05-III-2018.

Baki got hard times. His sister hung herself a couple of weeks ago; mother died some time around new year. Since the weather just got (finally) nasty around the time, nobody from the class attended the funeral. We gathered today, rather ad hoc, to just sit with him and his wife. I went up as scheduled to pick up Dragana (and I guess to do some groceries first, perhaps visit promes to get the stuff I didn't get right last time or it was this time that I got a couple of items wrong (didn't have the proper peasant bacon large enough and I got the wrong kind of dry neck so we went again couple of days later). From her, went to a pharmacy on Žitni trg (actually just about five blocks away) to pick Jasmina and her husband. She closed her own pharmacy, retired, and now works for these guys - says it's much easier so, she has no worry in the world, end of shift she can completely forget everything until the next day, not being the owner.

Approaching the village I realized I didn't have an address and, well, nobody did. Dragana sort of did, from about 2002 when his dad died, so we called ahead and got fairly simple instructions, and when we got there she recognized the place. This being the shifty month of march, instead of first signs of spring, there was a palm of snow on the ground.

Bajlo and Staša came too. I did as was expected of me, photo documented the whole gathering and whatever was shown to us - her obituary (both the placard and in the local newspaper), her room, her photos. The story is sad, of course, of a nice girl who was dedicated to her work and nourishing her mother and spent most time on that, for the last 16 years or so. Mother wasn't able to walk or serve herself, so it was a permanent schedule between her and whomever they'd find to keep the day shift. Then mother died and she finally had the time for the rest of her life... which she couldn't remember what it was, or was supposed to be, or what she would do with it. She did grow ten years older in the pictures of the last five years.

The serving was memorable, he had the perfect white sausage*, we barely touched anything else, not even pršut** and ham.

We stayed until about 19:00, with or without the drive back.

At home, I left fes work from 14:00 to past 22:00, probably forgot about it.

These days, news from the Philippines - Ender found colhicin (colchicine or whatever), which helps ease his gout, it's for another order of magnitude cheaper than here, something senselessly cheap. And he was seriously running out of supplies. Now he bought a big lot of it and just keeps munching them. True, he screws up his belly each time, as he always did, he gets the runs and becomes completely unusable for a day or two, but somehow still manages to push the paperwork. They first need the phillipine birth certificates, which then they need to take to the embassy to make american ones, based on which Sanda and Linda can claim american citizenship (philippine citizenship is not acquired by being just born there). And then to add them to a passport or make passports. The trouble is that the philippine clerks expect a certain bribe, and he's not in on the language (though he did restore and actually use tagalog in day-to-day operations, and english is the second official language there, so most of the people speak it) and even less on the body language - there may be a wink, or a certain gesture, or manner of speech that he doesn't recognize, so he doesn't know when to offer and how much. So they string him along and he makes three or four visits to accomplish what he could with one.

[correction, later: nope, this was with greasing; it's much slower without]

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* it's actually a liver sausage, with bits of other stuff plus black pepper, salt and garlic, and it's stuffed into pig's colon, which is light blue gray, hence the name (at least in Banat). It's unrelated to liverwurst, which is a pašteta.

** dried and smoked best piece of meat, from italian prosciuto; it needs to be very dry, and hence has to be cut into very thin slices across the grain, or else it'd be trouble to chew

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Mentions: Branislav Rade (Baki), Dragana Vitas (Dragana), Ender Aquila (Ender), fes, Jasmina Vlajin, Linda Sredljevich Aquilla (Linda), Nenad Bajlo (Bajlo), pašteta, promes, Sanda Sredljević Aquilla (Sanda), Stanoje Serdarević (Staša), in serbian