27-IV-2013.

johana bore the kittens overnight. We haven't seen them yet, and don't know how many of them there are, as they are under the old bed on the terrace, a rather dark and inaccessible place.

She made a [swiss] chards musaka, in the same glass pot where she bakes the bread, and we took it to Lena. The weather was untimely summer like, +26 or more, with lots of visible chemtrails in the sky. The clear sky is gone again, we had just a brief ten day respite. It's a bit hazy, just like it used to be on the east coast, maybe a bit less.

Parked the car on my favorite spot, between the corner and the door. We took the bus to Novi Beograd, after zigzagging between the kiosks until we found one that sells the tickets and has the machines in order. There's an ugly new grayish building under construction on this side of the street and they probably screwed up the phone lines.

The shopping mall Ušće was disgusting. The same graphite gray with fake brick wallpaper or tiles in every shop - it's part of the building's setup, and the shops renting the space either don't want to invest into remodeling or aren't allowed to touch that or just think this is good. The choice of shops is identical to that in the US - fashion, gaming, jewelry, cell phones and tablets, cafes and fast food joints (didn't see much of the latter, though, the stink of industrial bread was conspicuously missing). Lots of young Duke Nukem typed guys (albeit thinner) in identical dark grey suits, identical black shoes, close mowed hair, and the wound cable hanging out of their right ears, hanging around strategic shop entrances and just looking too damn serious. As fits the place, I didn't hear anybody laughing during the whole hour plus some.

The stuff they sell is just ordinary chinese junk, declared to be the fashion of the year. A simple skirt at Marks and Spencer (there are no domestic names at all, except one souvenir kiosk) cost 12.000,00 RSD, which is outrageous - the same can be found for perhaps 2.000 in ordinary shops. Found one shop, further from the entrance, with a no-name name (X + Y, don't remember actual letters) where Lena bought a bunch of shirts, skirts, shorts and whatnot, to wear on her trip to Prague next week. It all cost... the same as that one skirt.

I was carrying the eos40 around but didn't make a single shot. It's all too ugly and nobody seemed happy at all. Perhaps the kids in front of the entrance, who were panhandling for some charity, under pretext of some kids from some village, of whom we know nothing, perhaps those youngsters are gaining some brownie points or even money, and worthwhile work experience. Getting few dozen fuckoffs in an hour and keeping a straight face is a marketable skill.

While exiting, I remarked that "we're actually in the matrix... I see agent Smiths have multiplied". Lena said "not sure, have you also seen the lady in the red dress?". I looked around and, sure enough, within two seconds I pointed my finger to one. The dress was long, down to the floor, and the lady looked older than I, but there it was, the proper shade of red. We had a hearty laugh, the only one I heard in that building.

We were dead tired. The whole trip didn't take more than two hours, bus rides included, and our backs hurt, the soles were swollen - and that was in an airconditioned building. At Čankovo I carry the seven kilos of švorceniger hanging on the straps, move across uneven surface, bend and duck at times, and I don't get a bit as tired as in the mall. She felt the same. Said even the smell is the same as in the american malls, and she also got some undefinable feeling of not feeling well in there, but like me she couldn't pinpoint the cause. For a while back there I thought it was the pervasive noise of the AC, but then we had that same noise at home - from our AC, fridge, mirko, computer fans - and yet that did nothing to us. It could be the combined vapors from cleaning fluids, fresh plastic and other synthetics hanging everywhere, plus the noise and the million wireless thingies saturating the space with their EM waves. I don't know and I don't care - next time we go shopping anywhere else, or I'm staying in the apartment and taking a nap.

We tried to unclog the syphon under the basin in the bathroom, for which we bought new parrot pliers beforehand (at that place where I promised they won't see a dime from me, so she went in and bought them), and the operation succeeded but the patient was dead. The piece of pipe connecting the syphon to the wall outlet was rotten and full of holes. That's something for the landlord to fix. Lena is changing apartments by the end of may, moving in with a friend of hers who lost a roommate (who got a job in the UK and is leaving in a couple of weeks). She'll have about the same space, but a better kitchen and bathroom. Her new roommate is about 35, studying sculpture.

We planned to go to Čankovo after getting home, but were too tired, so we slept it off a bit, then just had dinner, talked with Go. The new air transport mess, courtesy of the american Congress, is raising the prices of all the flights (which was probably the desired effect), and she's trying to get the tickets before that happens. Neša's passport is not ready because he still doesn't have an SSN, or there's some snafu of the kind, the usual bureaucratic mess. Stanley may not be coming, he's in one of his panic-depression-bullshit cycles now that he's seen how much is there to handle before moving here.

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Mentions: Čankovo, eos40, Gorana Sredljević (Go), Jelena Sredljević (Lena), Johana, mirko, Nenad Berger (Neša), Stanley Berger, švorceniger, in serbian