The Whimsical European Adventures of Two Non-Australians from the Eastern Bloc Homeland: Belgrade: A Tale of Two Lost Suitcases

Robbie
Fast forward: We picked up our bags Friday afternoon. Relief! Konačno su prtjlage došli.

Back to the future: Arriving in Belgrade, we asked the Lost and Found people where our suitcases were. (My first slightly awkward speaking of Serbo-Croatian.) They had been delayed as we were but were to arrive later in the week. Our realisation: I had one pair of socks and two pairs of underwear; Marek had two pairs of socks and one pair of underwear. I'll let you decide who wins in this chapter.

So, not letting anything stop the tourist rampage, we successfully met with my grandfather and went for a stroll through Novi Beograd. We supported the local economy by buying some shorts and a shirt from a small street side clothes shop for over 5000 dinars. What a rip! That night we got settled then went out for dinner to the local tavern. Yummy čevaps and fresh white onion with fries and Jelen pivo. Not the best pivo, but it did the trick. Meal for two and two pints each: 1240 dinars. As the waiter approached, I awkwardly asked: Can we eat? He looked at me puzzled and said, of course. Marek just laughed at me, and we began eating our first round of grilled meats...the first of many to cause more than a few funny but true toilet jokes. Let's leave it at that. On a side note, a pack of twenty cigarettes is about 120 dinars.

After dinner, we had a walk around the Studentski Grad (student city) and found that in the main square between the student apartments was a small concert. Pretty cool! For me anyway. But then it started raining and legged it home.

Thursday, we met with my cousin Nikola. He told us we'd meet at the local Mac and that he'd be wearing a bright blue shirt. Suddenly, we were seeing bright blue shirts everywhere. He took us to the old city and we saw Kalemegdan, the old Belgrade fort, Knjez Mihajlović the main shopping street, and Skadarlija, the old cobblestoned alleyway with many restaurants and cafes...

Skadarlija

Later that night we met up with my other cousin Ana, who met us at the Narodnog Povorište in the old city and took us to an awesome restaurant called Stepenice were we ate pizza and drank cocktails overlooking the river Sava. She took us to another cafe bar (loving Europe for them) and we had blueberry beer and shots of honey and rockmelon brandy. Soy good. Got into a taxi with a dirty looking driver (let's not be gypsies and name races). He misunderstood me and dropped us off a few kms from the apartment. We asked many people on the street how to get back to our place, and got there eventually, but it remained a walk of shame and a lesson learned for all involved: 800 dinars for the wrong place is not worth sitting in a dirty taxi. Character building!

On Friday, my auntie Ljilja kindly booked a double decker bus tour for us through Belgrade. Really good and easy going drive through the city meant we saw so much for minimal walking, brilliant! Audio tour gave us the low down on B-town and its history. Later that day we spent over 16000 dinars each in Zara Man and picked up the infamous suitcases, happily changing our underwears. That night we hung out with Nikola and Petar, Ljilja's son and had an awesome dinner. More meat, more street. That's how we roll.

The bus to Osijek left Saturday morning. Silly Australians put their baggage under the bus without telling the bus driver, how could they not know that you had to pay extra for that! A lovely old lady I'd helped earlier ended up paying for us. I believe in karma, after all. On to Croatia!

Brucie

Next stop: Belgrade, Serbia. Of course, our baggage remained in Bangkok while we were whisked away on the rapid transfers, and when we landed in Belgrade we were wearing trackies in the sweltering heat. Nice.

The exchange rate was 9001din to AU$100, (ie OVER 9000!!!), so we had many thousands of dinars to use. Food and drink came very cheap. I’ll cut out the first afternoon we stayed, as it was filled with “great” Serbian music videos. The second day we met up with one of Sven’s cousins, Nikola, who was absolutely awesome in showing us around the “old city” part of Belgrade. Of course, we did find a lot of stuff that tickled our fancy, check out the photos below.

Sven’s written a bit about the Belgrade chapter at any rate, so I’ll let my camera do the talking ;)