Timişoara. Probably the first time we had a potty on top of the full trunk. Which made us look like fools, made the romanian customs officers laugh, and they waved us through. We repeated this a few more times - while we already had the diapers, both the thin ones and the flannel triangular ones, Go will need another potty to use at Oma's place, then we'd have Mire and Baja with us and they were also having children at the time... So a potty on top, works every time. The škodilak was so full that it was hard to maneuver it out of the parking, and we passed without a hitch.
We'd usually buy most of the stuff in Bega (romanian name for the river that we share) department store, namely in the big supermarket in its basement. It was at least well stuffed with most of the goods we'd buy, and sometimes they had a few rare items, like that cuban clear rum. Upstairs you'd have to wait for a clerk to appear and explain what you need, which didn't go too well most of the time, they were not really cooperating, unless they'd find it interesting. Sometimes we'd buy wine, or Triple sec, a liquor which was about as popular as Maraschino since the late sixties. Once, only once, we went native and bought a ţuica (cujka, in serbian), the romanian version of rakija. Never again, it was so bad, and didn't even have enough alcohol to be used as disinfectant.
Right behind the store, in the backstreet, there was another supermarket with different wares. All different. I couldn't possibly describe what was their repertoir or what to call that store... let's say glass and hardware. You could buy all kinds of pitchers, wine glasses, even really fine and thin ground glass (called crystal for no good reason, except perhaps the crystal-like refraction of light) on the same shelf with heavy hammers, sickles and 20kg vises. I think we still have some brandy shots, dark gray „smoked“ glass, that we bought there.
The point here was this was a command economy, all planned, and they didn't give a fuck about customer satisfaction, or profit or any other incentive to be good at work. The goal was to fulfill the plan, and the performance was measured sometimes in weird ways, so whatever helps to make the unit show better on the performance sheet would be done. What won't show on the sheet, wasn't. Which is why the goods were never too clean - we'd buy, say, canned foods or bottled tomato juice, and had an immediate desire to wash our hands as soon as we got those in the trunk.
10-III-2020 - 4-VIII-2025