14-IV-1977.
In my index this is a stamped date below a stamp saying "...UOROGRAF...", which means fluorography, which was our regular lung x-ray, done en masse with the purpose of finding early signs of tuberculosis before it gets serious. Five days later, on the next page (actually the inside of the rear cover) there's a similar pair of stamps, with the upper one saying "SISTEMATSKI PREGLED". This one I remember, the nurse there was offended that I used the word "bušnuti" (to holepinch) to describe the taking of blood sample that she was about to perform, and started near yelling at me for using such disparaging vocabulary for her work. I replied that I don't mind the vocabulary, when I donate blood I use the same term and nobody there got offended. That calmed her down.
The students' medical was at the ground floor of one of the two new students' dormitories near the university (the other two or three were in some older buildings around town, not as comfortable nor as popular as these two). The architecture was quite cute, all in red façade brick, not too much visible concrete, except in those outcropping window frames.
The bag on the ceiling is decoration, what with the punch card with something possibly written on it. The bag and the net tote hanging on the wall below are... well, being short with shelf space, this is where we kept the bread. Too bad I didn't reshoot this better than I did, so I can't quite read all the wisdom we poured on the paper bottom left.
The landlord, just like everyone in the village, has a vineyard somewhere up on the slopes, and a cellar dug in somewhere, probably just right under our room - the basement door could as well hide the entrance to it. So of course he has some loza, and he offered us a drink. Not as bad as the one I had last october, but close second. Luckily, we still had some of that whiskey to wash our mouths.
We got the whiskey from V.J., a fellow student, as his part of the project to write a pedagogy script. There was no textbook, and so we had to rely on the notes taken - not only our own, but some girls' too, their handwriting was neater. I brought the typewriter, the same old reporter Olivia (still functional, dry ribbon though), that I typed my matricular work on, and dad his college final work. Slave would read the material, notes mostly, and compose the text as short as possible, I'd shorten it even more to save on typing. V.J. brought the supplies - paper and booze. We eventually did write the whole thing, perhaps some thirty or fifty pages of it, in triplicate. The text was full of small jokes, as we couldn't bear the sheer stupidity and futility of the base material. The professor was a dimwit, spoke serbian with a heavy hungarian accent, often inventing words (I remember something translatable as bunchization), though not making too many gender mistakes. The nouns and adjectives don't have gender in hungarian, so the whole idea of having it in other languages is strange to them, and they often get lost or just totter over it and move on, knowing that they said something funny but unable or often unwilling to dwell on it, they want to finish the sentence. He held separate classes in hungarian too, for those who wanted to attend, and I later heard from one of those students that his hungarian was equally bad. And this guy somehow got his PhD...
The whole pedagogy was not even resembling a science, it was a cookbook of various recipes which were tried over the last two centuries. Some of those weren't completely wrong - anything that doesn't seriously hamper a young mind would produce some results, by sheer power and interest of the said mind, often despite the recipe - and many of these recipes were just someone's bright idea of how to reorganize the previous stupid system, not much smarter than the bright idea they were supposed to replace. In the end, we all passed, but at the exam we noticed that V.J. has learned the script by heart, from comma to comma, and recited it verbatim, we literally dragged a finger over the text while he spoke, every word matched. So for the next endeavour, methodics, we prepared a few landmines. We inserted things like... "It is a duty of the lecturer to provide a positive atmosphere (oxygen, carbondioxyde, nitrogen, hydrogen, argon...) in the class." in a few places. Unfortunately, he didn't pull any of those questions, so we never knew what would have happened if he did.
Decades later, we heard that these two scripts are still being circulated around. They were photocopied endlessly by the following generations, and were used even by some of our colleagues' children.
Mentions: fluorography, loza, Radovan Tomić (Slave), in serbian