A Slow Burn for Belgrade, Serbia

Belgrade, Serbia is one of those places I was destined to fall in love with. Everything I knew about it spoke to me on an almost primal level.  It’s home to pristine examples of social realist and brutalist architecture.  Serbian food is amazing – including several types of cheesy carbs.  As the capital of the former Socialist Republic of Jugoslavija, it would be full of markets shilling communist shwag.  I’m in love with gypsy horn music (Brasslands is an amazing documentary everyone should watch).  And all of my favorite bloggers had written about the amazingness of the city – see Yomadic, Silvia at Heart my Backpack, The Bohemian Blog, and Waegook Tom have all sung its praises over the course of the past few years.  

Maybe it’s that when stars line up in near perfect alignment (this time, Belgrade and my blind date), Murphy’s law is an becomes an automatic cosmic balancer. And thus began a series of unfortunate events starting from midair over Greenland.  David ate some questionable food on our first Lufthansa flight (the curse of being a vegetarian) and ended up with an international case of food poisoning (meaning he puked in multiple countries).  We arrived in Belgrade, and David was still sick.  We laid down in our lovely AirBNB, only to wake up at a little past midnight – effectively missing our first day in what was supposed to be the city of our dreams.  We ended up venturing out at that late hour (very uncharacteristic of our old man traveling habits) to get a SIM card and some midnight cevapi.

The next day we braced ourselves and adventured to Subotica – a highlight of our trip – and didn’t get home until rather late.  It was a long day, and we were still quite disoriented by the time change.  The combination of David’s sickness, my piss poor backpacker/time change hygiene, and a long travel day to and from Subotica had crippled us – and to keep moving forward at a steady clip was like running on a sprained ankle.

Day three we woke up and, despite feeling like shit, we ventured out.  And don’t get me wrong.  The city was beautiful, had tremendous examples of extremely disparate architecture styles, and would  have been everything had we been feeling better.  We walked down Knez Mihailova (the main pedestrian thoroughfare in Old Belgrade – kind of like a more authentic feeling Istiklal Caddesi), through Kalemegdan (I’ve never been a fan of old fortresses), and finally hobbled though the bohemian Skadarlija – again, all engaging, vibrant, and tourist free spaces. But all David needed was a toilet, to liquidate his stomach assets, and time in a bed.

So I left David at the AirBNB with some vacay pepto, and headed to what I thought would be the main event in Serbia – Novi Beograd, the brutal, dystopian, and eerily nostalgic remains of a totally different yet recent time.  

And then, upon my stepping of the tram, I was encountered with two words: стоп педерима.  Stop the gays.  I was over it.  I couldn’t even.  I walked around for about 45 minutes looking at some pretty incredible structures before I finally submitted to Murphy’s law and made my way back to the AirBNB.  We had to catch a flight in the morning to Sarajevo and I was feeling downtrodden and sorry for myself.

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What followed was a euphoric, fascinating five days in Bosnia and Herzegovina.  At the end of our time in BiH we knew we had to get back to Belgrade for our flights home.  We ended up opting for a nine hour bus ride between Sarajevo and Belgrade in fears of flights out of Sarajevo being cancelled.*  

During the ride between the two cities, snow began to fall, heavily.  We knew we’d be tired when we got back, and would have another ten or twelve hours in Belgrade before departing for home.  When we finally pulled into Belgrade, the streets were covered in snow and it was silent.  Cars were sparse, and those that were on the road were struggling.  We rooted our taxi driver on as he tried to get his 1980s-era Zastava the hill leading from the train station toward Parliament.  We bought some crepes and went back to our apartment – feeling  better about the city.  We later went out and ate some cevapi (well, I ate some cevapi), and had a conversation with a rather rough woman with a killer perm.  As she deftly cooked my meal, she talked to us about her life in Serbia, and how things have changed so much, even in the last 30 years.  

It took having those conversations and experiences to finally get a little crush on Belgrade.   Well, and not feeling like puking your guts out every few hours.

We left Belgrade in the morning at about 4am.  Our taxi drove us to the city toward the airport, and I already felt nostalgic and eager to return under better circumstances.  That said, you can’t always control your perception of a place with rainbows and sunshine.  Shit happens, and the best course of action is to trudge on, keep moving. 

And Belgrade, love you mean it.  It wasn’t you, it was us (aside from maybe the homophobic graffiti artist).  The next time we come back, we’ll try to puke less and see more – and the sooner, the better.

 

PIN ME!

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*Pro-tip: If you’re visiting Sarajevo in Winter, flights are extremely unreliable in and out of SJJ.  30 days before we flew from BEG (Belgrade) to SJJ (Sarajevo), there hadn’t been flights in and out of Sarajevo for thirty days.  This is not abnormal.  So, unless you’ve got time to kill in either city, best to not rely on flights that may or may not operate.