Grgi and I drove all the way to Murska Sobota, to Taho. Because we're having a booth at Interbiro in Zagreb, starting tuesday or so. So we went ahead, probably today, it's a long ride, and got a room in the local hotel. The hotel was unheated, which is not nice in these mountains, no matter that they say this is the sunny side of the Alps. But it was an old building, kept clean and scrubbed, and it had practically the same view postcard of Rogaška Slatina, done in shiny pieces of nacre for roofs and windows, as granma had in her room. Was it a honeymoon souvenir? Who'd know now. Never crossed my mind to ask.
Most of the afternoon we sat in their office, preparing the machines for the exhibition - their the hardware, ours the apps. They had some piece of shit from m$, something called windows, already advanced to 2.0 or so, and while it looked interesting, it was so confusing, nowhere near the clarity of GEM. The navigation was a labyrinth, it kept running you in circles and you never knew where you were, how you got there, and where to go next. At least it fit on two floppies and was easy to install, but other than that we just gave up and decided not to demo that on our machines at all. Our Dos apps looked better than that.
In the morning we loaded as many machines and monitors into our yugo, and just as many into their Renault 4 (katrca) and drove to Zagreb. Put up the stand and buzzed around the fair for a while, don't remember that we had anywhere near the number of visits we had in Belgrade. Well, at least I've gone full circle - a year ago I was just visiting, now I'm a stand girl at the same place...
In the evening we parted ways, they drove back to Murska, and we went downtown to eat something. I called Morkec, trying to set up a meeting in the evening, but he was busy, there was a big concert of Prljavo Kazalište right on the square, and instead of watching it from his terrace, he just had to be in the front lines of it, being their sound engineer for the evening. We passed through the edge of the concert, briefly, perhaps half an hour before it began, and went to the airport. Some time later that evening I heard that's the first time Kazalište played „Zadnja ruža hrvatska“. There's some dispute, as „zadnji“ primarily means the rear, and when I think of a 'rear rose' I get nothing but cows in my mind; other schools claim that „zadnji“ also means the last, like it does in slovenian. Well, either way, this was a beginning of the end for me. Rockers were not nationalists so far, they actually needed the whole yugoslav market to survive. So something pushed these guys to the dark side, and that marked the end of an era.
Don't know where exactly we exchanged the keys, but Sale and Blaža (or was it Brata) were flying in the opposite direction, from Belgrade, so we both had one yugo waiting at the other airport. A bit of a triper, but it worked, we all got safely to the other side.