30-VIII-2014.
As usual, she woke up before I did, and what's unusual is that she took two snapshots of me lying on the bed, in pretty much still sleeping state, one eye open.
The burek was just right.
We left the place - nothing to pack, as we left our stuff in the car, parked at Boća's place. Walked around looking for a breakfast, found some good burek and yogurt, had a coffee at a nice place almost in the open but in a shade. Even though it was still 8 in the morning and not hot yet, and even though it was on the parking of one of those big gray box supermarkets, kind of keymart style. Good coffee, and interesting talk about photography with the waitress. Interesting to talk with waitresses these days, you never know what they graduated.
By the edge of the parking lot some peasant sold tomatoes, using a classical scale, nothing digital. Tomatoes were huge - we bought one, exactly 1kg. Later she extracted seeds from it, and we had a line of them, though with smaller fruits, only 750g, but each stalk bore 5-6 of them.
Literally, "A grain of café"
Eventually we walked down to his place, had probably another coffee there, then went downtown for a walk. Arranged a meeting with a guy from sezam, who used to work with Boća, and had a coffee together at the square right in front of their old gimnazija. Walked some more afterwards, went to see the old factory of Zastava - not the car production, but the old cannon foundry from XIX century. Well I guess the buildings we saw were newer than that, but just as empty and abandoned.
Went to lunch somewhere on a hill above the lake, very good - and we saw a trick of how to make the wood beams look older and thicker, by simply covering them with old planks. Will do that in our upstairs when we get to that. He wanted to keep us for another night, but I promised Aranđelovac, so we stayed for the afternoon at his place, some beer and coffee (well coffe only for me, driving), as "you'll be going west mostly, so let the sun go down first". Which we eventually did.
We arrived at Aranđelovac when it was almost dark. Parked at the Izvor hotel, me in shorts, clogs and the new (but crumpled) white t-shirt (... 10 words...)... while everyone else we saw while walking from the parking to the concierge was posh, in suits and gowns and neckties and shiny shoes. The night would be 15000 dinars, about 150€ at the time. Wow, this is more expensive than Manhattan, I could always find a room for 100$ there. But this is four stars hotel. So what? I only want to sleep and have a shower. Well you have all the facilities - swimming pool, spa, gym, tennis court, bla bla bla.
While I did have that much in my pockets (actually more) I just didn't want to spend the night in such a place. Can't relax and, I guess, there'd be no smoking. Likewise the gray box little hotel a few kilometers ago, to which I didn't want to return.
So we drove around the place for another hour, back and forth along the main street and the other transit street, looking for another hotel or b&b. At some point we even drove a couple of km out of town, nothing. Stopped at a pharmacy near the park and went in to ask, and the girl pointed me to the two old hotels just in the park, through that gate right there.
Drove in and found ourselves in the dark. Both hotels, Staro Zdanje and the Šumadija were stark dark, not a soul, anyone wanting to shoot a oh the horrorrs movie would find a cheap set here and cough some serious cash to find lodging for the personnel. While we walked from one to the other, my phone rang - Bajlo. The IV4 was organizing a boat trip down the rivers next weekend, they are keeping a place for me. Nope, thanks, daughter coming soon, busy, take somebody else, ciao.
Stopped somewhere in the main street to have a coffee (good, domestic aka turkish, tall and deep, can't see the bottom), juice (cafe style, where the 7% of blueberry is printed in a much larger font than the 59% of grape) and a leak (which was kind of acrobatic, of all the possible ways to squeeze a toilet so high above the floor in such a cramped space, these guys were among the most imaginative, happy to have not drunk anything). The night was still kind of hot and sweaty. We saw absolutely no signs of any hotel or b&b. Well screw you, I'm only 160km from home. So we hit the road. We should have stayed in Kragujevac. But at least the hens weren't unattended for too long.
Balkan and near east going back to work
The Balkan and near east were returning to work.
Two notes on this sentence:
First, there's one Balkan. That's the name of the area between Sava, Danube, Black sea, the greek seas and the Adriatic sea. If you find another one somewhere else, I'll agree with the use of plural. Anyone else using the plural is challenged to count them.
Second, what you call middle east is near east here. I actually never found a good explanation for the lack of mention of near east in the western press. Near east is the area from Suez to Pakistan; middle east is the indian subcontinent, far east is anything east of Bangladesh, all the way to Vladivostok.
Mentions: Božidar Sokolović (Boća), burek, gimnazija, IV4, Nenad Bajlo (Bajlo), sezam, yogurt, in serbian
23-VIII-2015 - 31-X-2025