I suppose that can be said about everywhere, but it wasn't a desolate rusty bullet ridden hellscape, the cities were beautiful and so were the beaches, at least as captured in my memory.

My family had friends from Poland and Hungary and we always envied them, the green kind. So, I always assumed at that age things were nicer beyond the borders, but they weren't so bad locally either. Of course, in the end, it was a house of cards, but the life itself wasn't NK level.