There is no chair to be had in the pedestrian area in Zagreb. The weather smacks of May, and everyone is out. “What a crushing crisis,” I joke with many a waiter I know well, “there’s not a chair anywhere around!” They chuckle and dash to another table. But the joke is hardly a joke. Most of the people sitting in outdoor cafés are on the young side. The bulk of them are unemployed. The official unemployment rate is above twenty percent, and more than sixty percent of the unemployed are in their twenties and thirties. Coming from all over Croatia, where jobs are even harder to find, they nurse their cheap drinks as long as they can. Although many of them are dressed as though everything is hunky-dory, they are stretching every coin as far as it can go. The crowding of the pedestrian area is largely a cultural matter, too. Besides, one can never tell where the next job will pop up, and friends are often the best bet around. All things considered, the economic crisis in Croatia is crushing, indeed. Not a chair can be found in outdoor cafés of its capital.