Rampant unemployment.

Sunday is the Lord's day, a day of rest, and at no time have I felt that more aggressively than today. Nedelja, the Slovene equivalent of Sunday literally translates as "no work." (Monday, to be sure everyone is on the same page, translates as "after no work day." And the widest circulating newspaper, Delo, means simply "work." A trend develops here...) So, as I awoke this morning in search of feeding myself, getting a photocopy of my passport, hitting an ATM to pay off my landlord and then purchase detergents, I had no idea of the Nietzschean mountain I was about to scale. As I made the trek from my home to Trg Prešeren, I found only one sandwich place open. It turned out to be the cheapest I've discovered, and I chalked that in the win column. But my happy surprise turned to dismay when nary a grocer, drugstore, stationer or photocopy place was open for business. The NY audience, for whom Kinko's are as ubiquitous as pigeon droppings, will find this akin to a dragon swallowing the sun. I steeled myself to this dearth of transactionability and stood before an ATM (BA here) to withdraw those necessary funds. But, I had forgotten my PIN #. How could this be? The duststorm that was my extraction from the City spanned approximately 40 days. In that time, I freed myself of my apartment and all worldly belongings—apart from the bare necessities (and a few cherished frivolities), opened a new bank account specifically to tackle the rigors of this trip, and filed/refiled/double-checked on the first files to a Houston insurance broker about a setto involving a carjacker, a car and myself. Factor in opaque nights meeting friends for copious whisky consumption, and you get a PIN # mystery series Kojak and Freud together couldn't deduce. With automaton diligence, I entered the eight or so #s I know I know. (Pardon the Rumsfeldism, but the claim makes more sense here than in Fallujah.) None of these worked. This was clearly an effort that required more than I could bring to it. So, I withdrew to my e-roost (KUD France Prešeren) to draw help from my bank. I sent an email (unsecured) to the representative outside Salt Lake City (or some other quasi-urban storehouse of customer servers) requesting my PIN #. She answered promptly back that I must send her a secured email and sent me the link to do so. As I filled in the blanks, I noticed the final piece in this secure email jigsaw puzzle was my PIN #. I wrote back that this was the very thing I was looking for. My representative obviously found my response too ponderous for her Sunday afternoon, and our communication ended there. I retaliated by enlisting the aid of a friend I know is an online fixture. He emailed me back with the link to the link I had just failed to make into a complete chain...and an international toll-free #! At last, things were moving. (As a sidenote, on the back of my bank card is the # to call if the card is lost or stolen. Oh, ghost of George Orwell, you are a busy spectre.) I migrated downstairs and asked the bartendrix how to dial an operator. "Nula...Nič." Zero. I pulled out my Mobitel cellphone and posed my thumb over the "0," imploring her approval. Her mouth pulled tight. "There is no Mobitel operator. You must call from a home phone or a collect phone." OK, so I can use my Telekom card on a street phone and make a collect call there? "No, you must go to the post office." But it's Sunday... She shrugged. I retreated back around the corner to the ATM. There, to no avail, I entered four more #s phenomenologically active in my memory. And although I got the impression this ATM, like Kafka's guard, would never ask me to stop entering #s, I did. I returned to the bar, where I had a beer and read a book.