Travels
So I went to Belgrade. And it was cool.
Sam's been out there on his year abroad since mid-October, and his birthday last week plus a surfeit of unclaimed holiday allowance seemed like a decent enough constellation of circumstances to propel me in the direction of the Balkans for the first time since a family holiday on what must now be the Croatian coast, way back when I was three-and-a-bit years of age and not particularly aware of anything around me unless it concerned the local availability of ice cream.
The first thing I noticed about Belgrade, and indeed the motif that would dominate the entire week, was that the place is chaotic. I don't necessarily mean that as a bad thing, though having to deal with it on a day-to-day basis must surely become tiresome; it's just that sometimes it feels like the city's roads are an incessant procession of rickety cars with crotchety drivers and noxious fume-emitting buses packed to the rafters with sour-faced commuters. (Mind you, if you were dependent on Austria and Switzerland's public transport cast-offs, you'd probably be less than cheery too.)
Sam's got himself a rented flat out on the edge of town, some 20-25 minutes from the centre at a good time of day (and closer to 35-40 minutes at rush hour). It's a gloriously 80s throwback of a place, with stuff on the walls that my parents would have consigned to Oxfam around the fall of the Berlin Wall, cosily situated on the third floor of a vaguely impressive tower block in a veritable sea of, well, lots of other tower blocks - I couldn't help but be reminded of the Sertoriusring complex I once inhabited in Mainz. More importantly, it's in immediate proximity to Miroslav and Ivana from the local Eurovision fan club, which I'm sure will prove useful for settling in and staving off homesickness and general boredom - as well as Ivana's mum, a fine lady with the typical hospitality-oriented mentality you find throughout Eastern Europe, manifesting itself among other things in the provision of copious amounts of plum brandy and a request to be set up with a strapping young member of the Swedish side of my family as recompense for helping with the arduous process of registering as a guest with the local branch of the Scary Armed Police. (That's Swedish rather than British, incidentally, because "the Scandinavian standard of living is higher". I like this woman's style...)
But that was Sunday, and we're still on Saturday evening here.
On the way to the thoroughly ace Snežana pizzeria, which would become a frequent hang-out over the course of the week, we were rudely accosted by a couple of lads with beer on their breath. At first I suspected that my choice of chill-eliminating headgear, namely a Newcastle United hat, might have been to blame - with a recent history of important European matches against Partizan Belgrade, I should probably have been wiser in the wardrobe stakes. Fortunately, as soon as they learned we were English, everything became decidedly more cheerful. They tried to rope us into joining them at some local scuzz-hole for a Cockney Rejects gig - Cockney Rejects, for god's sake - before teaching us the Serbian word for "faggot" and telling us to search them out if anyone gave us any trouble. Which was nice. All of this came from the more talkative of the two, with his relatively silent mate restricting his output to several exclamations of "South London!".
Anyway, we were eventually allowed to proceed down Knez Mihailova, the main pedestrianised shopping-and-eating street in central Belgrade, and ended up knocking back two litres of syrupy local wine between the two of us before staggering home to investigate Sam's cable TV package - which, conveniently enough, includes the likes of BBC Prime and various Croatian, German, Italian and Spanish channels alongside the myriad of underfunded Serbian stations offering a steady diet of subtitled imports and music videos by people who placed mid-table in a Eurovision national final a couple of years back.
The weekend successfully negotiated, including an induction into the world of 24-hour kiosks selling everything you could possibly want (provided it falls into the categories of "crisps", "magazines" or "booze"), Sam found time to go to a few classes while I nursed a Turkish coffee or three and got some work done myself. Inbetween times, exploration was very much on the agenda - you can do a lot of Belgrade by foot, and with the weather playing nice (by November standards) and every bus journey threatening to significantly reduce your life expectancy by the minute, you'd probably want to. First, we took in the Kalemegdan fortress, a sprawling complex of buildings, ruins and sculpted parks atop a hill overlooking the confluence of the Danube and Sava rivers. The sun was just starting to go down on a cloudless day as we stomped around the paths and walls of the old fortifications, stopping along the way for a crafty Jelen beer (charmingly described on Wikipedia as "first choice for construction workers and grocery store alcoholics" - I liked it, so I wonder which category I fall into), and we managed to get some superb photos in the warm orangey-red light.
Kalemegdan is a vivid reminder of Belgrade's strategic importance over the centuries, and it's no surprise to discover that the city's architecture is reminiscent of many different countries. Later in the week, our Belgrade tour would take in some of those architectural relics, including the impressive churches of St. Mark(o) and St. Sava - the former's sparse interiors attributable to Orthodox tradition, the latter's to a staggering lack of investment over the decades.
In a change of pace, Wednesday (I think) saw us meet up with the ever-busy Ivana after work for a stroll along the western side of the river(s). We started at the sinfully ugly Hotel Jugoslavija, formerly the five-star residence of international politicians and dignitaries, but now a darkened shell of a building awaiting some much-needed Greek investment. Passing a staggering number of boat-based restaurants and bars (and indulging in Nutella-smeared pancakes along the way - well, it was either that or the rather less appealing local fillings of Eurokrem and Plazma Keks; I shit you not), we eventually ended up in Zemun, which used to be a town in its own right but has since been swallowed up by the suburbs of Belgrade.
Zemun owes a great deal to its Austro-Hungarian heritage from the days when the rivers acted as borders and barriers between sprawling empires. Indeed, as soon as we turned down the pedestrianised street leading past the marketplace, I had the curious feeling that I might have been in any one of those interchangeable small- to medium-sized towns you get in central and southern Germany. First impressions can be misleading, of course, but everything - right down to the shoe shops and the knitting and needlework emporium that Ivana insisted on visiting, thereby exercising her inalienable rights as a Female of the Species - felt just that little bit more calm and civilised than on the other side of the river (with no disrespect intended - I probably just mean "more western", and hence in keeping with my own life experience).
More pertinently, Zemun's winding streets, narrow lanes and stairways provide remarkable respite from the traffic noise and general insanity of Belgrade itself, and I found myself thoroughly enjoying the brisk clamber up to a superb vantage point, avoiding spooky cemeteries and howling dogs along the way. Being November, it was already dark by the time we reached the top of the hill at around 6, but it didn't really matter - with the lights of Kalemegdan twinkling in the distance and the nearby church steeple gradually becoming enveloped in a fine mist, we could have been the only people in the world at that moment, and it felt good.
That pretty much wrapped up the sightseeing side of things, with the exception of the bohemian quarter. It's more of a bohemian street, really, albeit a very long and cobbled one. Again, a pleasant antidote to the more hectic pressures of big city life - amidst the grandeur of its old buildings and the functionality of its newer additions, it's sometimes easy to forget that Belgrade's population totals around 2 million, all crammed into a comparatively small footprint due to the preponderance of residential tower blocks. As such, any negativity on my part with regard to the chaotic and hectic nature of the place should be read in the knowledge that I really wouldn't expect things to be any other way!
It's also easy to forget that the city has had sanctions and bombardment to deal with over the past decade - at least, until you turn the corner from a carefully tended park and find yourself confronted by a bombed-out construction that still hasn't been properly cleared up. I wouldn't park my car underneath it, I'll put it that way, but many do... So it's a city of contrasts, to say the least, but definitely somewhere I found myself enjoying, even if the language barrier can be oppressive for a total newbie like myself (accentuated by the use of Cyrillic on approximately 50% of all signage, road names included!).
And then there's the smoking thing. Everyone seems to have a cigarette permanently stapled to their lower lip, and even the places that are ostensibly non-smoking still have the reek of stale smoke in the air. It feels strange to say it, but coming after my recent trip to Edinburgh where you aren't allowed to smoke in pubs, restaurants and the like, this was a dramatic throwback to how things used to be, both in the UK and in the rest of the world - i.e. a thin but unmistakable film of smoke hanging in the air wherever you go. I know smoking is more of a southern European thing, and perhaps in the summer when everyone is outdoors it's less of an issue, but in a sunny but brisk week in November it was all too noticeable. At least it didn't trigger my asthma, which has thankfully decided to only bother me every few months these days, but I did feel something of a weight on my chest by the end of the week that could easily be attributed to the cumulative effect of all that passive smoke inhalation. Mind, I also seem to be coming down with a cold now, and that may be a more plausible explanation...
(As an aside, it appears that all Serbian women over the age of 30 are legally obliged to adopt a hairstyle reminiscent of the glory days when Communism first began to discover the fashions of the western world. Hot trends include lashings of highly flammable hairspray and a colour along the lines of "radioactive russet" or "vivid maroon".)
Ultimately, we ended the week very much as we started it, with a Saturday night eating reasonably priced nosh and quaffing the local grape juice at Snežana. Except this time I had a chocolate brownie too. (Hey, if you can't pig out on the last day of hols, when can you?) We then joined Ivana for a trip down to the shore of the semi-artificial lake formed by the Ada island, where we spent a couple of hours in a log cabin-style bar, marvelling at blokes with improbable T-shirt slogans such as "I'm Fucking Maniac" and watching a decent covers band (it's not every singer who can cope with the high bits in "Take On Me", although starting with a Kool & The Gang track immediately ruined any chance they had of street cred) at an event sponsored by, and populated by the models of, some rather run-of-the-mill local beauty salon. Apparently this is perfectly normal - making it an appropriate end to my first experience of Belgrade, a city that attacks you with the disarmingly familiar and the outright confusing in equal measure.
Oh, and then there was the five-hour delay on the way back. I thought nothing of it when the 12:45 to Heathrow came up with an expected departure time of 13:15 - these things happen, after all - but when people got to the gate to discover no sign of the London flight on the board at all, with the much later Germanwings departure to Cologne in its place, we started to suspect that something was up. After several hours of grappling with contradictory information in dubious English and taxing the patience of the admirably calm British Airways rep, it was established that 13:15 was merely the time at which "new information" would be provided, the incoming plane having been forced to turn back to London halfway through its journey due to a technical fault. What with the changeover to a new machine and the inevitable difficulty of getting any kind of takeoff slot at Heathrow, the new information at 13:15 turned out to be "new information will be provided at 14:10", which, in turn, turned out to be... well, you get the picture.
In that quintessentially British way, I bonded with a number of the other passengers over the course of the intervening hours, swapping mildly disgruntled comments about Serbian mis-/disinformation and the state of the free sandwiches they provided for us. (Not to mention the muzak - I've no problem with them piping in some background noise, but did they have to taunt us with "Volare", "Come Fly With Me" and "Somewhere Over The Rainbow"?) Strangely enough, it was actually quite fun, though I'm not so fond of the Blitz mentality that I'd want to go through the same thing every time I take to the air. We eventually took off into a rainstorm at around 6pm, landing at Heathrow some two-and-a-half hours later on a high of gin and tonic and BA's admittedly superb Belgian chocolate mousse - only to have to wait for a further fifteen minutes to actually get to our parking position. It doesn't help, apparently, when there's a runway between you and the gate. A runway that, being Heathrow, is in pretty frequent use.
(Of course, I could have foregone BA in the first place and flown with JAT, the former Yugoslav national airline - but since their airport bus managed to provide us with a dripping air-con unit and a seat that actually slid from side to side whenever the driver negotiated a corner, I think this particular uneasy flyer would gladly take a lack of punctuality over a lack of, well, anything much else!)
In my only lucky break of the day, my suitcase was the first one out onto the carousel. All of which allowed allowed me to make a mad dash for, and reach, a Piccadilly Line train that terminated just a few stops up the line and some distance shy of anywhere particularly useful. An appropriate "welcome home" greeting after a week of getting used to general chaos and confusion, I suppose - plus ça change...
Sam's been out there on his year abroad since mid-October, and his birthday last week plus a surfeit of unclaimed holiday allowance seemed like a decent enough constellation of circumstances to propel me in the direction of the Balkans for the first time since a family holiday on what must now be the Croatian coast, way back when I was three-and-a-bit years of age and not particularly aware of anything around me unless it concerned the local availability of ice cream.
The first thing I noticed about Belgrade, and indeed the motif that would dominate the entire week, was that the place is chaotic. I don't necessarily mean that as a bad thing, though having to deal with it on a day-to-day basis must surely become tiresome; it's just that sometimes it feels like the city's roads are an incessant procession of rickety cars with crotchety drivers and noxious fume-emitting buses packed to the rafters with sour-faced commuters. (Mind you, if you were dependent on Austria and Switzerland's public transport cast-offs, you'd probably be less than cheery too.)
Sam's got himself a rented flat out on the edge of town, some 20-25 minutes from the centre at a good time of day (and closer to 35-40 minutes at rush hour). It's a gloriously 80s throwback of a place, with stuff on the walls that my parents would have consigned to Oxfam around the fall of the Berlin Wall, cosily situated on the third floor of a vaguely impressive tower block in a veritable sea of, well, lots of other tower blocks - I couldn't help but be reminded of the Sertoriusring complex I once inhabited in Mainz. More importantly, it's in immediate proximity to Miroslav and Ivana from the local Eurovision fan club, which I'm sure will prove useful for settling in and staving off homesickness and general boredom - as well as Ivana's mum, a fine lady with the typical hospitality-oriented mentality you find throughout Eastern Europe, manifesting itself among other things in the provision of copious amounts of plum brandy and a request to be set up with a strapping young member of the Swedish side of my family as recompense for helping with the arduous process of registering as a guest with the local branch of the Scary Armed Police. (That's Swedish rather than British, incidentally, because "the Scandinavian standard of living is higher". I like this woman's style...)
But that was Sunday, and we're still on Saturday evening here.
On the way to the thoroughly ace Snežana pizzeria, which would become a frequent hang-out over the course of the week, we were rudely accosted by a couple of lads with beer on their breath. At first I suspected that my choice of chill-eliminating headgear, namely a Newcastle United hat, might have been to blame - with a recent history of important European matches against Partizan Belgrade, I should probably have been wiser in the wardrobe stakes. Fortunately, as soon as they learned we were English, everything became decidedly more cheerful. They tried to rope us into joining them at some local scuzz-hole for a Cockney Rejects gig - Cockney Rejects, for god's sake - before teaching us the Serbian word for "faggot" and telling us to search them out if anyone gave us any trouble. Which was nice. All of this came from the more talkative of the two, with his relatively silent mate restricting his output to several exclamations of "South London!".
Anyway, we were eventually allowed to proceed down Knez Mihailova, the main pedestrianised shopping-and-eating street in central Belgrade, and ended up knocking back two litres of syrupy local wine between the two of us before staggering home to investigate Sam's cable TV package - which, conveniently enough, includes the likes of BBC Prime and various Croatian, German, Italian and Spanish channels alongside the myriad of underfunded Serbian stations offering a steady diet of subtitled imports and music videos by people who placed mid-table in a Eurovision national final a couple of years back.
The weekend successfully negotiated, including an induction into the world of 24-hour kiosks selling everything you could possibly want (provided it falls into the categories of "crisps", "magazines" or "booze"), Sam found time to go to a few classes while I nursed a Turkish coffee or three and got some work done myself. Inbetween times, exploration was very much on the agenda - you can do a lot of Belgrade by foot, and with the weather playing nice (by November standards) and every bus journey threatening to significantly reduce your life expectancy by the minute, you'd probably want to. First, we took in the Kalemegdan fortress, a sprawling complex of buildings, ruins and sculpted parks atop a hill overlooking the confluence of the Danube and Sava rivers. The sun was just starting to go down on a cloudless day as we stomped around the paths and walls of the old fortifications, stopping along the way for a crafty Jelen beer (charmingly described on Wikipedia as "first choice for construction workers and grocery store alcoholics" - I liked it, so I wonder which category I fall into), and we managed to get some superb photos in the warm orangey-red light.
Kalemegdan is a vivid reminder of Belgrade's strategic importance over the centuries, and it's no surprise to discover that the city's architecture is reminiscent of many different countries. Later in the week, our Belgrade tour would take in some of those architectural relics, including the impressive churches of St. Mark(o) and St. Sava - the former's sparse interiors attributable to Orthodox tradition, the latter's to a staggering lack of investment over the decades.
In a change of pace, Wednesday (I think) saw us meet up with the ever-busy Ivana after work for a stroll along the western side of the river(s). We started at the sinfully ugly Hotel Jugoslavija, formerly the five-star residence of international politicians and dignitaries, but now a darkened shell of a building awaiting some much-needed Greek investment. Passing a staggering number of boat-based restaurants and bars (and indulging in Nutella-smeared pancakes along the way - well, it was either that or the rather less appealing local fillings of Eurokrem and Plazma Keks; I shit you not), we eventually ended up in Zemun, which used to be a town in its own right but has since been swallowed up by the suburbs of Belgrade.
Zemun owes a great deal to its Austro-Hungarian heritage from the days when the rivers acted as borders and barriers between sprawling empires. Indeed, as soon as we turned down the pedestrianised street leading past the marketplace, I had the curious feeling that I might have been in any one of those interchangeable small- to medium-sized towns you get in central and southern Germany. First impressions can be misleading, of course, but everything - right down to the shoe shops and the knitting and needlework emporium that Ivana insisted on visiting, thereby exercising her inalienable rights as a Female of the Species - felt just that little bit more calm and civilised than on the other side of the river (with no disrespect intended - I probably just mean "more western", and hence in keeping with my own life experience).
More pertinently, Zemun's winding streets, narrow lanes and stairways provide remarkable respite from the traffic noise and general insanity of Belgrade itself, and I found myself thoroughly enjoying the brisk clamber up to a superb vantage point, avoiding spooky cemeteries and howling dogs along the way. Being November, it was already dark by the time we reached the top of the hill at around 6, but it didn't really matter - with the lights of Kalemegdan twinkling in the distance and the nearby church steeple gradually becoming enveloped in a fine mist, we could have been the only people in the world at that moment, and it felt good.
That pretty much wrapped up the sightseeing side of things, with the exception of the bohemian quarter. It's more of a bohemian street, really, albeit a very long and cobbled one. Again, a pleasant antidote to the more hectic pressures of big city life - amidst the grandeur of its old buildings and the functionality of its newer additions, it's sometimes easy to forget that Belgrade's population totals around 2 million, all crammed into a comparatively small footprint due to the preponderance of residential tower blocks. As such, any negativity on my part with regard to the chaotic and hectic nature of the place should be read in the knowledge that I really wouldn't expect things to be any other way!
It's also easy to forget that the city has had sanctions and bombardment to deal with over the past decade - at least, until you turn the corner from a carefully tended park and find yourself confronted by a bombed-out construction that still hasn't been properly cleared up. I wouldn't park my car underneath it, I'll put it that way, but many do... So it's a city of contrasts, to say the least, but definitely somewhere I found myself enjoying, even if the language barrier can be oppressive for a total newbie like myself (accentuated by the use of Cyrillic on approximately 50% of all signage, road names included!).
And then there's the smoking thing. Everyone seems to have a cigarette permanently stapled to their lower lip, and even the places that are ostensibly non-smoking still have the reek of stale smoke in the air. It feels strange to say it, but coming after my recent trip to Edinburgh where you aren't allowed to smoke in pubs, restaurants and the like, this was a dramatic throwback to how things used to be, both in the UK and in the rest of the world - i.e. a thin but unmistakable film of smoke hanging in the air wherever you go. I know smoking is more of a southern European thing, and perhaps in the summer when everyone is outdoors it's less of an issue, but in a sunny but brisk week in November it was all too noticeable. At least it didn't trigger my asthma, which has thankfully decided to only bother me every few months these days, but I did feel something of a weight on my chest by the end of the week that could easily be attributed to the cumulative effect of all that passive smoke inhalation. Mind, I also seem to be coming down with a cold now, and that may be a more plausible explanation...
(As an aside, it appears that all Serbian women over the age of 30 are legally obliged to adopt a hairstyle reminiscent of the glory days when Communism first began to discover the fashions of the western world. Hot trends include lashings of highly flammable hairspray and a colour along the lines of "radioactive russet" or "vivid maroon".)
Ultimately, we ended the week very much as we started it, with a Saturday night eating reasonably priced nosh and quaffing the local grape juice at Snežana. Except this time I had a chocolate brownie too. (Hey, if you can't pig out on the last day of hols, when can you?) We then joined Ivana for a trip down to the shore of the semi-artificial lake formed by the Ada island, where we spent a couple of hours in a log cabin-style bar, marvelling at blokes with improbable T-shirt slogans such as "I'm Fucking Maniac" and watching a decent covers band (it's not every singer who can cope with the high bits in "Take On Me", although starting with a Kool & The Gang track immediately ruined any chance they had of street cred) at an event sponsored by, and populated by the models of, some rather run-of-the-mill local beauty salon. Apparently this is perfectly normal - making it an appropriate end to my first experience of Belgrade, a city that attacks you with the disarmingly familiar and the outright confusing in equal measure.
Oh, and then there was the five-hour delay on the way back. I thought nothing of it when the 12:45 to Heathrow came up with an expected departure time of 13:15 - these things happen, after all - but when people got to the gate to discover no sign of the London flight on the board at all, with the much later Germanwings departure to Cologne in its place, we started to suspect that something was up. After several hours of grappling with contradictory information in dubious English and taxing the patience of the admirably calm British Airways rep, it was established that 13:15 was merely the time at which "new information" would be provided, the incoming plane having been forced to turn back to London halfway through its journey due to a technical fault. What with the changeover to a new machine and the inevitable difficulty of getting any kind of takeoff slot at Heathrow, the new information at 13:15 turned out to be "new information will be provided at 14:10", which, in turn, turned out to be... well, you get the picture.
In that quintessentially British way, I bonded with a number of the other passengers over the course of the intervening hours, swapping mildly disgruntled comments about Serbian mis-/disinformation and the state of the free sandwiches they provided for us. (Not to mention the muzak - I've no problem with them piping in some background noise, but did they have to taunt us with "Volare", "Come Fly With Me" and "Somewhere Over The Rainbow"?) Strangely enough, it was actually quite fun, though I'm not so fond of the Blitz mentality that I'd want to go through the same thing every time I take to the air. We eventually took off into a rainstorm at around 6pm, landing at Heathrow some two-and-a-half hours later on a high of gin and tonic and BA's admittedly superb Belgian chocolate mousse - only to have to wait for a further fifteen minutes to actually get to our parking position. It doesn't help, apparently, when there's a runway between you and the gate. A runway that, being Heathrow, is in pretty frequent use.
(Of course, I could have foregone BA in the first place and flown with JAT, the former Yugoslav national airline - but since their airport bus managed to provide us with a dripping air-con unit and a seat that actually slid from side to side whenever the driver negotiated a corner, I think this particular uneasy flyer would gladly take a lack of punctuality over a lack of, well, anything much else!)
In my only lucky break of the day, my suitcase was the first one out onto the carousel. All of which allowed allowed me to make a mad dash for, and reach, a Piccadilly Line train that terminated just a few stops up the line and some distance shy of anywhere particularly useful. An appropriate "welcome home" greeting after a week of getting used to general chaos and confusion, I suppose - plus ça change...