Sleight of Hand

30 Jan 1994 (Sunday)

Another sunny day, and I decided to have a nice walk around town to take some photos. Damn and blast. My camera battery pooped out as soon as I took one picture, but I continued on my journey around Zagreb.

I made a larger west-to-east loop around the city than I had yesterday, and I discovered more good and bad neighborhoods. This increase in knowledge helps when it comes time to look for a flat in earnest. I must have walked about seven miles, taking about three hours. I stopped for a while in front of the National Theater, and once again near the Palace Hotel, where I sat and watched children play under the gazebo surrounded by lovely trees in the park. Then I walked down to the train station and wandered through it like a lost passenger. In the warmth of the day lovers cuddled and kissed on the platforms, and many of the men were soldiers saying goodbye. I wondered if they were off to the Bosnian front. I wondered, too, if any of them would ever watch me through their gun sights.

Some miscellaneous notes for the day:

1. I have made a sort of study of the types of cheating that goes on here by merchants. There are several obvious techniques used, and no doubt many others I have yet to discover. First is the charge- you- more- than-posted- price technique. This is easy to catch if you remember what the marked price was. A variant is charge- you- more- than- the- agreed- upon- price trick, which is very easy to perpetuate in a country whose language the buyer does not know.

Then there's the basic short-changing, which is easy here, since the change comes in a multitude of colored bills, many of which bear a remarkable similarity to one another. In short, most people cannot be bothered to count out the "funny money."

One crude technique is when they pretend they don't have the correct change and then go off, presumably to find it, only never to return again. Patience pays off here, since eventually they MUST come back to make more sales (and to cheat more customers).

The last technique, which is only for the highly skilled, is what I call the "magic trick." You lay your money out to pay for the purchase, and the merchant then lays out the correct change while all the money is atop the counter or table. Then, in one deft sleight of hand, the changer scoops up the money you just paid PLUS a significant fraction of the change they just laid out for you. It all happens so fast that it's hard to spot.

2. Toilets. Yes, toilets. How many of us were potty trained on a basic sit- down type toilet? In many parts of this country so-called "Eastern" type toilets are more common than "Western" sit-down type. Proficient use of squat- over-the-hole Eastern-type toilets is definitely an acquired skill, and they are neither well suited for those of us with bad knees, nor for extended, peaceful contemplation. Toilet paper seems to be made from recycled grocery bags... and burlap sacks, too. In short, squat thrusts can probably strengthen your quadceps for holding your knees together, but bring your own Charmin.