My personal trouble there was that, whatever I ordered from the menu, I always seemed to get those blasted klopsiki—horrible meatballs, guaranteed to make you burp for hours. In the supermarkets, shelves were as good as empty and when you asked for some article, the standard reply was "Ni mé". That's what it sounded like, and it stood for (in German) "Nicht mehr", "no more". On the other hand, they had rum from the original Cuban Bacardi factory, the best donuts I ever tasted, great ice-cream and, wow, chocolate! Should you visit there, don't forget to try the smitankowa, not made with milk, but with real rich cream.

The weirdest experience only came some twenty years later, when I was reading a description of a battle in Solzhenitsyn's August 1914 and it started growing on me that I knew that location. And, yes, we had passed through that rather desolate landscape he described there: low hills on which grew meager fir woods, interspersed with sandy plains. Some writer!