With the Vaha we got a bunch of vouchers for training in Nova Gorica. Radoje decided to send me to a few, this time for assembler. Not that we were coding in it, we did Cobol (even though I rewrote my solitaire game again, for VAX Basic, after the success of the version for pdp). These courses were something to compensate for moderate pay and not much of a status, to at least make us feel the taste of a better life.
I took a train from Belgrade some time in the morning. Arrived in Ljubljana in the evening, had a burek from a kiosk near the station, unexpectedly good. Slovenia doesn't quite consider itself part of the Balkans, even though the larger part of it, south of the Sava river, geographically belongs to it. North of it, it's the Alps, though. So I didn't quite expect to find a good one there, but hey, there's a lot of Bosnians working there, so I shouldn't have been surprised. Took a train to Gorica, just to sniff the local life. I know everyone took a bus, but on a bus you're quite isolated, you see perhaps your seatmate and hear what the driver runs on speakers. On a train there's a bunch of people sharing one room.
That was completely different from our trains - neon lights, good seats, sounded really fast. Well, the tracks are laid on stone, not the ancient seabed with soft soil, it doesn't need repairs every decade (which then don't happen for a few decades, so trains mostly go slowly). The people were dressed somewhat better, weren't loud but weren't silent nor looking into nothing (like I saw later in the US). Found a forgotten newspaper on the seat and tried out my knowledge of slovenian language. Not too bad, in every article there were a couple of words I didn't understand. Not that I could speak it, I'd probably build a sentence awkwardly, thinking in serbocroatian, but understanding what I hear was no problem at all. Good.
The coaches were just like the šinobus at home, with same space layout, except the seats were better, slightly more apart, and the seat backs couldn't be switched. So when we arrived I obeyed my old reflexes and avoided the crowd - took the door on the opposite side, then headed across the tracks. A railroad worker spotted me and asked where I was going. Hotel Delta. The other side - if you cross three more tracks you will be in Italy. That fence there is the border. Ah. Then I noticed I was the only pedestrian - everyone else had (someone with) a car waiting. It wasn't too far, this is a small town in a valley, but my suitcase (still the one of 28-III-1976.) seemed to get heavier along the way. It was funny how every building was practically new, the station and a couple more being the only old ones, because when the borders were drawn after WWII, most of the old Gorica/Gorizia went to Italy, so they built the new one on this side.
This may as well be the first time ever that I slept in a hotel, on my own. Perhaps we did once in Hungary or Romania, but that was some old old building. This was spanking new, with synth rugs in every room and hall, a little bathroom to myself. Discovered that those little soaps fit my hear right. The door handles were of that bent plastic pipe design, which was new then, and looked really neat. No TV in the room but didn't miss it anyway. Didn't call home because I've heard that hotels may charge you a lot for that, and I wasn't sure whether stour would pay.