Post #15 - Serbia

Even though Sarajevo, Bosnia and Belgrade, Serbia are only 193 km apart, it took about 9 hours by train to get there. I had met Rhys from England a few days earlier and he had been planning on taking the same train, so it was nice to have some company for such a long journey, especially since we may have both been a teensy bit hungover. Not long after we got on the train, we met Magnus from Norway, who came to join us in our compartment when he heard us speaking English.

Incidentally, that day was July 1st, Canada Day! (This will give you an idea of how behind I am in my blog posts, today is July 11th...) It may not have been the most traditional way to celebrate, but it's definitely one to remember- waking up in Bosnia, falling asleep in Serbia, and celebrating with a Welsh, a Norwegian, and later joined by a Croat. Diverse!

After 9 agonizing (okay, it wasn't THAT bad) on a slow, old train with no AC and windows that didn't stay open, we finally made it to Belgrade and eventually to the hostel. Here we met the owner, Dusko, who joined us when we went out later on.

Belgrade is a FANTASTIC city. It's really different than Sarajevo, and a LOT bigger. It kind of has a Montreal vibe, having tons of cool pubs, bars, and shopping areas, plenty of interesting old architecture, lots of cool museums and cultural sights, and some beautiful parks.

I spent a lot of time exploring the city on my own (the boys were too lazy to join me) and my favourite part was the big fortress, called Kalemegdan. I've probably posted pictures of every fortress/castle I've visited and I know I'm sounding like a broken record, but this one was different. It's more of a giant, walled-in park on a big hill that overlooks the confluence of 2 rivers, the Danube and the Sava. It took me ages to walk around the whole thing, but there are plenty of shady trees that made it bearable in the scorching heat.

Although Belgrade too has been beautifully restored since being bombed by NATO during the Kosovo War in 1999, they've left a massive reminder of it right in the middle of town in the form of this bombed out building:

Standing in front of it and seeing shards of glass still attached to some of the window frames is an effective memento of the devastation that Belgrade suffered.

I've been trying to avoid spending all my time in just one city in each country (so far the only exceptions have been Budapest in Hungary and Bratislava in Slovakia) so I took an afternoon trip to another town in Serbia called Novi Sad. I had heard it was a really pretty city and worth checking out, and I'm glad I went, but I get the feeling they don't get too many tourists because I had the hardest time finding someone to give me directions. When I arrived, I got off the bus and went to the info desk at the bus station to ask for a map or at least to be pointed in the general direction of the old town/ downtown area, but the clerk didn't speak any english. Same thing happened at the railway station, which was next door. Finally, just before opting to wander the city aimlessly until I found the old town, I found an outdoor newspaper kiosk that happened to have a map of Novi Sad. Although I grumbled a bit to myself about having to buy one, since I probably could have gotten one for free somewhere else like every other place I've been, it really saved me because without it, I doubt I would have made it back to the bus station in time to catch the 8 pm bus back to Belgrade.

I almost forgot to mention- the Serbian language, though it can be written in Latin letters, is actually meant to be written in Cyrillic script (the same alphabet used in Russian and Ukranian, to name a few) though it originated in Bulgaria. So, some of the street signs look like this:

But most of them actually look like this:

Not so easy when all of the tourist maps have the street names written in latin letters, but fun to try to decipher. I've actually gotten pretty good at 'transcribing' the cyrillics into latin letters. Once you figure out the main differences, it's not too difficult: P = R,  H = N,  backwards N = I,  C = S,  and A, E, J, K, M, O, & T are the same, etc. So for example, if you see the word PECTOPAH, you can translate it into RESTORAN, which, if you're clever enough, reads ‘restaurant’. But if you're looking for a late night snack, you might instead come across something like this:

                                    And I thought Pizza Pizza was an Ontario thing!