The business trip to Vienna. We were supposed to print a bulletin with classified ads for our diaspora there, mostly business but also car sales etc, in serbocroatian. The guy behind the projec was one Lan Jord, which we never could confirm was his real name, and he spoke our language as a native, without accent or off-usage words. My guess is that he was something like Milan Jordanov and just shortened it for linguistic penetration.
We (Vanji, Sale and I) took the red yugo and took off the day before. Around Osijek it was clear that we're losing electricity, the headlights were quite dim, so we gave up the plan to get to north Slovenia during the night and be in Vienna by noon. Took a room in a hotel, and in the morning drove further.
At some point in the morning, somewhere in northwest Slavonia, we ran out of juice. Stopped in a large village, so we found some guy who brought a charged battery and some tools in a wheelbarrow and poured some juice into ours. He said our alternator belt was limp, so he tightened it. We drove on, and came to Murska Sobota to meet Taho. He thought we weren't coming, so we found him in the office. Well, then, he had to change into a suit, so we drove him home, which is a small apartment a lone building near the railway tracks. Being in a hurry, he stumbled over something, and for an unforgettable moment he was levitating half a meter above the ground. Then he slammed on it. With just a few bruises and a slight cut on the nose, in a fresh suit, he joined us. We were in Vienna around 14:00, at the shop where the guy had an office. It was all closed, saturday afternoon. Half an hour later when he finally came he didn't have the keys, and there wasn't anything official looking there, just huge windows on empty space and a few pieces of printed paper pasted on the inside. They contained just the ad clips in serbocroatian in several different typesets, clipped from other papers and put together - which he actually confessed he did as a sample to show potential customers. I have put together a four page leaflet from such stuff he brought to DBA a couple of weeks ago, fired up the old ventura and... don't know whether we already had a laser printer of our own, or borrowed from that guy again.
The plan was that he'd fax us the ads, and then I'd run them in a nifty little leaflet of 4 or 8 pages (as we'd grow, eh) and then send them back (on paus paper, I guess, so he'd print them locally). We didn't even sit anywhere, and the bangladeshi restaurant across the street (where we actually went in to make a phone call, don't remember who called whom, perhaps we called him to tell him we came) looked promising with the smell of curry and other spice. But no, we concluded the talk in less than an hour, standing there on the street, and then we split.
When we sat to eat, we were already an hour out of town, it was getting dark, and the place was some fancy roadside inn. Sale had a wiener schnitzel, of course, he does that everywhere, and why not around Wien.
I was at the helm, and the car battery was getting emptier. I could barely read the dashboard. I stepped on it, at some downward slopes I was doing 140 kmh, passing numerous mercedeses and beemers, when the battery finally died. I switched to the right lane and, miraculously, had just enough momentum to pull into a gas station. The alternator belt was frazzled, not really a belt anymore. And, amazingly, they had the proper belt on sale and the yugo listed in the parts book. It took us some time to replace the belt, because the space between the pulley and the right wheel bunker was half a millimeter too narrow. But we did it, started it by pushing and drove off. We left Taho in Murska and went on driving, taking shifts. One drives, two others sleep. When fatigue kicks in, just pull over and wake up the next guy. Luckily, through most of Slavonia, where the road goes through hundred villages, there was practically nobody anywhere. Except for two things: somewhere in the forests around Papuk I almost hit a guy who was sitting on an upturned wheelbarrow and smoking in the middle of the road just beihind a curve. And the other thing is that this was the night, as we heard later, when the neonazi or nationalist or whateer units started raiding the houses of prominent Serbs. Of which we saw nothing and just arrived home around 9:00, which makes it a total of about 26 hours of life in a yugo.
The whole business with this guy was quickly forgotten. We didn't try to contact him, and he probably saw that we saw through him (at the cost of this trip) and didn't try again. I don't have anything of the printouts I made (I think we brought about 40 copies of the sample I made from the material he brought previously).