To Szeged. Just a smuggling trip, I'd say, buying T-shirts and sausage.
The agriculture fair in Novi was around mid-month. True, we aren't any sort of agricultural outfit, we're the stour's erc, but Radoje found a good excuse in Iskra Delta and a few other „manufacturers“ of computing gear being exhibitors there, so he took me and two other programmers there, to take a look.
That was part of his policy - while being quite limited in what he could do about our salaries, he managed to find other ways to make us feel less shitty, to be something. Fair as fairs go, same as ever, we saw a bit of all of that, it's rather that we were somewhere together and not in front of terminals. Then at lunchtime the choice came to me, as the only one who studied here and not in Belgrade, to choose the place where we'll eat.
It'll be Borsalino, of course, I know of no other places. This is where it became obvious, by me knowing just one tavern without them noticing anything odd about it, that all four of use were from medium to lower well off families, and didn't have much cash to go out while studying. The only exception was once Radoje's roommate, a priest's son, who'd also play it thin except after the village slava, after which he'd be overflowing with cash for a couple of weeks.
The Borsalino had one dish, beans, on its menu, but it was good. Nobody complained. The house tradition kept each table with a glass of water with three hot peppers in it. Largish, light green. Radoje and the colleagueess didn't reach for them, the colleague and I sure did. I ate mine to the stalk, he gave up on his at half. Said mine was less hot. Okay, we'll see tomorrow. I took the third one with me.
Next morning I rode my bike to the green market, to get ćevapčići and whatnot from Trpana. Cut this third pepper lengthwise, he took one half, I the other. He ate two thirds of his, I ate all of mine. He paid the breakfast for all. At least we didn't have to clear out the small change.
Which often did turn to be a challenge, because I never had enough cash with me to simply pay for all of it and then charge each of them for their share. Instead, I'd gather some contributions, roughly rounded amounts of expected cost, and then we'd get clear accounts. Which would be simple if we put it all on paper (which we actually did a couple of times, when nothing else helped), but no, we kept trying to make shortcuts and only complicated matters. It was once said „well screw us all, four mathematicians around the table and it's second coffee break and we still haven't cleared the change“.
The works on the house were progressing, slowly. We already had a plate on the basement, a smaller crane came, by mediation of stambena, and lined up the siporeks boards on the wreath aka serklaž* on its walls, that was last year. Then we built the ground floor walls up to the next wreath, and then I had, again via stambena, a much larger crane, from the shipyard, lift those boards to make the top plate. Then we had quite a large moba to pour the concrete for that plate, but I absolutely can not remember what was when, nor how did we lift the concrete, as we didn't have any kind of elevator. I think we had a pulley, so we lifted one bucket at a time. We still have that pulley, somewhere on the upper terrace.
We two often went to do this or that, there was always some work to do. Up to about this year there was a path by bager, to which we'd go down the side street behind the house to the railroad, then carry our bikes over, then straight. But then a garbage dump formed around that path, it reeked of carcassed and we also risked stumbling into a shard of glass or some rusty iron. So we switched to going around, and it wasn't as big as before, because bager was already declared a landfill and it was much smaller now. On the filled part a path formed, several paths, which we'd take to reach the railroad crossing in our street.
Sometimes it'd happen that it was dark by the time we returned, and we couldn't easily pick the best path, the soil being quite uneven. Only my bike had a working headlight, hers and dad's couldn't boast of that kind of luxury, but light made it worse. It's a wee five watt bulb, and doesn't really shine much but casts weird shadows and makes me drive around seemingly nasty obstacles, straight into much worse ones that I didn't see. Once the light's wire got unhooked, I realized that driving blindly was much smoother.
During one of these weeks Mars and Jupiter were really close and bright on the western sky, looked like magic. If any astronomer sees this, may help me to decide when did this actually happen. My best guess is september this year.
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* wreath has several meanings in slavic languages, including a crown, a mountain ridge; in construction, it's the reinforced concrete frame on top of a wall. Since it connects the walls into a frame, it's considered a circle; serklaž is the transliteration of french circlage (or whichever way they chose to spell it)