Took the bus to Niš. I had a reservation in the Ambasador hotel. I was supposed to take over the maintenance of the app fro Students' that Mika Fišer wrote, while he serves his term in army. Mika Fišer and the director and accountant of our Students' were already there, we'll meet in the morning in the one in Niš.
When I disembarked to Niš busodrome, it was long dark already. I hooked up to a girl whom I asked for directions to the hotel, as she was going in the same direction, so we had a little chat along the way. I had to ask about the grammar, is it true that the people here use only three cases (out of seven). Why, no, only the elderly and in the villages around. And really, I didn't hear anyone speak like that. Many years later I found the error was in my listening - as soon as they sense an outsider, they switch to literary speak, and still talk the old way among themselves. And a few years later someone recorded a small ad on an electric pole, „holding lessons in serbian“ - of which the first noun was supposed to be in accusative, second in genitive case, but both were written in nominative.
The hotel is a skyscraper, looks like at least a dozen floors. It seems they didn't turn the heating all the way up, my room was on 1st (am. 2nd) floor. It all looked quite nice at night, the lights and the sheen of the pavement. In the morning, however, it got quite ugly, the weather was dull gray, a bit misty, if there weren't those orange lamps, one'd feel suicidal. No snow from anywhere, all damp, the pavements covered by thin mud film, neither clean nor dirty, like nothing.
I somehow found the guys, and we went for a tour. We first talked at length with the director of the local Students', then he took us to show us the nearby Dom, to see how it looks in the morning. The building is new, looks like something from seventies, but inside it got exactly the smell like our old one always had, of a place where at least six evenings a week two thousand cigarettes burned. Eh, nostalgy.
Similar sessions in Čačak and Kraljevo. I have no idea what talk was on the whole day. Mika Fišer was trying to show me the ropes of his app, what's where and how it all works, in general. It was something done in Clipper (the 87 version, which was actually a preprocessor for cee or ceeplusplus), of which very little landed between my ears, even though I knew Clipper already, since last summer. But okay, if it comes to that, I'll manage somehow. [luckily it never did, nobody called]
The grand final was the big dinner at Amerikanac (same one where we had lunch 28-VI-1970.), where our accountant and the one from Čačak got solidly drunk, the latter more than solid, bordering liquid phase. Two unforgettable scenes - one is when the two embrace and the latter says „shove me yer tongue!“. The other is when he lights a cigarette, and puts it on his sandwich instead of on ashtray. Then he turns to say something, turns back, remebers the sandwich, and eats it with lit cigarette on top.
On the way back we took turns driving the rental Golf, because after Belgrade we ran into horrible fog. The visibility was one stripe or less. Had to drive fifty. If you drive faster, it's insane, you don't know where exactly is the road. If you drive slower, the time between visible stripes is just long enough to lose track of where's the road. Anyway, we arrived somehow, it just took quite long and we were exhausted.