(date approximate)
By the break of spring I brought the praktika and started making lots of shots, specially seeing as Franci had some good lenses, even a fish eye adapter - we played with it a lot.
I still attended the students' mess halls, but less frequently, because the two better ones were on the other side - east and north of the university, and I was on the west. Not that I ever walked the distance, it was indeed too far (actually not - just 2,5km and the distance at home was 2,2), but somehow it became more handy to just get some prepackaged meal, specially with her living three blocks away. Having a kitchen and some set of vessels and utensils we started some cooking. I invented an extended version of popara, which initially was just stale bread sprinkled with water and some young cheese. Instead of using a plek in the oven, I put it on a frying pan, and started adding sausage ends, any leftovers, other types of cheese, mustard, sour cream... whatever leftovers I got my hands to. This kind of popara is still, 40-some years later, one of the five dishes I know how to make :).
For ingredients there was a supermarket two blocks away in her direction, or the small one-room shop at the corner in the other direction, where they had just bread and perhaps the elementary fifty items. Next to it was the Forum (where Ilona worked) shop - which should have been a kiosk, but the enterprise preferred such brick-and-mortar places. I don't know why I went in, perhaps on a hunch, or was I trying to switch from smoking Opatija to something else, but I found it here: the škija. They also had the cigarette paper. Didn't have a proper tozna, though, so I managed by carrying a bag with me, or with other small boxes. But in the following years I'd smoke this whenever I could lay my hands on it, which was most of the time.
This spring we also went a couple of times to Temišvar. One of those I somehow place in may, but with my then passport gone, can't be sure. The best purchase of the day didn't happen downtown, but in a street leading to it from our side, somewhere near the bridge, I'd say on the farther side, at the ground floor of a four (am. five) storeyed novogradnja. The shop etched itself in my mind by the sight of a series of bags with a peculiar combination of colors - the pure light blue, of chalk-like hue just brighter, with the crummy mustard-brown with a slightly olive-greenish ingredient. Eyepiercing. Once more coming to the conclusion that the Germans and Romanians have a special taste in colors.
But that's where we found two nice suitcases of the same design, one larger one smaller, of honey-orange color, with rounded corners and solidly done locks, and handles wrapped in yet another layer of the same leather. Someone here thinks of ergonomy too, a miracle, and they fit the hand neatly. Bought one belt for myself, too, with a largish (but thin and sharp edged) buckle, as were fashionable at the time.
Epilogue: those two suitcases endured much. The big one didn't travel much, but we had it when we needed it, specially for vacations (v. 18-VIII-1993.). The small one saw the world, went to both USSR and USA and China, crossed borders at least fifty times. The belt is still in use (as of 2024) for my garden work shorts.
17-XII-2019 - 31-X-2025