"Black" to the drawing board...

We’re not yet back to 100% but hopefully moving in the right direction.  This morning  M and I walked to the next village over to have coffee on the patio of a funny bar we’ve stumbled across.  We sat under parasols and enjoyed the warm breeze and laughed about the free glass of Tang-like liquid that came with every cup of coffee.  J

Afterwards we stopped by a bakery to buy bread.  Most of the bread here is white, and I’ve been puzzling for a week as to how to find something whole wheat.  Although many people speak good English no one seems to respond to the term “whole wheat”, probably because it doesn’t seem like anyone eats it. 

I was all excited because I thought I’d finally figured it out by comparing the lists of ingredients in 5 different former-Yugoslavian languages on the back of a package of bread that seemed like it might actually be whole wheat.  “Polno-Zrnati”!  In Russian the word “Pol’no” means “whole” and the Bosnian word is apparently “Integrali” like it is in Italian.  I was pretty confident that I’d finally found the right word!  We walked into the bakery and I said:  Hi!  Do you have “Polno-Zrnati Kruh?”

The girl behind the counter smiled and said:  “Yes!”, obviously pleased with my attempts to use her language.  She pointed to a very big, very white loaf of bread.

I was crestfallen.  “Oh.  No.  Sorry.  I was looking for “Vollkorn”.  (using the German, which everyone seems to understand for some reason.)

“No, no, you were right!  Polno-Zrnati!”  And she smiled at me again happily.

“Hmm.  Really?  Because that looks very white to me.”

“Well yes!  That’s because it’s half white, half black!”

???

“OK.  Do you have something that’s maybe only black?”

“Oh yes!”  And she pointed to another similar white loaf next to it.  “This one is black, it just doesn’t have seeds.”

I went ahead and bought it just because she’d been so friendly but it’s just about as white as my babies’ butts.  It tastes great, but the mystery continues…