The Mystery Mobile

Since I arrived in Nis a month and a half ago something peculiar has become a daily occurrence: two to three Roma men driving a green vehicle with a speaker hitched on the hood. The truck inches along and advertisements are blasted from the speaker. The men don't say a word their faces are the molds of torpor. The advertisements are prerecorded and sound like some sort of emergency wake-up siren with a deafening, dire sound. There's no other way to describe it than bizarre, really.




The neighborhood I live in, Trosarina, is more like a suburb than an extension of Nis, which I like, and it has many small roads lined with houses running through the hill. This truck seemingly crawls through each street between 10am and 2pm at a pace so slow and in streets so narrow -- two cars cannot pass at once in most -- that the honking from the cars behind usually overpowers the broadcasted message. I've had difficulty finding meaning in the cacophony since the consonants are swallowed up by a spent speaker and the harmony of honks blanket the rest of the sound.

However this is just too curious to be left unanswered so I will seek the truth and report back!