It's an uphill slog from Belgrade's bus station to its tourist centre: children playing in countless parks, languages and alphabets warring across the signs, shabby buildings waiting their turn to be replaced with glass boxes, old trams rattling and slick new light rail trains humming along.
The hotel is carefully concealed above a row of shops on the main shopping drag, a pedestrianized boulevard leading to the fortress. It's on a stretch with no restaurants, and this seems to be why a certain kind of busker collects here. If you play where people are always just passing by, you only need to know 45 seconds of music. You can learn this by rote, like a single sentence in a foreign language. More or less underneath my window is someone who plays an accordion version of "Billie Jean" over and over. On his breaks, someone who knows one section of Pachelbel's Canon fills in. Some nights, it goes on until you want to find Pachelbel's grave and desecrate it (he's buried in Nuremberg, apparently).
There's also a woman who slumps on a step beside a tall metal device, a "digitalna vaga". This must be some excitingly weird 1960s Yugoslav medical fad, something to do with the vagus nerve or orgones or biofeedback; or some kerosene-powered machine that tests whether your stress or qi or midichlorian levels are high enough to qualify to join some Serbian cult. Google translate says: "digital scale". Selling turns on a digital scale must once have seemed like a sure thing, but digital scale technology has marched pitilessly on.
Belgrade's fortress is a huge complex built, captured, destroyed, rebuilt, blown up, expanded, and tinkered with over some 2000 years. Modern Belgrade has added tennis and basketball courts. There's a faint roar as you approach. This comes from an animatronic dinosaur, part of an exhibit of models set out on the grounds. They're dinosaurs from my generation's childhood: green and scaly, with no feathers or any of that nonsense. There's even a tyrannosaur and a triceratops facing off -- a classic matchup.
Stretching away from the dinosaurs is a lot of military equipment, mostly WWI and WWII era. The whole area's a meditation on the past and -- for those who understand that the battles of the future will be fought not with guns and bombs but with animatronic dinosaurs -- the future of warfare.
Up on the ramparts, a little dog is running back and forth ecstatically with a 1L brown plastic bottle in its mouth. The garbages are full of them. Belgrade's come to be seen as a bit of a party destination, appearing on a lot of online "Top 10 Places To Throw Up In Before You Die" lists. Down the slope from the fort is the Low Town, which was once thickly-settled, but has, since WWII, been parkland and ruins. There are no obvious dangers, but the signs say, "You are risking your life by walking in this area". You wish they'd be more specific.
New Belgrade
Across a long bridge that vibrates with passing buses is New Belgrade, a planned city of numbered "blok"s begun after the war. Though not short of ratty white apartment buildings, it's more a Yugoslav Mississauga than a concrete dystopia. The bits nearest the river are now all glass and corporate logos. But New Belgrade also has vast, quiet parks full of unexpected things. In one weedy field stands an abandoned foundation, a huge concrete square with rusted lattices of steel stretching up and open concrete pits leading down. It looks to be the home of the two men who sit in one corner of it, chatting.
Beside that, a thick meadow of white flowers, a quiet road, and then the Eternal Flame, a white obelisk erected in 2000 to civilian victims of the NATO bombing campaign. The flame itself is out; it lasted four months. Surrounding the EF is a complex built in the 60s to celebrate the Non-Aligned Movement. The long flagstoned approach is cracked and weedy and feels like something from a vanished civilization. The Non-Aligned Movement is still going strong, with (Wikipedia says) 120 actively non-aligned nations and 17 "observers" content to observe the non-alignment of others. Maybe it's become less impressive since one of the blocs it was avoiding alignment with has disappeared, but there's still plenty in the world to be unaligned with, if you look.
Independent Serbia's politics are of a different kind. Souvenir kiosks sell Putin portraits, and from barriers in front of the parliament building hangs a banner (in English) about victims of the "Albanian terrorists" of 1998-99 and another about Kosovo's possible admission to the EU: "No Pasarán" -- "they shall not pass".
From Belgrade, I'd decided to fly to Sarajevo. For a while, I wanted to cross the Balkans overland, which seemed more adventurous, but the transport options were awful. Anyway, look -- Shackleton's drive for the pole: an adventure. Riding a bus across Serbia for seven hours: not an adventure.
Air Serbia turned out to be fanatically strict about carry-on size. Everyone who passes security has to cram their carry-on into one of those little metal cages, and I could not do this (the wheels were the problem). Back downstairs at the check-in desk, I explained to the clerk that I'd have to check my luggage. "It's not too big," he insisted. He asked me to just drop it into another of the cages, this one covered in huge dents from some of the very determined people who'd preceded me. After I gave up, he became interested in the problem as a professional challenge. He tried finesse. He tried force. Then we both tried. We eventually had to admit that it couldn't be done. But we'd gotten some exercise, we'd worked as a team, we'd entertained a lot of people, and we'd shown definitively that my carry-on isn't carry-on sized -- correcting our own unscientific guesses to the contrary and making the last twenty airlines I've flown with look extremely foolish. Having done everything possible, my new friend charged me the €38 fee Air Serbia is forced to assess in these situations and wished me a good flight.
The hotel is carefully concealed above a row of shops on the main shopping drag, a pedestrianized boulevard leading to the fortress. It's on a stretch with no restaurants, and this seems to be why a certain kind of busker collects here. If you play where people are always just passing by, you only need to know 45 seconds of music. You can learn this by rote, like a single sentence in a foreign language. More or less underneath my window is someone who plays an accordion version of "Billie Jean" over and over. On his breaks, someone who knows one section of Pachelbel's Canon fills in. Some nights, it goes on until you want to find Pachelbel's grave and desecrate it (he's buried in Nuremberg, apparently).
There's also a woman who slumps on a step beside a tall metal device, a "digitalna vaga". This must be some excitingly weird 1960s Yugoslav medical fad, something to do with the vagus nerve or orgones or biofeedback; or some kerosene-powered machine that tests whether your stress or qi or midichlorian levels are high enough to qualify to join some Serbian cult. Google translate says: "digital scale". Selling turns on a digital scale must once have seemed like a sure thing, but digital scale technology has marched pitilessly on.
Belgrade's fortress is a huge complex built, captured, destroyed, rebuilt, blown up, expanded, and tinkered with over some 2000 years. Modern Belgrade has added tennis and basketball courts. There's a faint roar as you approach. This comes from an animatronic dinosaur, part of an exhibit of models set out on the grounds. They're dinosaurs from my generation's childhood: green and scaly, with no feathers or any of that nonsense. There's even a tyrannosaur and a triceratops facing off -- a classic matchup.
Stretching away from the dinosaurs is a lot of military equipment, mostly WWI and WWII era. The whole area's a meditation on the past and -- for those who understand that the battles of the future will be fought not with guns and bombs but with animatronic dinosaurs -- the future of warfare.
Up on the ramparts, a little dog is running back and forth ecstatically with a 1L brown plastic bottle in its mouth. The garbages are full of them. Belgrade's come to be seen as a bit of a party destination, appearing on a lot of online "Top 10 Places To Throw Up In Before You Die" lists. Down the slope from the fort is the Low Town, which was once thickly-settled, but has, since WWII, been parkland and ruins. There are no obvious dangers, but the signs say, "You are risking your life by walking in this area". You wish they'd be more specific.
New Belgrade
Across a long bridge that vibrates with passing buses is New Belgrade, a planned city of numbered "blok"s begun after the war. Though not short of ratty white apartment buildings, it's more a Yugoslav Mississauga than a concrete dystopia. The bits nearest the river are now all glass and corporate logos. But New Belgrade also has vast, quiet parks full of unexpected things. In one weedy field stands an abandoned foundation, a huge concrete square with rusted lattices of steel stretching up and open concrete pits leading down. It looks to be the home of the two men who sit in one corner of it, chatting.
Beside that, a thick meadow of white flowers, a quiet road, and then the Eternal Flame, a white obelisk erected in 2000 to civilian victims of the NATO bombing campaign. The flame itself is out; it lasted four months. Surrounding the EF is a complex built in the 60s to celebrate the Non-Aligned Movement. The long flagstoned approach is cracked and weedy and feels like something from a vanished civilization. The Non-Aligned Movement is still going strong, with (Wikipedia says) 120 actively non-aligned nations and 17 "observers" content to observe the non-alignment of others. Maybe it's become less impressive since one of the blocs it was avoiding alignment with has disappeared, but there's still plenty in the world to be unaligned with, if you look.
Independent Serbia's politics are of a different kind. Souvenir kiosks sell Putin portraits, and from barriers in front of the parliament building hangs a banner (in English) about victims of the "Albanian terrorists" of 1998-99 and another about Kosovo's possible admission to the EU: "No Pasarán" -- "they shall not pass".
From Belgrade, I'd decided to fly to Sarajevo. For a while, I wanted to cross the Balkans overland, which seemed more adventurous, but the transport options were awful. Anyway, look -- Shackleton's drive for the pole: an adventure. Riding a bus across Serbia for seven hours: not an adventure.
Air Serbia turned out to be fanatically strict about carry-on size. Everyone who passes security has to cram their carry-on into one of those little metal cages, and I could not do this (the wheels were the problem). Back downstairs at the check-in desk, I explained to the clerk that I'd have to check my luggage. "It's not too big," he insisted. He asked me to just drop it into another of the cages, this one covered in huge dents from some of the very determined people who'd preceded me. After I gave up, he became interested in the problem as a professional challenge. He tried finesse. He tried force. Then we both tried. We eventually had to admit that it couldn't be done. But we'd gotten some exercise, we'd worked as a team, we'd entertained a lot of people, and we'd shown definitively that my carry-on isn't carry-on sized -- correcting our own unscientific guesses to the contrary and making the last twenty airlines I've flown with look extremely foolish. Having done everything possible, my new friend charged me the €38 fee Air Serbia is forced to assess in these situations and wished me a good flight.
