Water in, Sweat out

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The bus from Sofia to Belgrade took a lot longer than expected. The border alone took an hour because apparently, the border patrol on the Bulgarian and Serbian sides were too busy having coffee and cigarettes to immediately get to stamping our passports. When we made an unexpected stop in Nis to switch busses, I was lucky enough to meet a Macedonian girl who spoke English (no one else on the bus spoke that, German or Spanish, so I would have been really out of luck) and showed me where to switch in our tickets, where the new bus was, and covered the 10 dinar fee to "check" luggage onto the new bus (that's a new one) as I didn't have any Serbian money on me yet. She told me some really interesting stories about Balkan culture, education, and the how difficult it is for many of the nationalities in the Balkans to get visas to visit other countries. We got into Belgrade around 11PM, which was a few hours later than I'd been told we'd arrive, but I was able to get a maxi "gurmanska" (huge spiced hamburger in pita bread) at a 24 hour place, so I went to sleep with a happy stomach.

I met up with my friend Dave, who I'll be touring Europe with, the next morning, and we headed out around Belgrade, seeing the sights. The city is actually quite nice, and much more expensive than we would have imagined. There are still a few bombed out buildings from NATO's 1999 air campaign, but mostly, it looks like the city has put those days behind it. There are cafes and restaurants everywhere, a few pedestrian-only areas, and the streets are always flooded with well-dressed people. The native food revolves around various barbequed meats, and bureks, greasy cheese or meat filled filo-dough pies.

The Serbs are some of the most friendly people I've ever met. Many of them speak very good English, and it became typical when asking for directions for the person to stop what they were doing, and walk several blocks out of their way to show you exactly where things were.

We took in the sights, the Citadel on the mountain, several Orthodox Churches, the military museum which has a part of a downed F-16 and a captured US Airman's uniform from 1999, and the Nikola Tesla museum. We happened to have gotten into Belgrade in the middle of a heat wave, as it was past 40 degrees during the day, and didn't go down much at night. We were drinking a half liter of water every half our, and probably sweating it out right afterwards. We were able to get some relief when we went to a lake near the Sava river where half the city was also trying to cool off.

Belgrade is a nice city, but the real attraction is the nightlife. The best known feature are the party barges on the Danube and Sava river, which are packed every night of the week during the summer and open until early the next morning (with all the people on the lake, and out at night during the week, I can't imagine that anyone actually goes to work in Belgrade). Each barge has its own personality and music type, which was good for us experiencing variety. There are also a lot of hidden bars in buildings which were established during the Milosevic era and are kind of like speak-easy's, but the only one we were able to find hidden in a residential apartment building was unfortunately closed for restorations.

After some hot, exhausting, days and nights in Belgrade, we were off to Montengro, hoping to find cooler temperatures.

For some more pictures, check out Dave's blog: Adventures in Serbia

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Photos

The Sveti Sava Church
It's huge, but still under construction and has been since 1935.