The public and the private in Europe

In a number of places I've called out the waning of retail offerings in Europe, or at least obvious retail offerings (almost all but the very richest historical sites are keen on capturing any dollars they can from visitors through sales of coffee, cold drinks, snacks, trinkets.... So a 14th century chateau can easily have many of the features of a convenience store if you go inside). Often it's difficult to find a place to buy thinngs. Some of it is a function of the aggregation and economies of scales I wrote about recently. Some of it is legislative: with very rare exceptions, all shops in Germany are closed by law on Sundays. In the Basque provinces all grocery stores closed at 3pm on Sundays. I guess this is more or less uniform around Spain.

So it turns out that much of Europe feels intensely closed and much is always happening behind the closed walls of homes. The public domain, at least in summer, is ceded to the tourists that prowl the landscape like locusts but in fact feed the place. Roughly speaking, 10% of GDP in France is tourism, in Spain it's 12%, in Croatia 18%, in Greece 26%. If you figure that most of the tourist dollars come in in the summer, multiply the above numbers times 3-3.5 for a rough approximation of how much "summer GDP" is attributable to tourism.

People's homes then, are pretty much their castles where they hide out from us tourists, and I for one am always curious about people's homes. One indication of the seriousness with which they take their homes is the dominance of home design and furnishing providers along European highways and at the edges of towns.   

Between friends who've settled there and AirBnb I've now had opportunity to go inside more and more of them over time and they have a lot of good features, perhaps best epitomized by their windows. European windows are marvels. Thick, heavy, triple-paned or whatever. But the incredible thing is the seamlessness with which they alternate between opening on a vertical hinge (to let in lots of air) or a horizontal one (to lean in and just let in a little). The windows really seem to epitomize the solidity of the homes, or maybe they just take me in.

One mystery, however, is the near universal absence of screens. Where are all the mosquitos? Are they ruthlessly and systematically exterminated wherever there are tourists?