21-II-2024.
The packing wasn't much complicated, because it was easily stretched to whole afternoon, evening and night. Nina did it all by herself, the kids fortunately didn't try to help too much, didn't occur to them to move things around, at least not too many times.
In the morning we had our coffee at leisure, woke them one by one (Nina didn't sleep at all), fed them as time permitted and then brought snacks along. We remembered how Sanda complained last summer when we took them to Čurda and she didn't have any breakfast beforehand, so not to repeat that.
And amazingly and contrary to best practices, we were underway on time. The plan was targeting 9:00 with the intention of starting no later than 9:30, and the actual time was 9:10, excellent. The van starts, goes, new wipers, it all works, I even passed a few trucks on the emptier stretches of the road. Despite the usual traffic density between Pupin's bridge and highway, we reached the airport parking in one hour ten minutes. Went through all the motions with no hurry at all, I parked near the passage, so we didn't have to drag the luggage far. At checkin there was no queue at all. Nina, having completely mindswitched to over there, stuck to the formality and went through the zigzag line with us and kids dragging the luggage, so not to annoy the personnel and to prevent any problems... That snakeline makes sense when there's 200 people with luggage, but now in a completely empty hall... We left them there and went out for a smoke, can do one now. When we returned, the checking was done, they even got their seats in one row.
And then the last shopping rite. For some things we convinced them that such things should not be bought at an airport where they cost twice as much, but some stuff had to be bought, like a pair of kinder eggs, a small pack of pringles each, more water to sip before security check (coke for Violet, of course), and then we found places to sit in that checkin hall, where we slowly pushed away the remaining forty minutes. The last shot is of Sanda sitting on my shoulder. Then we saw them to the gates, kissed and... that was it.
By the time we got home (and dropped by Mere to buy big black bags to start packing all the stuff that should be stashed or discarded, green beans, green peas, pečenica [dried smoked meat], bacon, cat food), the shot from the first airplane already arrived, all merry and happy. In Munich (aka Bavarian Monkton, Bavarsko Monahovo, as someone translated Monaco di Baviera, its italian name) they had less than an hour to switch planes, and of course the Germans picked them out for frisking, all five of them, and thoroughly rummaging through their hand luggage. As experienced travelers, we knew what goes where, so the brandy (half liter of apricot, half liter of pear) was in the checked-in luggage. They still got through on time, and by the time I wrote this they were already in the air.
The van is finally running out of fuel, lit the yellow just around Čenta, just when I thought it would, didn't fill it up since june of 2022, but then the battery is full, and I made a batch of window washing liquid, with the new (dish) detergent from Mere (domestic, called „Peri“ (wash! - imperative mode in serbian, the rest is in english), the car ran out of it. Unhooked the terminal, battery waits for april.
Lunch, scrambled eggs with bacon, of five eggs [sorry about your language, „kajgana“ is the word for scrambled eggs], just like we did once three weeks ago when Nina went scouting. For dinner I ate the rest of the birthday cake, and if I feel like eating more, there are two more of yesterday's pancakes. And a heap of cakes and sweets, industrial of course, which we bought in Mere, gambling. They hook into something we find and they eat all of it at once, then we buy a lot of it next time and they clean up that too, then third time we buy a bit more than that and half of that remains. So it happened with cotton candy, now with some cherry rolls.
On the list of things we are not buying anymore are: sweets, coke, bottled water, chips, smoki, milk chocolate, other snacks, crayons and paint, pencils, toys, čikine nogice (chicken nuggets - v. house dictionary), fries, fish sticks, icecream, sushi fish (which Violet used to eat as is), fucken pringles and generally processed potatoes, industrial bread, ramen, fruit yogurt (at times) and most of the toilet paper.
It's not that it's silent now, I didn't long for silence so much. It's that I hear no more the permanent cacophony of screams, roars, barks and peeps from various tiny tinny speakers, and acted fake childrens' voices with sung intonation, with at least a third of each sentence pronounced at least an octave higher, in the fucken falsetto, and then, worse than that, that same intonation in real childrens' voices. But fuckit, I gave up on that a few years ago. No matter how far they sank into exactly the things I hated in other children when I was a child - being spoiled, capricious, tantrum prone (we actually don't have a word for tantrum, had to learn it from american media), screaming, manipulating each other... fuckit, they are sweet nice and smart, likable and it was a true pleasure having them in the house these five years. One simply loves them.
And, ah, finally the ashtray to the left of the keyboard, where it sat all the time since nineties. At last this means that when you build a house with your own hands you get a permission to smoke in it.
In the evening we two drank the apricot, fes doing its job without pause. Since the last update zmajček doesn't dim and later turn off the monitors, so it stayed on for hours, and I saw notifications from Telegram when they landed in Newark. „Linda puked in the airplane before landing. Sanda gave her the idea.“
We hit the hay about two thirty, planning what shall we put in order in which order. We'r left with a heap of chips, those roll cakes, half of a six liter bottle and three half liter bottles of commercial water... For starters, we stopped keeping dežurni lights permanently turned on (above staircase, in the bathroom, above my desk, the one above kitchen sink stays), as there's nobody who'd rumble around the house at night and stumble into some piece of furniture or some rag on the floor. We two know the house throughout. True, now we sleep in the yellow room, which is actually the first time - we mostly slept in the blue room, sometimes in the big living room, and at various times have slept in all of the rooms upstairs, just never did in the yellow one. The mattress felt strange, seemingly harder but we fell asleep like pigeon sucklings. Wakeup, 10:30 for me, was a bit of a fuckup, because I slept on my right hip on the very left edge of the bed, which I really never do. To get up, I swung my legs to turn left and suddenly felt no support under my back. Reacted on time and didn't fall, but was rewarded with a swift and stiff cramp in my left calf, not extensivelly strong and it, luckily, abated right away. But not all the way, some of it stayed through the day. Even after lunch, while we waited for them in Chesapeake to wake up and report (she sent only a shot of her Volvo in the garage at ORF), I was still limping, cursing at times while I walked.
We had a smoke outside, on the bench under the apricot. As Vasa on burundi said, „Villagers, how are the apricots? Ready to blossom? There's no frost in sight for the next 15 days, if they blossom in and out in that period, things are looking really great for them, at least until the april frost.“
Најзад смо се видели око 17:00, одсели су код Реина и Фрејс, јер у њиховој кући још нема топле воде, још понегде цури, мајстори су још тамо. За невољу, плаћени су унапред, тако да ко зна кад ће то бити урађено. Добро изгледају, девојке су добиле огромне плашије или сквишмелоу или како се већ зову те играчке. Тога је неколико комада остало и овде, нису ни покушавали да све попакују. Каже Нина да не да су их испретресали у Минхену, него су чак децу терали да се изују па су им ишли по табанима детектором метала (!). То им је још госпоја на Сурчину, ђубре швапско, уписала „S“ на перонске карте, свима редом. Дошли пре времена, чудна комбинација презимена, толико деце, нееколошки, гле колики угљени отисак стопала, и још би из једне Србије да лете за САД, тск зарез тск, ајде један претрес. Чак су са дечије електронике скидали заштитне навлаке. И то посебно зато што је одбила да прође кроз рендгенски скенер. То исто су покушали да јој ураде и у Њуарку, и само је рекла „већ смо кроз ово прошли у Минхену, ја сам већ 40 сати будна и уморна сам и не могу брже од овог, мораћете да имате стрпљења“. Ту су се смиловали и прескочили остатак прегледа, само да прође кроз детектор метала и готово.
We finally saw them around 17:00, they nighted at Rein and Fayes's, because there's no hot water in their house, still leaking in a few places, the majstors are still working on it. To make things worse, they were paid in advance, so who knows when will it be finished. They're looking good, the girls got huge plushies or squishmellows or whatever are those toys called. They left a few of those here, they didn't even try to pack them all.
Nina said they not just frisked them in Munich, they even unshod the kids and passed the metal detectors over their soles (!). The lady at Surčin check-in, the german sleaze, wrote the „S“ on their boarding passes, all five. Arrived ahead of time, weird combination of surnames and genes, and have this weird wish to fly from a Serbia to the USA, tsk comma tsk, let them have a full body search. Specially because she opted out of going through the ex ray scanner. Then in Newark they were singled out for the same thing all over again, and she just said „I'm tired, forty hours without sleep, we've been frisked in Munich already, so I can't possibly unload the bags any faster than this“. Then they had the mercy to just wave them through the metal detector.
While we were finishing the call, Lena called, somewhere in the park by SIV, walking Api, wanted also to hear how they fared and how they are. Didn't hear us particularly well, because the pooch found a pal of his own sort, and they were outbarking the phone.
Mentions: Api, burundi, Čurda, dežurni, fes, house dictionary, Jelena Sredljević (Lena), Linda Sredljevich Aquilla (Linda), majstor, Nevena Sredljević (Nina), Reinaldo Aquila (Rein), Rosanda Aquilla (Fayes), Sanda Sredljević Aquilla (Sanda), Violet, yogurt, zmajček, in serbian