16-VIII-2012.

Got up quite early, around six. The partial renovation of the hotel means some fancy trim - like new thick red curtains and pretty orange paint on the outside, and then some rugs in the hall unmoved since the sixties. Nice breakfast, as far as hotel breakfasts go, with young cheese - I remember I had to translate that for someone, into spanish (!). Made a bunch of shots with the long tube, i.e. the japanese second hand tele lens, which translates to about 320mm on eos40's 1,6 factor CCD chip. It did have some yellowish protective filter, but that came off easily in processing. Focusing may be a problem, it often tricks the eye to think it's focused, while it really didn't focus exactly there, but a bit behind. Worked mostly fine.

Having just had enough of scenic routes, I hit the highway at the nearest entrance and zipped to Niš with just one coffee break... at the "Restoran Tito". Yup it had all the iconography of SFRY, with most of the design lifted from those times. The restaurant didn't live that long - seven years later we drove by again, and it was gone. Something else was in its place, with probably some of the billboards in turkish, as turkish truckers are the most important customers on this highway.

We were in Niš around eleven. Found the place easily, and met the whole oldwave gang there... well, except the two locals, who were at home. Škrba took me to the place of one of them, where we left the car. The place where we slept is not a real hotel, it's an bed and breakfast, without a breakfast. A simple place to sleep - regular hotel rooms actually, just not the standard ones, but an old house adapted to this. The room we got was upstairs, Škrba's (with wife but not daughter) was further down the terrace, a couple of his friend, and another guy was on 2nd floor. Stinge had a new luxury chick and he had to have some place with a swimming pool, which pissed him off the next day, as the owner of the place got some guests, obviously relatives, who'd just come to sit by the pool, play turbo folk on their boom box and ogle his chick. Which was fine, I mean the chick, though nothing to slash wrists for. So he switched to some other place.

In the afternoon, at Rajko's (she was somewhere with Lena) for just beers, only us guys (except Stinge with his girl), which served as a, more or less, official meeting of the oldwave gang.

The occasion for the gathering was the Nišvil jazz festival, which featured Jean Luc Ponty this evening, so they all had tickets and went to see that on the open air stage in the fortress. We didn't, we came for fun and company, so we went out for dinner, beer, walk. Lena met her friends from the academy, painters all, and had fun with them, and then one girl stayed the night with us, as we did have a spare bed. Having arranged that, we sat on the terrace for a bit and decided to have another walk. Being downtown, just a couple of blocks from the epicentre (i.e. Kazandžijsko sokače, the kettle-makers' alley, where all the good places are) has its advantages. So we went there, and had a couple.

Around 22:30 we were back in the room and talked with Go, but no, she's still pregnant.

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Mentions: eos40, Gorana Sredljević (Go), Gradivoj Škrbić (Škrba), Jelena Sredljević (Lena), oldwave, Stinge, in serbian