The big snow. As everyone was cleaning their sidewalks (not just a habit, but actually a city regulation), the snow was piled on lawns twice as high, which was, at least near the corners, above my head.
I was going to school twice a day at least twice a week - once for the accordion band, once for the maths sekcija. Luckily, the music teacher could lock her cabinet so we didn't have to carry our instruments every time, we could leave them there. And I didn't have to carry it home to have more lessons, because my lessons were just about finished. At times I actually hated to practice, probably because since november 1965 we got our first TV.
The TV being in my room, I got into habit of not going to sleep anytime too early, and in the morning I was pissed off that there was only one channel and it showed only educational programmes that time of day. Still I watched even that and didn't mind that half of it was in croatian (which I, of course, understood even though I didn't quite grasp what's Croatia; was annoyed by things I didn't understand and the generally low quality of the 16mm tape they used, it was always dirty and looked out of focus). There were times when the accordeon teacher would come and I haven't practiced at all; once I even pretended I wasn't at home. Once I had just about 30 minutes to warm up the lunch and get to school. I think this phase didn't last too long.
The accordeon teacher was an interesting guy, by the way. A Montenegrin, pale, could shave thrice a day, hair upright, glasses thick as ashtrays, and even so he was very shortsighted, sometimes he'd just bring the notes to 10cm away from his eyes to be able to see them properly. Being almost blind, he wasn't good for any other kind of work, so they put him up as a switchboard operator in šećerana. And I guess he also played at weddings.
At school we learned a bunch of stuff, of course, and among those was the story of Mičurin, the soviet geneticist who went on creating crossbreeds and hybrids of various plants, trying to create cultivars which would bear richer crops in the harsh northern climate. The stories were exaggerated, of course [and I got seriously disappointed with their apples once I saw them on my plate - that was about half the size of what's normal here]. This line of thought bore an unexpected fruit - the crossbreed jokes, of which there were a dozen, which circulated until everybody knew them. The only one I remember is „what do you get when you cross[breed] a hedgehog and an earthworm?“ - „barbed wire“.
Association: „real love must hurt, said the rabbit coming down off a hedgehog“.
The new dinar was launched on new year's date. Same as the old one, just two zeros less, so the old thousand, with that foundry character, was a tenner now. The nicknames remained - it was still a bank (though the last time it had a drawing of the bank's building on the reverse was back in the days of kingdom), som (carp, so „five soma“ was 50 or 5000 dinars, same paper), monkey (jumps easily from hand to hand), rag (because it was printed on bad paper). In Slovenia it was called „juraj“ (george), and I even found they had a band in the eighties (guess... nope, end of century) named „posod' mi jurja“ („lend me a juraj“). They also used it with shorthand plural like any other unit of measure, so it was not „pet somova“ (five carps), it was „pet soma“ (five [of] carp), not „štiri jurjev“ (four georges), but „štirje jurje“.
When the hundred appeared, several years later, brand spanking new, not inherited from the old dinar times, it was called ten thousand anywa. It was seldom called a horse, despite of featuring a rawing of a monument of a rider, it was „crvena“ (the red one), for years, for as long as it stayed in circulation.
The price tags were posted in both currencies, to avoid confusion, for years to come. The best shot came from a footwear shop, where the upper row had a „nova c“ (new p[rice]), and lower „stara c“ (old p). The space was small, so the starac (old man) came across as costing a hundred times more than novac (money).
This mandatory posting of both prices was revoked after a couple of years, but the practice held on, and the inertia was such that deep into the eighties, and even a bit of nineties, we still spoke amounts in old dinars, despite officially writing everything in new dinars.
The kids' series „Thousand whys“ was on, which I often watched at Kale's. It was led by Zoran Radmilović, then a youngster and later a legend of our acthood, and Staša Pešić, one of the few faces I loved to much and didn't understand why. Now we too had a television set, so I watched it at home, I think it was broadcast on sunday mornings. Though, we didn't have a habit to turn it on in daylight, it was a thing for the evening, but there, on sunday mornings there was something to watch.
5-VI-2020 - 6-II-2026