living in sin

one note about Srbija: They'd rather you not visit, thanks; if you don't do what the finer-than-thou print says, however, there's a chance that They won't let you leave....

trusting not the probabilities when someone other than myself was involved—and fearing that some intersection of elements in the jumbled contrapositives and impossibilities of blustery post-Communist iron fists would result in a scene back at the aerodrom (and, moreover, in its interior, where i would not be there to beg/borrow/steal—or otherwise laugh with scorn before invecting—passage out of the country), i decided to register Best Favourite (under that nomenclature, superlatively translated into Najnajnajnajbolji miljenik) with the policija. that is, until i realised that i could do no such thing, being registered, myself, in a similar fashion; there's something singularly humiliating about this additional forbiddance: just because Srbija is inhospitable doesn't mean that i have to be (or at least should be allowed to choose my own hostilities).

though i made several off-handed (colourless, though) comments over the past week, about being unsure as to the process (that i called it such was clearest manifestation of my watered-down approach) whereby guests decrease their likelihood/ness of being swept up from the streets (even if, by living thereon, it appears that they could be, thus, dwelling in a small loophole in the registration ordeal itself) by official (or not) members of the police force, it was only when i mentioned this during language class on thursday that i received any efficacious reciprocation.

which amounted to: meeting Tijana and her mother (who regularly smooches and feeds me, and ruffles my hair as nin would never dare to do) in the pijaca, making our way over to the Zvezdara station (site of the original abortive attempt at my own registration) for presention of reams of documents, promises to mind our collective "nj's and đ's," and other formulaic falsehoods (in which the former descriptive trait always more than makes up for the latter).

englowed with our own sense of good-ness (exactly in the "Neitzsche would be condemning us; we would be cowering were we not skipping down the filthy street" sense) and on the way back into the city, stopped at NB: a decidedly correct (further proof, in the form of slap halfway to Friedrich's mustachioed face) action made awkward only by the fact that people were there (on the Satur-first-day of vacation) and setting up for some event which, though was advertised as extra-scholastic, involved all of the usual suspects.

fueled, as usual, by a-touristicity (up to and including the point of neglect), my incessant chatter about the ultimate anti-landmark led us straight for: an elaborate subway station (complete with egresses on all sides of an asymmetrical, multivehicularly careened at all hours, and otherwise typical Beograd intersection) with no subway. i kept talking. i think i was even gesticulating (in that minisculely wild way) by then. at which point—alongside the bottom of a long long, and probably analogied, escalator—a train stirred the subterranean air with its telltale clatter.