Trip to Belgrade

Riddle me this – Why does a country that NATO (aka, the US) bombed for 78 days a mere 7 years ago look nicer and have better infrastructure (specifically roads) than a country on the verge of entering the EU? Read more about the NATO bombing here .

This weekend was a three day holiday weekend for Bulgaria so Joel, Ian and I took the opportunity to drive up to Belgrade, Serbia for the weekend. It’s only about an hour to the Serbian border then another 4 to Belgrade, but most of that is on a nice highway. En route to the border we passed a couple miles of trucks waiting to cross the border into Serbia, then another couple miles of trucks on the other side waiting to get into Bulgaria. The whole thing seems pretty inefficient to me. I can only imaging how much food rots waiting to get over the border. I noticed the same situation on the Greek border. At least the Greek border crossing will speed up (theoretically) once Bulgaria enters the EU.

Belgrade (or Beograd, as the locals call it) is at the intersection of the Danube and Sava rivers. It is the capital of Serbia and was also the capital for the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia during the Cold War.

We arrived in Belgrade mid-afternoon on Friday. We checked into our hotel – the Hotel Royal – and were lucky enough to find street parking spot right across from the hotel. The downside is that you have to buy tickets and place them on your dash to park on the street. On each ticket you have to cross out the date and time you are parking. Of course you can’t put a stack of them on the dash so you need to come back to the car every 2 hours to change the ticket. The guy working the reception of the hotel was kind enough to service our parking tickets for the day. At least we only needed to do this until 2pm on Saturday when the rest of the weekend was free.

The Hotel Royal is in a great location right in the center of the old town. It’s only a couple blocks from both the Belgrade Fortress and the main pedestrian street, Knez Mihailova (Prince Michael).

We basically meandered along Knez Mihailova St. down to Republic Square. We then wandered back up to Kelemegdan Park, where Belgrade Fortress is located. The park offered great views of the Novi Beograd across the river Sava. Across the river we could see a recently rebuilt office building that the US had bombed in 1999. Joel had been to Serbia 2 years previous and had seen them working on the building.

Friday night we grabbed some Italian food and went to a bar near our hotel. The bar waiters were pulling the “Tom Cruise in Cocktail” twirl the bottles of alcohol around. They made pretty good caipirinhas which we drank a few of. We retired to our simple hotel rooms not too long after midnight.

Breakfast at the hotel was free. It was very simple and the waiters looked and acted as though your order was a huge burden on their life. I ordered a cheese omelet which was ok, but I was not too impressed with breakfast.

We started the day at the Ethnographic Museum. I was expecting something like Sofia’s ethnographic museum (sort of an afterthought museum), but was pleasantly surprised by the quality and effort put into the museum and displays. Still, it was an ethnographic museum and I can only spend so long looking at traditional Serbian clothes.

We headed next to Belgrade Fortress and the Military Museum which was located in the fortress. Unfortunately most of the Military Museum was in Serbian. A few of the later period pieces had identification tags in English. Also the museum had a special “NATO room” where they showed off a part of the F-117 they shot down, a uniform of an American soldier captured and some weapons used during the conflict. It also showed a NATO radio detonator made out of a Radio Shack transmitter. I guess the US government’s COTS (Commercial Off The Shelf) initiative is working. We hung out at the fortress for a bit overlooking the Danube river. We learned later in our trip that there was still 35% of the fortress yet to be excavated. There was a tradition started in the first part of the 20th century by an archeology professor at the University of Belgrade to only excavate the fortress for a couple months a year. This ensured new students had the chance to continually discover something new.

In the afternoon we walked around Novi Beograd. All along the Sava and Danube rivers in Novi Beograd are restaurants and clubs situated on rafts or riverboats anchored to shore. There were probably a hundred of these restaurant/clubs all along the shoreline. We passed an impressive looking communist-looking building that we later found out was built to be the administrative offices of Yugoslavia. Our final destination was a boat cruise that we saw on our tourist map. The boat left across from the “Hotel Jugoslavia” – a large, empty, communist-looking hotel. Apparently they were going to renovate it, but it didn’t look like they were renovating very quickly.

The boat cruise went up and down the Danube and Sava rivers. The tour guide would talk for about 10 minutes in Serbian than give the English “translation” which only took about 2 minutes. I sense the Serbians were getting a more comprehensive tour. The boat went up the Sava river until all you could see on both sides were ugly industrial operations. In my opinion the boat didn’t need to go quite that far up the Sava.

After the boat cruise we were able to see some (pretty old looking) fighters flying in formation. It looked like they were practicing, but it was interesting to watch because they were flying almost above our heads. One of the planes was a little more comfortable flying close to the lead plane than the other one.

That night so Joel, Ian and I headed out for dinner and drinks. I haven’t been able to figure out the Serbian eating habits, but I think there must be only a couple hours at night that they eat. Throughout the weekend we had a hard time finding open restaurants at hours that weren’t too out of whack with normal eating times. However, if you wanted to sit in a café and drink coffee you would have no problem finding a place at any hour of the day. They also had a plethora of ice cream vendors. I think Serbians live off of coffee and ice cream.

Sunday morning we headed to Zemun a suburb of Belgrade. At one time the edge of the Ottoman Empire was located at Belgrade and Zemun was the gateway to the Habsburg Empire. The town is small with some old buildings and cobblestone streets. We talked up to a tower where we were able to see downtown Belgrade in the distance.

As we left the city we stopped by the Temple of Saint Sava – the largest Orthodox Church in the world. The exterior is finished, but they are still working on the interior. Inside was basically the base concrete walls and floor with lots of building supplies lying around. The temple has been under construction in some form since 1935 so I’m guessing it won’t be finished anytime soon.

We made the trip back without any problems and without any hassle from the Serbian police (who have a reputation for being one of the more unfriendly police communities).

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