OK so there was one odd memory I had from Belgrade, and it was when our train had just entered the city limits from Novi Sad (a 1.5 hour journey that costs less a ride on the Montreal Métro). Will and I were sitting on either side of the train, absently cracking dumb jokes to each other across the aisle as you tend to do when you’re flushed with the excitement of a new city. But the train pushed ahead a little further, reconnecting with the Danube, and as we stared out the window we both went silent at the same time.

Next to the highway on either side were enormous interconnecting huts made of little more than sheet metal, dirt, and rocks. The huts were all the same. There were clotheslines hung with laundry, oil drums tipped over, garbage everywhere. There weren’t any people around, but the destitution seemed recent and alive somehow. People were living in these hovels, definitely, and all the huts were sort of built together in neat rows to form little streets. Hundreds and hundreds of them. All of this was built right behind large industrial lots filled with machinery and bustle, shockingly close to the action. From the train you could see forklifts and trucks at work right next to these villages. The train slowed down a little, and finally I saw a group of people crowded around something near one of the huts. It was a family of Roma as best I could tell, and the father was holding in his arms a little girl, about ten years old. She seemed to have badly twisted or broken her ankle as it was hanging rather askew from her leg. None of them seemed to know what to do. The father seemed to be quite upset and maybe crying but I couldn’t tell for sure.

I looked up ahead, towards Belgrade, to the lights and condominiums and riverside views, couldn’t believe what I was seeing. This is a major modern city, isn’t it? And this, here, is third-world poverty on its outskirts?

Well, I never worked up the courage to head over there, but I later met a Canadian guy who decided to take nothing in his pockets except bus change and take the bus over there and walk through this ‘Gypsy quarter’. He gave me the following account:

I took nothing except the bus change I needed to get there and back. I told the bus driver where I wanted to get off and he looked at me like I was nuts, and asked me if I was sure. The bus let me off about two blocks from the place. As soon as I turned the corner and saw the first set of shacks, they saw me, and a bunch of kids came running over and started grabbing me, grabbing at my pockets, grabbing everything. I sort of pulled them off me and they let me go. I tried to laugh with them a little but they weren’t friendly. For a little while I was left alone, and I kept walking and looking in the huts. People looked at me and yelled things to their family. Then an enormous herd of people—kids, adults, everything—came running out of two or three huts after me, waving their arms and begging, and this time I started running a little bit. It wasn’t so much scary as very uncomfortable. They kept following me, really bearing down on me. I had to start sprinting. The last of the kids followed me for three blocks before giving up. I ran to the next bus station and luckily my bus was right there and I got the hell out of there.

All this and more, just a city bus ride away from your hotel or guest house.

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.

The phrase “Eastern Europe” calls to most Western minds a certain aesthetic to the environs, namely of dilapidated buildings covered in graffiti and bullet holes, ancient cars, beefy men with short brush-cuts, dance music, and muggings. I must admit that this perception is more or less correct, and as we moved from North to South, from the tidy simplicity of Vienna into Hungary and down to Serbia, the landscapes changed with every passing hour. Abandoned buildings multiplied, cars grew older and more Lada-like, the graffiti shifted to the Cyrillic alphabet, and so on. But the people in Eastern Europe show none of this unkemptness. They are remarkably fashionable and even in the small town of Novi Sad, tremendously lively. We arrived on a Sunday night and found the entire downtown core, a stretch of no more than six square blocks of restaurants and bars, completely packed with strutting adolescence, every bar filled to capacity, teenagers walking around licking ice cream cones while their chihuahuas sniffed each other.

We received a royal welcome from two Serbs, Razkol (?) and Sergey, friends of friends of someone in Toronto. They immediately took us out for a traditional Serbian dinner of… meat, piled on top of additional meat, served with bread and yogurt. The dish we tried (”cevapcici”?) is called “spicy hamburger” in English, and a more perfect translation you could not find, for that is exactly what it was. I’ve become intimately familiar with the ubiquitous Kebab these past few weeks. It is difficult to walk three blocks in any Eastern European city without walking past one of those enormous rotating meat logs being sliced into by a man in a hat. But Kebab is something more like ground meat fashioned into a particular shape, spiced heavily, and set atop a bed of lettuce or a pita round. Anyway, it’s delicious, and probably the most cost-efficient meal you can find out here, meaning that I’ve eaten more than a lifetime’s worth of Kebab in fewer than three weeks.

Sergey and Razkol (I’m calling him Razkol because I read Crime and Punishment a few weeks ago, and the name Razkolnikov is still stuck in my head) are software developers who work in the outsourcing business. Specifically, they are the “outsourcees”, as Serbia is starting to become a major destination for that sort of thing. We talked shop for a little while and they expressed all the same gripes about the software industry that I have (and probably every industry): incompetent management, hostile executives, people getting paid to do nothing, etc.

As is the norm in Serbia, talk turned to politics shortly thereafter, where Sergey related the following story about Montenegro (and the famous Montenegrin highlander temperament), which he claimed is true (further research is needed here):

There was discussion in the Parliament of Montenegro about what to do with their newly won independence, and one MP suggested that they ought to declare war on some other country and lose. His rationale was, look at Germany. They lost the war and then became one of the richest countries in Europe. And Japan, look at them. They lost the war, and now they’re wealthy and their country is booming. So why shouldn’t Montenegro do this?

Therefore it was of immediate importance that Montenegro declare war against the United States. They would lose, and shortly after, they would grow to be the biggest, richest, most powerful country in Eastern Europe.

And another Parliamentarian raised his hand, stood up and said that this was a fine idea, and that Montenegro most certainly should declare war against the USA, except that he held one small reservation: “How can you guarantee that we would lose?”

May I introduce you to the thermal baths of Budapest?

After four or five days of nonstop sightseeing, there was no better idea than to grab a pair of shorts for a bathing suit and head up to the Szechenyi Bath for a prolonged soak. The place is a large spa complex that has existed since 1881. No mere tourist trap, the locals bathe here in great numbers, arriving in the morning and slipping in and out of pools and saunas until the early evening.

I can’t remember what all the various rooms are called, but the place consists of a series of pools of varying temperatures, some stirred with Jacuzzi jets, others with large fountains spitting water onto the shoulders of bathers below. The first pool upon entrance is a deep pool of formidable Arctic-cold water that I foolishly underestimated. I jumped out and ran immediately to the adjacent warm bath, which was much more agreeable, and proceeded to spend a good hour in there, staring at the ceiling and the ornate pillars that held it up, thinking of nothing much. Afterward, we walked outside and spent the rest of our time dipping into the assorted outdoor baths, doing a few perfunctory lengths of the Olympic pool, and so on, until my sunburned shoulders decided that it was time to go.

We’ve since moved onto Serbia, with some regret, as I really enjoyed Budapest and would definitely recommend it to anyone. We are now in Novi Sad, two hours north of Belgrade, and I’m writing this in an Internet cafe full of chain-smoking teenagers playing World of Warcraft (a relief from the Hungarian cafes full of people looking shamelessly at porn). It’s growing harder for me to find reliable Internet access, as the hostels tend to have one computer that everyone fights over, and as such it’s been hard to do anything resembling a real post here, but we’ve decided to slow the pace of our travel down a little, and cut out some places. My original travel plans involved trying to make my way all around the Balkans in one shot, skipping only Macedonia and possibly Albania, wandering slowly across Romania and Bulgaria, and taking a conventional beach vacation in Athens or Dubrovnik before heading back up to Munich. But in talking with some people around the hostel and in interpreting my own mood about our trip so far, I’ve decided the best option is to head directly, without stopping/passing Go, to Turkey, and spend as much time there as I’m able. More on this when I get to the next computer.