24-III-1979.

In Leningrad, same hotel as last year, Leningrad. The finnish furniture, the incredible armless armchair which fits your back exactly, and you can just sit for hours. We took only one trip with the group, to Ermitaž, to see all the art there. The queue from brotherly countries, i.e. eastern bloc, was incredible. I'd eyeball it to around 2000 people. Knowing the soul of a yugo, which wouldn't stand in a queue for so long and would rather disperse, they led us to the riverside entrance. There were lots of cables, some thick as a thigh, coming in from a generator parked on the street. Some paintings were being photographed, and the lights required a lot of power, and the in-house cables may be incapable of providing that much. We had to step over them until we got to the wardrobe, but then it was easy, and we weren't with other crowds most of the time. The art displayed there is magnificent - just like any emperor worthy of his name would have plundered, or bought with the money plundered from his people, same thing.

At lunch, we were mostly sitting with the crowd from Slavonska Požega. They had a few funny songs ("svaki ručnik briše, samo potporučnik ne" - every towel wipes, only sublieutenant not). I once watched as the guy sitting in front of me poured a bowl of icecream into his beer, mixed it up and drank it. And yes, it's true that the Russians eat icecream all winter. It's just that they do it inside.

The usual crowd from Finland was getting stiff drunk, as usual. They have prohibition at home, so they get into a ferry, take rooms for the weekend, and then drink even-odd. Which means half of them have to stay sober enough to take the other half to their rooms; the other night they switch roles. I've seen a kid, around 16 to 18, barely finding his way to take his dick out to pee... and it was still daylight.

The rest of the time we were buzzing around. We'd just take a cab and go to anything we'd want to see. Found bookshops and bought more maths and medicine books - she got a fullblown anatomy atlas. By this time we already sold what we had to sell, had wads of rubles and just went shopping, or walking around. At some point, in a department store, we spotted a refreshing drink vending machine... well it said „газированная вода“ - and sure enough, for a couple of kopeikas you get a glass of soda water. Except the machine was quite rusty, and there was just one glass from which everybody drank, and there were rust stains on the glass. But we were thirsty and, well, if it does nothing bad to the Russians, won't hurt us either. Water as any other water.

At the ground floor we took a break somewhere in a corner, where they were selling suitcases (I think we bought one). We felt like a pair of balls on a pool table - being knocked this way or other by the crowd of people who know where to go, while we want to have a look first, we'd also like to know where to go. Then there was some announcement on the PA system, audible but with the usual distortions and lack of high frequencies, about something blocked at the moment, and mentioning suitcases (rus. čemadan). What the fuck blocked, we're exactly where suitcases are and nobody is reacting in any way. We were finished there already, and went out on the street. The street was blocked. The cops were deployed along the curbs, and we could go up and down the street, but not across. And then a motorcade passed, doing at least 90 kmh. All black Čajka and what other large cars they had, plus a bunch of smaller Volga in the front and rear, those'd be security.

Later we heard that it was the prime minister of Thailand, Čomanan Kriangsak, visiting.

We took a cab to get out and see the Finnish Bay. The ice was still there, though mostly covered with slush - the top layer was thawing in the day and refreezing overnight for a couple of weeks already. Seeing that we're going to take pictures, the cab driver figured he'd have enough time. He opened a trunk, pulled a beer from the crate (I didn't see how many bottles were full) and started drinking it. "Are you allowed to drink on the job?" "No." "Don't they check you?" "In the garage, in the morning..." "What if the cops catch you?" "Well, three strikes and I'm out of this job, so I become a mechanic. But they never have enough drivers, so after two months I'm back at the steering wheel".

During one of the walks we stumbled upon an ordinary shop with cans in the window. The labels were in cyrillic, but the language wasn't russian. Took me a while to recognize the language - it was romanian. The cans were from SSR Moldavia.

The second evening we somehow found a bar, where we had to wait in a queue to get in, but not too long. Seeing me with long hair, some guy of similar description, in a horizontally striped sweater (something brown and pink, I'd say) approached me and tried to strike a conversation. He's an artist... and then he looked left and right to check if anyone was listening (yeah, in that crowd where everyone was blabbering), and said "a surrealist!".

Then we got inside, and found seats near the bar. It looked more like a classroom, with tables lined the same way and the bar being in the place of teacher's desk. We got sandwiches with smoked salmon and red caviar, and the cocktail of the house - half lemonade, a small ladle of apricot syrup, two icecubes, fill the rest with vodka. Wasn't too bad. By the time we were at half of the first glass, we were joined by a local couple. Well, as local as it goes in the USSR - they were from Ukraine, graduating soon the hydro powerplant engineering. They can take a job onsite, with five times the salary, or stay here or in Kiev, for minimal. They'd rather pick the latter. We had another cocktail and then went to the hotel. They weren't allowed in the hotel for foreigners, the state was trying to limit the contact as much as it could, but we faked it easily by me speaking english while we were entering, and the doorman didn't even wink.

We got upstairs and bought a bottle of mineral water and armenian cognac. He said the water is "Poluostrovskaya" - of the peninsula - which means it's probably tap water plus gas, we are right on that peninsula. The cognac didn't taste quite right, so we poured some of it into the water. The mix immediately got dark gray, as if we just poured the ashtray into it. We drank no more.

Later we exchanged a few letters with them, only to learn that they were divorcing by the end of the year.

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Mentions: yugo, in serbian