Monday - time to get our ID cards so they know where to pick up when they come after the foreigners while we are in Serbia. Unlike previous years, the cards are now in English (Serbia is working hard to get into the EU), and we were able to get them in advance. Of course, like previous years, it's not as simple as that.
We picked up our friend Emese, who speaks Serbo-Croation, and headed to the police station - let the fun begin!
The lobby of the police station is already full of people. It is also full of police officers in various uniforms actively involved with - well, actually not much. Unless you count making sure the counters and desks don't suddenly fly up in the air.
We are second in line at the window, watching Officer Incompetent deal with a lady at the window. He "hunt and pecked" at his computer keyboard for a couple of strokes, taking, and I am not kidding here, a full three minutes, and then wandered off to find someone who had mastered the alphabet. This gave us 20 minutes to catch up with Emese, write in the journal, and admire the, as many as 8, police offiers sitting in the office working on something that involved holding the furniture down.
A cleaning lady (and friend of Emese's) came by and regaled us with tales of working in the place. Evidently, she has finally trained the police officers that putting out their cigarettes in their coffee cups is a bad idea. After several years, she has also convinced them that cleaning products might be a little more effective than just plain water. She has to be careful about cleaning the second floor window. It is only held in lace with a wooden wedge - if she pushes too hard on it, from either side, it will fall out. Best I can tell, she is the only person working in the whole place. When last seen, she was berating the door stops in the police office about putting chewing gum in the track for the window. They helpfully presented her with a ruler to scrape it out.
While all of this was going on, Vera pulled me over to show me a shredded desk chair in the office we were waiting for, and said I should address it in the blog. I assume it was shredded in frustraition from these people at the counter wanting things and interrupting the importnat work of holding the furniture down.
Finally, Officer NahΘτ* (my guess - Fackelmann), showed up and demonstrated some competence. Taking our cards and passports, he was gone for about 10 minutes, and we were checked in.
From there we went to city hall to get birth certificates to start Z's passport adventure for this year, only to find that they had risked having their furniture float away for their midmorning snack break. We gave up and went to Emese's to sit on the deck and enjoy coffee and a "car" conversation.
*****
Pista and Rozsa, Peter's cousin and wife, came by to visit this afternoon. They are active farmers in town. Pista shared with us that if it doesn't start raining in the next few days, the corn won't come this year. They made several thousand Euros on this crop last year, and are a little worried. The river levels in town are too low to allow for irrigation, so the crop may be a write-off. There are no farm subsidies here, so this will be a financial loss for them. So remember kids, there is no such thing as global warming.
*****
Dinner this evening is at Laci-Bacsi and Erzsi-Neni's house (known to long time readers of the blog as "Beethoven-Bacsi" and "Mozart-Neni." Laci had a large St. Bernard dogs when Z's kids were young and the "Beethoven" dog movies were out). In attendance are Imre and Kati, Lajos and Bori, Lacika and Dora and their son, Benedek. Lacika is the manager for this really hot Serbian brass band, the Boban Markovic Orkestra, that I have been infatuated with lately. Laci, Erzsi, Imre, Kati, Lajos and Bori are the harvest crew for the wine grapes in the vineyard that Peter is managing in Hungary, and they have all become good friends.
Lajos and Bori are a little late this evening. The trees on their farm had grown a little too close to the power lines, and had caught on fire. Had they not been home to put the fire out, the entire place likely would have burnt to the ground.
*****
The evening proceeded, as they often do here, with me enjoying the melodious sounds of Hungarian flowing around me, without a clue to what it actually all means. Fortunately, Z will help me keep up with the flow of things by occasionally throwing me a "car." A "car" is a quick translation, so that I have some clue as to what is happening in the conversation, and can make some sense of it. The first year we came over here, they were concise little tidbits of the conversation. I was surprisingly, able to follow a lot of what was going on at that point. By the second trip, the tidbits had gotten shorter - usually consisting of one word. We talked about cars a lot that year.
After an hour, then, this is the "car" Z just threw at me - "it doesn't translate, it's like a pun." And I'm right back in there...
* His real name is spelled "Nah backward 'N' and a weird cross between a 'T' and an 'h.'" I used to be able to cut and paste from Word into Blogger. I can't do that any more. Thanks, Blogger.
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