Sretan Rodendan

It’s an auspicious day today – not only the first day of Spring in the Antipodes, but it’s Branka’s birthday!

After rowing (a few extras this morning), a goodbye swim with Minka who is returning to Switzerland, a coffee with a friend while we waited for visitors who didn’t turn up (slack kiwis) (sram ti bilo), I launched myself on the unsuspecting shops in town.

Mission one – to find some sexy underwear for her (we had joked about it in Paris)

Mission two – to find wrapping paper and a birthday card

Mission three – to find a cake and some candles.

Mission Impossible was the name of the game – very hard to find what I was looking for under the first heading (but found a facsimile of sorts after visiting the three possible shops), couldn’t find a birthday card anywhere, managed to buy a small chocolate cake, and finally found some candles (those annoying ones that you can’t blow out) in Tomy. For a compatriot of the extreme 40s, and someone who shuns attention, she coped with the rendition of Sretan Rodendan very graciously. (And does anyone know why that birthday song has the same tune in every country that you hear it?)

I’ve been sitting here trying to learn the huge potential for the use of the reflexive possessive pronoun, trying desperately to get the various words with their endings to sink into my head. To je tesko – it is difficult – but now that I can see the end of the adventure, I am feeling guilty about my lack of prowess in the Croatian language. I’m back to watching the stupid American sit-coms with their Croatian subtitles and busy reading the newspaper.

Hot topic in the paper at the moment is the priest in Imotski who has been paying young girls to have sex with him – he said that he wouldn’t pay them more than 4000 kuna each because he thought it immoral to give them too much money. I like a guy who preaches morals. Apparently he has sent out more than 20,000 texts to girls, including images of his anatomy. Makes it easy to identify him really. I say take away cell phones from these guys, that ought to sort it!

Must away, I am expected next door for more birthday celebrations. Ciao!