15-I-1988.
Some time this month I went for a trip to München with Stana and her husband, in their car, to buy the atarist. We drove all night, and got there in about a dozen hours. The whole hungarian leg of the trip is just a blur, nothing to remember. Their Zastava 101 handled it decently, didn't get too tired. Didn't find one on Schillerstrasse, where Balkans allegedly begins, i.e. where all those tech shops for stuff to smuggle are, not even at Konrad's, but rather in a department store behind the corner. Stana paid it with her credit card (only a few people had them, and just a couple of banks issued them - you had to have enough hard currency to get one). Bought it without monitor - which reduced the price from 1500 to 1000 DEM. I don't even remember whether I bought anything else at all, or what did they buy.
We didn't return the same way, but via Slovenia. Dad arranged with a friend of his to provide a lodging for us. This guy was a trucker, private, had his own truck (not a rare thing in those years, you could go private with almost anything, provided it wasn't anything dangerous - weapons, currency, medicine and a few other things were off limits - and that you didn't employ more than five workers. He'd tow a trailer to Borik with his truck (a small TAM of just 2T), leave it there, stay for a few days and then just leave his wife there - mentioned him already on july 1978.. He'd drop by whenever he could. They even visited us once, we took them to that ethnic-like restaurant at the west end (see 09-VI-1984.), and I got the honors to drive his big Mercedes. First time I felt a servo (aka power steering) in action. Now he didn't have the place to put us in his house, but rented a room in the village hotel (now I wonder how many villages here have lodgings... Slovenia was so far ahead in many ways then).
Going that way got me into some trouble, because we had to use a less frequently used border crossing. Then I appear there with the atarist, and I'm immediately suspect because I'm carrying a 1000 DEM piece of hardware away from main roads. No, 1500 DEM, said the customs guy and charged me accordingly, because in his catalog there was no monitorless option. That hurt. But I got the machine and... no monitor.
Within a week or two I found, in the local newspaper, someone selling a color TV with the SCART plug. Amazingly, none of the more famous manufacturers had it - and I checked a few of the Philips, Grundig etc - but this little one from Ei Niš had it. It served fine for a number of years, though it would keep losing the blue cannon near the end (1999), had to have it fixed a few times. When we returned in 2010 it probably still worked but we didn't even bother to plug it in, nor the atarist, as we were over with television and playing with a 16-bit machine would be more comfortable in emulation on my current machine, than hunting a cable for it, trying to plug anything VGA to it or other mess. Simply not fun anymore.
Sitting in the kitchen when the others went to sleep would get my legs cold up to and including the knees, and I'd go all stiff, so I'd lie down on the other tapestry that Oma made for us (lying on it I graduated) and would read whatever I had, probably some Sirius or Računari [computers]), and the speakers were still under the table, so I'd hear it excellently even though it was rather quiet. One such evening the Belgrade 1 transmitted live some jazz concert, which I generally wouldn't listen to, there's days ahead for that, I'm still having lots of empty spaces in my ears not yet filled with rokenrol... But, okay, this time, it's Dušan Prelević singing, the guy who managed to be the (second of six) singer in Korni grupa, from which he was ran out as an unreliable and lazy, now already a venerable alkos. Only, this is the circle of the deuce [inner sanctum Belgrade, encircled by the tram line #2], where these are called boems [bohemes]. They were mostly reluctant to allow him close to the microphone for anything alive, as nobody could vouch that he won't do any crazy stunt, but this was jazz, a practically academic matter, in the Dom sindikata [Unions' home].
And, truth be told, he honestly worked it out, he earnestly bluffed his way through, at least at Eric Burdon's level. The only thing that he did sincerely was when, after one longer round of applauses, he took the microphone and said „you each owe me a beer“.
It's a miracle how much that tapestry helped, guess because it was laid far enough away from the outer walls. That kitchen and bathroom had half brick walls to the yard side, which quickly became damp from either condensation from the bathroom and kitchen, or from the streetside wall next to the well, and it was really hard to warm up in the winter. One winter like this we had a finger thick layer of ice on the bathroom walls and ceiling, on the inside. And still managed to take baths like that. Just fire up the heaters, warm up the air, the plastic sheathing isn't cold, the water is warm, just need to run those two meters through the lobby...
The shot was made when the ice just appeared, in the end of 1984. A week later it had the thickness, and the winter was getting worse. What we two put on the roof board as insulation was sheer shit, because it was based on perlite, and nobody told us how hygroscopic it was, so we had an additional source of moisture from above. Around 1985 dad decided to relieve us of misery, and paid his majstor to extend the roof by those four meters and build a gable in the new position.
Mentions: july 1978., 09-VI-1984., Ten years reunion, atariST, Borik, Korni grupa, majstor, Oma, Stana Čopanja, in serbian
20-X-2016 - 10-III-2026