23-XI-1974.
The long saturday. We made instant coffee the long way - mixing it with sugar and half a coffee spoon of water (coffee spoon is about 2/3 of a tea spoon), mixing it endlessly until it becomes foamy, then pouring boiling water over it.
Found a funny old typewriter, the tall type just like the old Underwoods used to be - I think the brand was Mercedes. It had a narrow type, probably 132 positions per line. I started taking minutes of what was being said around the coffee table.
Don't know where did the three utilities problem come from, maybe from my faks (which would be expected), but then who knows, such matters would start circling around from unexpected sources. Us all being science oriented (Lajna was graduating gimnazija this year), we seriously went into trying to solve it. I expected it to be unsolvable in a plane, but what maths could I have picked up after mere two months of study. We spent a hill of paper, even these notes I typed on one of those.
We brought slides from the first of august birthdays, 23-VIII-1974., and probably the previous years as well, so Lajna and her neighbour friend were looking at them, bare eye, there was no projector. Lajna went several times through her endless rite of making instant coffee by first mixing it with sugar and a coffeespoon of milk until it dissolves into foam.
She had a huge dog, probably a lesika*. said it was already their second, „prije je bil Bil“ (the previous one was Bill).
(The combination of high-end Opel cars, with the coke bottle design around the rear wheels, and the heaps of soil where the sidewalk would be, was typical of Sesvete and many other suburbs at the time, these areas were growing, houses were built everywhere, and many of them with upstairs and even one semi-floor above, so heaps of soil or gravel or brick were a common sight)
We did hitch some guy, just like that, and being in a company with one extra girl, he took us for a beer. We downed it, had a chat, dispersed. That was quite normal at the time.
(the fourth stein is mine, in these light conditions I prefered to use both hands to achieve a stressless shot)
There was another temporary exchange of clothes between the girls for the evening. We went to Jabuka, where we found a disco somewhere in that forest, properly crowded. Most of the shots, no matter how crazy it was to even try to shoot them under those colored lights, actually worked. And this was shot just as it looks, with the light of two matches.
In the disco they had beer only, but we'd go outside for smokes and some stiffer drink, probably rum but then could have been whiskey or, more likely, vinjak. vinjak was the poor man's posh stiff drink.
Moved on then, found a tavern with room enough for the whole gang. We started writing a long letter to Rudolf, with lots of greasy stains from ćevapčići and drinks (wine or beer, can't remember, perhaps rum as well), to which everybody added something funny. Not as much of a consistent text, more like a graffitti wall. After dinner, properly drunk, we put it in an envelope, sealed it and I went to the coat rack and put it in the coat pocket.
Not my coat, though. Some random guest's coat. The guy was probably quite surprised to find it :).
Walking down the windy roads through the forest, with the gang properly loud. Took some pictures, extending the abilities of Ilford HP5 that I'd later develop to 6 DIN higher than the original 27 (i.e. taking it from ISO 400 to 1600)... and the pics even turned out sort of OK.
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* scottish sheppard, ergo a Lassie, transliterated phonetically as lesi, but here most of those (nick)names ending with -i were given feminine form, -ika, to an extent that any hungarian called Ferenc, Lajoš, Zoltan or Šandor would be nicknamed Ferika, Lacika, Zolika, Šanjika. Adjectives to it stayed in masculine gender. That's common. Since about seventies, however, we gradually learned to frown at this as a pannonian local quirk, there's a proper declension, so it's not Zoli(ka)-Zolike, Zolikom, it's -Zolija, Zolijem.
Mentions: 23-VIII-1974., april 1981., 27-XII-2021., august birthdays, ćevapčići, gimnazija, Melanija Merćep (Lajna), Rudolf Ochsner, vinjak, in serbian
9-X-2011 - 25-IX-2026