On out short, but eventful, journey to Serbia and Croatia, one of the first, and unpleasant, things we encountered, were the very narrow roads in Eastern Serbia with their ever narrower tunnels. Just in a few of those close to the Bulgarian border it was actually possible for two cars to pass each other in the tunnel.

Belgrade was the beautiful city Sofia might have been if history and years of bad luck had been more merciful to Bulgaria's capital. We really enjoyed the posh downtown of Belgrade and appreciated the special attitude Serbs had for everything Russian, exemplified here by the luxurious hotel Moscow (Moskva).

With the good friend in science Jovan Ajdukovic, DSc, whom I know from a Sofia linguistic conference, we had a splendid dinner in a typical retro-tavern in downtown Belgrade. Jovan helped me find and buy a voluminous Serbian-English CD-dictionary.

On our entry from Serbia into Croatia, we were amazed at the collection of cheap merchandise, reflecting more or less the different republics in former Yugoslavia, and sold at exuberant prices.

My first impression of the Croatian cunas was that they were a little more than 100 times more expensive that the Serbian dinars, about 7.30 to 1 EUR, while dinars were about 800 to the same amount. Life in general in Croatia seems also more expensive than what we saw in Serbia, but then we hardly had any idea of the real standard there since we did not know how much people earned.

A glimpse of the Serbian-Croatian border that was the second border we crossed in less that two days.

A peaceful day at the lovely Adriatic close to Split. If we had stayed a bit longer, we would have enjoyed some real bathing in the unexpectedly warm for late September weather.

Violeta playfully took that photo of me in front of a Bikini shop. Our private joke in that was that I had become modestly popular in Bulgaria and in the US for my interest in the origins of the word bikini. My idea, which renowned specialists proved to be true, was that bi- in that word had nothing to do with the Latin numeral for 'two.' Indeed, as it turned out, it came from Marshallese where it meant 'surface of a coconut.' So, monokini and other -kini are just fancy new forms, the fruit of a popular misunderstanding.

My precious daughter Ledka and I spent some time at the splendid Adriatic Coast.

We spent our last night in Croatia. That came around earlier than I expected because of the extreme weariness due to so much driving (the whole distance we covered in four days and three nights was 2,000 miles) and partly because of a sudden fog. The motel that we dropped in was called Evropa (Europe) and was roughly 1.5 times more expensive than downtown Belgrade�s Bristol where we slept the first night of our journey. Most amazing, and extremely uncomfortable, in the Evropa was the bath-tub where-because of the slanting ceiling-it was practically impossible to use normally the whole thing: one had to bend into an impossible position to get any water over oneself. As a bizarre joke, this motel was the only place we slept in during our journey where we found a small fridge in the room.

A photo of Prof. Snezhana Barova and me taken after her brilliant piano performance that concluded the concert dedicated to the 110 anniversary of Geo Milev's birth.

The Stara Zagora exhibition of hugely enlarged illustrations from Geo Milev's magazines and notepads turned out to be the best in Bulgaria so far. This photo of ours was taken in front of two pictures, Dancing Figure and Woman with Candles, done by Geo's hand, that we like so much that we already have medium-sized copies of them in our living room.

On September 30, 2005 I had the privilege of standing in the company of students of the Stara Zagora Thracian University who were preparing for a folk dance to honor the 10th jubilee of their Alma Mater.

Again at the Stara Zagora exhibition. Another enlarged illustration that I particularly like - Music by Nikolai Abrashev. A version of it decorates a well-lit corner in the hall of our apartment

My mother Leda Mileva in the courtyard of her father's house in Stara Zagora among primary school students who took part in a competition for children's drawing achievements.

A photo of the National-Louis University lecturer Dr Kate Zilla and me just after the report she read at the Conference of the Foundation Elizabeth Klark-Penka Kasabova in Burgas, October 9, 2005.

Mircho Slivenski, the loyal photographer, audio and video recorder of the last 15 years of Penka Kasabova's life, boldly decided to display the small portion of his work he had brought to Burgas on the floor in front of the conference hall. His idea proved successful and went down well with the event's participants and passersby.

A page of Mircho Slivenski's albums where Penka Kasabova, among others, is photographed with the National-Louis University Professor PeterFisher and Dr. Sheila Shapiro.