Searching Serbia

Day 1- Belgrade Serbia Arrival:

Traffic from Nikola Tesla airport last night seemed even worse than Denver’s ridiculous rush hour traffic – when I commented it seemed every bit as bad as US traffic, the taxi driver said in broken English that when you get close to city all the lanes funnel down into the old city lanes which causes these traffic jams. As with all jams, it came to an end, and in this case more calmly being the passenger versus the driver…just ask Christine.

After some geographic research, I elected to stay at the Courtyard Marriott City Center versus the AMT IN Hotel for two reasons. The CY is in the older Belgrade city center, hence the name, versus the newer convention / business side of the Sava River and it has a gym including free weights and some machines. Most hotels in Europe either have nothing or a couple of tread mills at best.

Got settled into Courtyard Marriott and then looked up some points of interest on Google Maps and then headed out to get my bearings and some landmarks along with beer and food. Goal for next day was to get to Contemporary Art Museum which is located on the other side of the Sava River as it heads towards the Danube.

I wandered around looking for interesting visual experiences – I love taking pictures of interesting (very subjective to my sometimes questionable taste) objects and activities to try to capture what’s happening around me and the reality of the environment. Touristy stuff is fine but my favorite is capturing gritty “in the bowels” elements. It’s not meant to be disparaging of the city environment but to share a reality – all this is about the selfless promotion of travelling and sharing experiences to hopefully alleviate other's fear of the unknown and provide the message of “get out there” and enjoy. I get comments all the time about how much people enjoy all the photos so in the end if that’s all it accomplishes I’m okay because I’m having a blast ensuring that, at a minimum, when I’m shitting myself and eating applesauce I can look back and say I have no regrets…pushing it all off to “someday” is a gamble I’m not willing to take. Okay – that went off the rails but now I'm back.

Belgrade is a vibrant, gritty, metropolitan and youthful feeling city which sounds weird since I read that it dates back 7000 years which sounds pretty old. It has a very southeastern Europe feel similar to Sarejvo in Bosnia minus all the bullet holes and graveyards. I’m assuming the reason for this is because the Serbs were the ones doing the bombing and shooting of the Bosnians...

Christine and I did a self-guided motorcycle tour of Croatia, Bosnia, and Montenegro in 2014 and spent two days in Sarajevo where we experienced this sad part of history. They were still suffering the social and economical effects of this conflict that had occurred 20 years prior (1992-95). Soccer fields were turned into graveyards with simple white crosses everywhere and all the bullet holes and bombed out buildings were left untouched to remind themselves and the world what took place over the usual ridiculous religious and ethnic bullshit that also tied into the former Yugoslavian goon leadership back then. I’ll never forget seeing an older Holiday Inn off in the distance riddled with bullet holes, dented up trams limping around the city, and the national museum boarded up because of no money…along with the friendliest people encountered anywhere in Europe.

Fuck…focus Pete focus.

So, in summary, Belgrade is gritty, fun to walk around, large beers are less that $4, and you can have a hearty meal with beer and wine for $20 in the neighborhoods…so what’s not to love! It’s lively, some people are friendly and some not, people make eye contact unlike many other European countries but no one smiles or acknowledges this contact. It is 98% impossible to understand anything written unless there’s an English version written below. Vowels seem to be an inconvenience along with Cyrillic cryptograms tossed in to further complicate…at least for a dumb American tourist. When I try to enlist the Google Translate audio feature to learn simple phrases like hello, thank you, bill please, etc. – my mouth/brain doesn’t seem to be able to mimic the string of consonants and what I’m hearing very easy. Luckily with enough repeating English combined with pointing gets the job done combined with them wanting to get rid of me. I've even inadvertently reverted to "si" and "merci" going into some form of mindless foreign language autopilot.

Day 2:

After a morning workout in the hotel gym, headed out to do a walkabout in opposite direction from yesterday before heading to the Museum of Contemporary Art which about 1.5 miles away on the other side of the Sava River. Found a bakery that looked popular and had an egg and prosciutto sandwich along with a piece of apple strudel and cappuccino…730 Dinar…or…$6.79 USD – in Denver that’d be $20.

Food options are everywhere here, little kiosks selling donuts, ice creams, burger patties/sausages, pastries, bakeries etc. and no rigid food schedules like in Spain which we’ve grown accustomed to. Speaking of “we”, this is my first European motorcycle adventure without my bestie travel partner and better half, Christine Muldoon a.k.a. “the Warden”. She’s a great travel partner with a mutual fondness for wandering, the desire for the local feel versus the typical tourist only experiences, and most notably her desire to be an international motoress that “rides like the wind”. The moniker “Warden” is definitely a positive adjective as she encourages better food and alcohol behavior through subtle unspoken peer judgement and/or a more specific “no -that’s it”.

Since the Warden is on the opposite end of the world at this moment (Bali), I’m guiltily enjoying sausages, hamburgers, fried potatoes, pastries, and ice cream, beers, wine, and booze in unchecked quantities. I take comfort in the fact that I will only endure this bad behavior for three more weeks and then be back on track…which I’m sure my heart will appreciate.

So anyway, I made it to the Contemporary Art museum which cost only $6 USD. It was interesting, had five levels, and I got some constructions ideas for Muldanuzzi Creations. As with any art, everyone has different tastes and this one didn’t really strike any of my hot buttons, but it was a beautiful day and worth the journey there.

The walk back was more interesting following the Sava riverfront which was littered dozens of old boats/barges that had been converted to events centers, many of which appeared to be abandoned and in disrepair including one that had partially sunk. What’s interesting is that they appear to be in what I’d consider prime locations along the riverbank right across the water from the city center. We’ve seen similar situations like this where I guess there’s just no money to support this infrastructure similar to Sarajevo Bosnia, Salerno Italy, and Castro Chile. In Salerno’s case, it had a great Mediterranean waterfront with a filthy littered beaches and abandoned resort buildings that had great waterfront locations but for whatever reason were allowed to deteriorate with no one willing bring them back to life. In Castro’s case, all the internet pictures showed these really colorful buildings on stilts above the water but didn’t reflect the actual disrepair of the buildings and garbage surrounding them in the water. Anyway, I’ll let the pictures do the talking.

This is what I enjoy most about wandering around foreign cities - discovering these curious situations.

I crossed the Sava on a different bridge further down that was being used by the trams. It was pretty old and bounced up and down every time a big truck or tram went over it which was interesting. I found a little beer garden adjacent to an old gutted roofless building I took a picture of the day before. The people from the beer garden were setting up a sound system in the old building so it looked like the party was on.

Walked about 6 miles in mid-80’s today so I earned guiltlessly enjoyed some tallboy beers, wine, hamburger, taters, ice cream, and a pastry to wrap up the day.