There is a three-day gap under ‘Belgrade’ in my travel journal from Aug 21 to Aug 24, during which I managed only to make a note about how I enjoyed the Nikola Tesla museum, and how I’d like to find a good Tesla biography. This is because my three days in Belgrade were severely impeded by a combination of extreme heat and wanton drunkenness. Belgrade is not a pretty place, nor is its layout welcoming to visitors. It took us a good hour to find our hostel, fruitlessly circumnavigating the hills surrounding the Kalemegdan complex until finally chancing upon the main pedestrian street, Knez Mihajlova. After unloading our gear, I sat on a park bench and resolved to learn the Cyrillic alphabet properly so that I might be able to make sense of the signage. From that point on, Belgrade began to open itself to me. The first day, I walked the city to the bone, starting with Kalemegdan and on down the Knez Mihajlova, through side streets, museums (incl. the aforementioned Tesla, which featured some wonderful demonstrations of his inventıons such as an enormous Tesla coil that, when activated, lights up the [unconnected] fluorescent bulb in your hand—sadly, the museum made little mention of his many notorious quirks, but I expected that). I took refuge from the heat in the cavernous St. Sava church, the interior of which was under construction, but cool and dark and with many pigeons. Tesla would have loved it.

At night the hostel crowd made their way down to the infamous ‘barge party’, which is a series of no-cover barge nightclubs floating on the Danube. We spent a time listening to some kind of Serbian rap show in which a very large man simply yelled at the crowd while some obnoxiously loud drum ‘n bass music pounded our ears. We went next door to an R&B place where near-nude dancers with leathery tanned skin danced on a tiny circular platform, so dangerously high above the crowd it made you cringe. In any case, the setting was less than ideal, but we had a large entourage and a group of Danish guys providing enough entertainment in the form of pitiful drunken leering at women that we managed to have a good time. We took a taxi home, in a taxi with no seatbelts and with an ancient taxi meter with one of those analog numerical displays where the numbers flip manually, like a clock radio from the 1960s. And it didn’t really work. The cab driver, a heavily tattoed man with a moustache that meant business, took us on an unforgettable death ride through Belgrade’s hills, culminating in his getting pulled over by a cop who demanded to see his credentials. And the numbers on the meter kept on flipping, but fortunately, taxis in Belgrade are so cheap we didn’t much care.

The next day was so incredibly hot we could barely even go outside. I walked to the store and back, no more than three minutes walk, and had to change my shirt when I returned. So we spent the day watching DVDs of some British TV comedy called Peep Show, as well as the movie Back to the Future II, and doing laundry, and all the other mundane things you hate to do when you’re traveling, but don’t have any choice.

The final day, we messed up bad. We discovered at the last minute that our flight to Istanbul was much earlier than we thought it was, so we had to endure yet another death ride from a Serbian taxi driver, who took us on a journey so incredibly dangerous and thrilling that I would almost expect the Serbian ministry of Tourism to consider selling these as a tour package. Our entry to the highway was particularly memorable: the driver passed a car on the (single-lane) on-ramp, weaved recklessly in and out of highway traffıc, drove a good 3 km on the shoulder, and then proclaimed the highway too busy to continue, opting instead to take us to the airport via the backroads. After another fifteen minutes of hairpin turns and nick-of-time passing lane antics, we landed at the terminal and he charged us the modest sum of 1000 dinars, which is probably cheaper than going to a movie, and at least three times as entertaining. And we were off to Turkey.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 9th, 2007 at 9:35 am and is filed under Serbia.