22-III-1979.

Honeymoon to Moscow-Leningrad-Kiev. Same trip as a year ago, but with differences, a lot of them. First, it was a month later in the year, so there was less snow everywhere - little in Moscow, leftovers in Leningrad, none in Kiev. I had some of black/white in praktika, and a spare color negative.

We used some of that negative yesterday, because we developed the wedding stuff right on an found out that the color roll was just bad, unusable, so we staged a repeat. She got into her wedding gown and I into that suit (and never wore them again), we gathered whom we could (our parents and the still present guests - Stef, the other grannyaunt, tanti). There was a dinner, and we reenacted several scenes - me carrying her over the threshhold (yes! double aitch!) and whatnot, while we're still in the swing. Just like the documentaries about liberation of Belgrade were shot in the spring of 1945, al fresco. These we developed after returning, and they turned out much better.

In Moscow, we were in one of twin Belgrad hotels, I think in #1. It had a lot of familiar details, because it was built by our enterprises, so all the furniture, lamps etc were like at home. Including identical ceiling lamps in the basement bar as found in Šanta, which was a bit of a cultural shock, or rather a momentary sense of displacement. Our group was a mix of people from Vojvodina (the tickets were by Yugotours of Novi Sad) and Slavonska Požega. The latter were a funny gang, they knew each other well, probably from work, and their trip was somehow organized by their trade union.

At the airport it was swift, as usual, they didn't even check our passports, you only needed to show you have one. The bus was already waiting; it then took some time for it to depart. What I didn't notice last year, but she saw immediately, on many of the windows of apartment buildings along the way from the airport there were no curtains. No explanation.

First thing when we arrived, I pulled up the remaining rubles from last year - there wasn't much to count, but it would take us through first day or two. Went to get some beer. Found Kristal, from Češke Buđejovice - where the good soldier Švejk called from - cold and nice. There was a beer opener on the coffee table, with the code "C2K" (cyrillic) embossed in the steel. It took me a while to understand that it was the price, 0,02 rubles. The command economy knew no inflation. The beer would open nicely and cover the whole table with foam... only if I fumbled it a bit. Around the third bottle I managed to open it swiftly, and it just emited a whiff of smoke and stayed still. I think we stayed at six bottles and went to sleep - the jet lag wasn't that much, only two hours, but still.

The weather wasn't too bad, it was just cold and the pavements were wet, in some places frozen. We found some souvenir shops, bought a nice bronze ashtray, armenian. We were both amazed with the clerks' skill with sčotka (abacus) and how they pack stuff diagonally, with less paper than ours do. Our clerks would pack the item in parallel to the sides of the paper; these guys pulled the corners over the edges, so it took only one piece of tape to keep it together, and actually saved even some of the moves.

Went to see the Red Square etc, though didn't wait in queue to see Lenin - I saw him last year, nothing much to see, and our boots weren't good enough for standing too long. Walking would be fine, but standing chills your toes.

Went across the square into CUM or GUM, whichever, and didn't buy much there, but then there was a clock shop somewhere down the street, and I bough my dad a pocket watch, pretty much the same as I bought myself last time. The clerk adjusted it on a mechanical oscilloscope, with a graph being drawn by a pencil, no screen, but a machine nonetheless. Dad kept this watch for years; when it broke he got another one, about three times heavier, with relief on the cover approaching sculpture - so much metal. Only in 2020 I opened it - and found an electronic ticker inside, the battery probably long dead. Why all the metal then?

Third day, when we moved to the next leg of the trip, all mostly sat in that bar and drank while waiting for the bus to take us to the airport. Everyone took short drinks, because it could arrive anytime. When it finally arrived, there was a bit of a rush, and one guy dropped some money and started rummaging the floor for it. Some tried to help, but when they heard it was only half a ruble, ridiculed him and then chided him for creating a traffic problem over such a trifle amount.

We had a guide of ours, but then the hosts provided their own as well, perhaps a spy of sorts, or at least with a duty to report anything untoward. He didn't seem too attentive to that kind of duty - or he was such a pro that it would seem that he wasn't - he drank with our guide and anyone who'd offer, so by the time we were on the bus to the airport, he was singing "Дорогой длинною" (On the long road), which was resold as "Those were the days" as performed by Marya Hopkina (probably also a Russian), a decade ago. Not bad as a singer. He wore a funny little fisher's hat and a leather jacket, and seemed a little plumper than an average soviet guy at the time. Tourism would do that to you.

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Mentions: praktika, Stef, Šanta, tanti, in serbian