Eurotrip p.1

Posted on Monday, May 07, 2012, under ,


My First Massage Outside of Asia: Lake Palić, March 2012

Normally I’d sigh and grunt like a sow once a deft hand finds the right spot – of which there must be thousands from the frontal bone to my big toe. This time round there is none of it.
Instead I have to concentrate on the small talk, both of us intent on squeezing out a firsthand info from the other. Me, I ask about the life of ordinary folks in the northernmost part of Serbia as he probes into a life of an expat earning his breadcrumbs in the Far East.
I learn electricity bills are the local top vexation, so much so that even a pair of wealthy returnees living in a pretentious villa near Palić, keep only one room heated in winter. I learn my masseur juggles two other jobs, a nighttime watchman and a security guard in a primary school. I learn how one of his clients was a Japanese man light as a feather, who was to marry a local Hungarian girl the following day; how a certain German prick asked him to work on his left foot for an entire hour and left him no tip; how he massaged some famous people none of whom talked much. I tell him that Serbs in Japan are as rare as hen’s teeth, that I’d sometimes kill for a hearty Pannonian dish, that I miss the hugs and the open bitterness and how I wish I could chew the cud with my Chinese masseuse sometimes, who charges me five times he does. Which in itself calls for a hearty tip.

                                                                The sun sets at lake Palic

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