Your experience of culture shock in Macedonia

Perhaps the rudeness in some public institutions and banks or the sometimes crazy processes and inefficiency.  A small number of individuals in the wrong public positions in key institutions have done more harm to the Macedonian economy than any foreign power ever could.  The department dealing with foreign visitors ID's is particularly memorable for most people and you often here people laughing about it.  Though not those that have to go through it of course.


For me, by far the biggest surprise was when trying to ship anything to and from Macedonia through the border was probably the biggest shock.  It is often shocking to me to remember that Macedonia is actually in Europe as it feels so isolated by the crazy border processes.  They will spend inordinate amounts of time trying to come up with a price for literally every nut and bolt of a product worth perhaps 100 Euros just to ensure you have paid ever denar. Having spent 1000s of denars in human resource to do it.  This and other aspects of the border controls blow my mind on a daily basis.  Having worked across 140 countries, this still stands out for me.

I can literally send urgent packages and documents almost anywhere else in the world, event to remote offices in Africa and south America with far less delay and trouble than Macedonia. This all means that if you have a business with a requirement for anything particular for IT (for example a powerful server) you would actually have to keep a full server as backup. Replicate this across basically everything for your industry.. Very little is made locally (it is after all a very small country) and local suppliers supply for the requirements of the local market and local businesses may well have less sophisticated requirements. I am not talking only of IT across, pretty much any industry will experience this (with some few exceptions).