If you think the monkey in your closet is evil, wait till you get to Serbia

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Back on the road, so the speak. After a really comfortable flight, during which I drank my last Bionade to formally bid farewell to my old life in Germany, I arrived in the city of Zagreb. The bus ride to the city was fine, so was finding the right tram, and even getting off at the right stop. Everything went nice and smooth. Strange? Hell yeah! I already got a bit suspicious and expected the worst from my host, but Dunya, who fetched me with her boyfriend Ivor, gave me a warm reception, and immediately offered me some pasta with a great tomato sauce. Only then did I find out that she worked as a vegan macrobiotic cook for an institute in Zagreb, which operates a restaurant, offers courses on healthy lifestyle, and cooks for people with serious health issues, such as cancer.

The food was so good that I had to take a nap while Dunya went off to work. Later on that night, we met at the city, and she showed me around for a while, which was nice, but a tad uncomfortable, since it was freezing like whoa! We decided to leave the sightseeing for the next day, and went back to her place, where she immediately started to prepare dinner. She didn't even accept my offer to help her prepare the meal, saying I was her guest. Ivor dropped by again, and we chatted for a while until dinner was ready. It proved to be the Croatian national dish, Sarma, just the vegetarian version. It was cabbage leaves stuffed with sauerkraut and two different types of grain, together with a light sauce. It was absolutely fantastic, despite the fact that I'm usually not such a krauty kraut. So much good food took its tribute, and while the two were showing me pictures from their trip to the Hebrides, I fell asleep.

The rest of my stay in Zagreb was pretty much like the first day. Eating great food, taking many naps, going out to be at least a bit of a tourist, relaxing for a while, going to sleep. One day we went for a hike to a nearby castle, which meant walking for about one hour through snowy forest. The highlight of the hike was arriving at the castle and finding a restaurant there, that not only had good coffee, but also a fireplace. Indescribable bliss after the freezing cold and wind outside!

On my last day in the Croatian capital, I decided to activate the sophisto in me, and went to three museums. The Mimara Museum had all its exhibits from a fanatic Croatian art collector, who dies shortly after donating all of his collection to the museum. It was an interesting mix of artifacts, statues, paintings, et al from all over the world, including Italy, Greece, Germany, India, China, Japan and more.
The Archeological Museum wasn't that interesting to me, although it gave a good overview of existing excavations all over Croatia.
Finally, the Ethnological Museum was the best of the three. It had a great temporary exhibition on carnival in the Balkans and Italy, including scores of masks, costumes and other paraphernalia, and some films about the strange customs at that time of the year in Macedonia and Bulgaria. The permanent exhibitions were also pretty good, consisting of loads of stuff from Africa, South and Central America, Oceania and Australia.

The following day, it was onwards to Serbia. Means of transport: bus. Travel time: six hours and a bit. Destination: Novi Sad. Why I went there: well, it's famous for the Exit Festival, which takes place in July. I would probably never go to that festival, but I heard the city is nice as well, so why not spend a day there. It proved to be a lot harder upon arrival in Novi Sad to find my way around than it had been in Zagreb. Bad omen? Maybe. Well, at least the border crossing had been without any problems, passport control, stamp, enter new country. But when I arrived at the main bus station in Novi Sad, I was confused, tired, and I had to take a leak desperately. All the public toilets cost money, of course, and I, also of course, didn't have any Serbian dinars yet. So I had to walk for a bit, sneak into a restaurant to find a free loo, and went to the ATM. Then I had to find the right bus, and when it finally arrived, the driver didn't accept a big note, and I didn't have any small change, so he just waved me through to my first illegal bus ride in Serbia. Many more were to be up and coming.

I ended up finding my host's place, which was inside a nice and grey Communist-style apartment block. My host was Maja, a 37-year old Serbian, who lived in the flat with her husband, whose name I've managed to forget after about ten seconds, and her three-years old daughter Jenya. To break the ice, we had some tea and sweets, but the girl was eyeing me suspiciously, refusing to drink her tea. I found out that Maja was a teacher for Serbian, but had been without a job for years. Her husband was a saxophonist and had just come back from a work engagement, playing in a band on the ferry Kiel-Oslo and back for three months! I could feel that they were really eager to make me feel at home at their place, which was a bit ramshackle and messy, but warm and cozy.

I had a first look around town, and found it 1. incredibly cold 2. charming 3. too fucking cold. I ended up in a restaurant, and due to lack of other options, I went for the vegetarian pizza. In that restaurant, I had the first occasion to witness Serbians practicing their favourite pastime, hobby, and eternal love: smoking. There was a couple sitting on the table next to me. Both were smoking, one cigarette after the other. A guy came in, ordered a coffee, started talking on the phone, and smoking. Another guy came in to chat to the owner. Both smoked. The girl behind the bar was extremely bored while smoking. I tried to eat my pizza without swallowing too much of the smoke in the air, but had I wanted to, I could have cut myself a big nice chunk of smoke to put in on my pizza.
Back at Maja's place, we sat together and chatted about Serbian history and politics, for I was very eager to hear the Serbian side of things. They told me about the NATO bombing campaign on Serbia, during which Novi Sad had been a target as well, and how they were really scared for life in their little flat while American bombers were destroying the bridges over the nearby Danube, apparently to stop oil transports to Belgrade. I realized then that I might have thought about the war in Yugoslavia and the Kosovo conflict too one-sided, and hadn't taken into account the fact that Serbian civilians had suffered as well for the stupidities of their government, an unsurprising and repetitive occurrence in most wars.

The rest of my stay in Novi Sad was pretty non-descript, I was just walking around the (admittedly interesting) pedestrian streets and the fortress, where nothing at all was going on. After one night I took the train to Belgrade. When I arrived there, I arrived in the real Serbia. Once again, I had to find my way around on my own, which included taking the tram in a certain direction and get off at a certain stop. This proved to be rather difficult, since there were no signs at all saying where the hell the tram goes, so I asked a fellow passenger before hopping on the tram. The same guy didn't know where my stop was gonna be, and the signs at the tram stops were in Cyrillic only and generally unreadable. So I just got off at a random stop, hit or miss, and tried to ask my way to the right stop. I asked a guy on the street whether he spoke English, but he appeared to be totally unprepared for that question, and just looked at me in a self-conscious way, shrugging, until I said 'It's ok, cheers' and went off. It turned out that the right stop wasn't that far away, so I walked there, and after a while arrived at the apartment block where my host was to live. As ugly as those buildings are on the outside, inside they can be quite appealing and more modern that you would imagine. Luckily for me, that was the case with Ivana's flat, who was living there with her flatmates Eva, a Croatian girl studying arts in Belgrade, and Sonya, who looked like a policewoman at a Russian border control. Turned out that Eva had prepared a meal containing soy chunks, and was happy sharing it with me, same as with the sweet blackberry wine, which contained less alcohol than beer, but which was very palatable.

I'd thought it was too late to do go out exploring, but Ivana asked me if I wanted to join them to go to a meeting of people who are members of an online community for travellers wanting to meet locals and stay with them at their respective places, or something like that. So we went to a bar hidden away in some basement, and joined a group of about eight people at a table. I learned that most of them were Serbian, but one guy had brought his Maltese girlfriend, and one girl her Indian boyfriend. I mostly chatted to those two foreigners, asking them about their Serbian experiences. The Indian guy in particular had some interesting stories about the occasional encounter with racist Serbians, and other difficulties he was facing in his daily life in the country. His name was Amberish, and he spoke precisely with the accent you'd imagine from an Indian guy speaking English. He also smoked, but admitted that it was not common for people to do so in India, for it was a 'rich man's habit'. To make a living in Belgrade, he had assembled the first-ever Serbian cricket team and worked as their coach. Since there were no other cricket teams in Serbia, they'd made plans to play against Croatian teams.

My first daylight stroll through Belgrade was rather bleak, I didn't think the fortress was too spectacular, and neither was the typically Communist architecture, the Orthodox churches, and the reckless drivers. But the Serbian cuisine seems to be downright unimaginative and largely meat-oriented. Vegetarians have to do with slices of meatless pizza and burek, a deep-fried flaky pastry filled with potatoes or fatty cheese.
When I entered the biggest Orthodox church in Serbia, I was surprised to see not only headscarfed old babushkas lighting candles there, but also the typical brutish-looking Serbian male in sweatpants, who always looked like you'd already seen them on TV doing the Nazi salute at a Serbian football or handball game, or burning shit at manifestations against Kosovar independence. Those thuggish blokes proved to be rather tame in their church, drizzling holy water on their foreheads, making the sign of the cross, and kissing portraits of saints.

To add a bit of colour to my Serbian experience, I went on a day trip the following morning to Smederevo, a small town in the heartland of Serbia, which consist of little more than a grey inner city with a nice church, and the impressive old fortress close by. There was little more else to do than walk around inside the fortress, marvelling at the snow and taking silly pictures of myself, other people, and street dogs lazing around. Back in Belgrade, I tried warming up in a cafe, which would have been more pleasant without the dense smoke and the perpetual text messaging and the sounds it produced on the mobiles of Serbian teens and twens.

To sum it all up, pretty much all of my prejudices were reconfirmed in Serbia. The majority of the population seems to be angry uneducated men in sweatpants who hate foreigners, oppose Kosovo independence, make fun of other former Yugoslav republics, chain-smoke, eat burek for breakfast and meat for the rest of the day, or girls with too much make-up on who wouldn't know the difference between Austria and Australia or Sweden and Switzerland if you squeezed it out of them. While they are highly suspicious against foreigners in general, they seem to be downright hostile towards blacks, Asians, Indians and other people who don't look like them or who are something else than deeply religious Orthodox Christians. That is not to say that all Serbians are hateful and ignorant peons, of course there are intelligent, tolerant, sophisticated people around, their presence is just not so prevalent as the stupid majority's.

Looks like I seriously have to think twice to go back to Serbia, on the whole it doesn't seem to have much to offer to the interested traveller. I'll still be going to Kosovo, a country that has gained its independence from Serbia only after a long time of suffering in 2008. I doubt that the points of view I'll encounter there will add anything positive to my impressions of Serbia.

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