On Serbia

Sitting in Belgrade Airport waiting for our flight to Dubrovnik, which has (surprise surprise) been delayed for an hour. Air Serbia flights have so far been cheap, spacious and late.

Serbia hasn’t been quite what I expected. It was meant to be a stepping stone between Hungary and Croatia, but we figured if we were going to fly through we might as well spend a couple of days exploring.

We left Budapest in a flap – a world-wide IT shutdown causing transit chaos. When we arrived at the airport there were thousands of people milling around, half of the computers weren’t working, and most flights were delayed. The gate staff were hand-stamping each boarding pass as we went through. Walking out on to the tarmac we found out our plane was a little smaller than the Airbuses we’ve caught everywhere so far. This was a propeller plane, cue flashback to teenage years and catching a propeller plane between Yemen and Ethiopia, across the Red Sea.

Confusingly my phone reception stayed on the whole flight – making me wonder if we were flying particularly low, or if phone towers are just getting better at sending beams into space. It was a short flight, just over an hour, and the seats were laid out in AB, DF format, two seats together in long rows down either side of the plane and the letters C and E strangely missing. Grace got a window seat, I got an aisle seat, and the air stewardess got a large glass of water for the woman who was coughing her lungs out in the row in front of us. She coughed and coughed the whole flight. Various other passengers brought her lozenges and cough syrup. I contributed dirty looks.

We landed with a very loud thump, the small planes’ small wheels battling the cracked concrete of the runaway, then walked out to the terminal where a very disinterested lady at the information kiosk explained the bus process to us. ‘The bus doesn’t take card, but if you tell him you don’t have cash he will give you a number to SMS your payment to.’ I neglected to tell her we don’t have a Serbian SIM card and we wandered out the front.

Our first bus driver waved at me annoyed when I held up my card, so we didn’t pay and stumbled down the back. The second bus driver did the same thing. It seems a feature of Serbian public transport is a desire to not charge the customer, in the whole time we were here I didn’t see a single person pay for any public transport, and there’s no ticket machines anywhere to be seen. Contrast this to Hungary where burly ticket inspectors actively targeted tourists on every bus we caught and charged them a 100 Euro fee for fare-evading. The difference points to a general Serbian disinterest, or possibly some weird throwback to socialist roots.

We stayed at a very cute one bedroom apartment smack bang in the middle of town. It was a two minute walk to Republic Square, which features a giant statue of a guy riding a horse. We did a walking tour and the guide told us that most Serbs use the horse as their main point of reference for the city. We’ll meet at the horse, they mutter to each other. I’m unsure of who the guy was, or what the square is named for, but at least we’ll remember the horse.

The main drawback of our apartment was Dejan, the elderly owner who was determined to show us all the features. He spent a solid 45 minutes in the doorway of our apartment talking. Here’s the shower, and there is the bin, and here is the toilet, and another bin. There was a moderately confusing switch system to operate everything in the apartment – they were all on one switch in the hallway, but neatly labelled with a picture of the thing they operated – a tiny washing machine, a tiny shower, a tiny fridge next to a row of tiny lightbulbs. I wound up flicking them all to on, which I’m sure caused Dejan some distress.

We got Dejan’s recommendation for a local restaurant, Roll Bar, where a neatly moustachioed man took our orders and promptly told us off for attempting to play Monopoly Deal. Turns out the Serbian Gambling Commission has a very tight hold on where and when you’re allowed to play cards. If you’re not inside a Casino or in the comfort of your own home its illegal, and comes with a hefty fine. And I thought Australians had a gambling problem.

Serbian food is, like Hungarian food, quite meat heavy. The two meals we ordered at Dejan’s suggestion came out as a giant hamburger (no bun, no salad) on a pile of wedges and a pair of deep fried sausages, also served on a pile of wedges. They both came with ‘kajmak’ a thick sour creamey type of sheep’s cheese dip. To balance out the meal we ordered a ‘Shopska’ salad, which is a throw-back to communist days where everyone was mandated the same meal rations. It’s basically tomato, cucumber and diced onion served with a giant heaping of grated cheese. The communist bit is that supposedly everyone across the Balkan States serves it in exactly the same ratio of ingredients. Delicious state-sanctioned salad.

The next night we dove deeper into the experience by ordering at Kafana SFJR – a socialist coffee diner dedicated to Yugoslavia’s leader Tito. The food was truly excellent, very meaty, and served in a room covered in socialist propaganda, military uniforms, old license plates and photos of Tito. Grace spent most of the meal using Google Translate to decipher the letters on the wall, while I polished off another Shopska salad.

Serbia has an incredibly mixed history – the oldest still-standing building in Belgrade is a Turkish Mosque from the 1500s, there’s a bunch of beautiful buildings from the couple of centuries after that, then a large swathe of brutalist bloc buildings from the communist era and then a mishmash of ‘new’ things. Belgrade had a history of destruction, being razed 44 times and each time it was demolished it was rebuilt in a new style, which lends a certain slap-dash architectural approach as we walk through the city. One highlight was the giant fort on the top of the hill, overlooking the meeting of the Danube and the Sava, which was built, rebuilt and expanded on by many generations. There’s a naked statue of a man there which was considered too risque for the middle of the city in the 1920s, so it was placed in the middle of the men’s only barracks, away from the public gaze.

We tried to get an authentic Serbian musical experience (see previous post on Budapest), but Skardalija, the main night-life drag in Belgrade has been infiltrated by accordionists playing Bella Ciao. It was actually absurd. On a strip with 15 restaurants, every restaurant had a ‘Romani band’ (five blokes dressed in white shirts and black pants playing accordion, violin and guitar), and we heard Bella Ciao three times in our brief walk down the strip. We discussed going to see Fred Wesley (the trombonist from James Brown’s touring band), which would have been an authentic musical experience, but hardly Serbian, and then found out tickets were the equivalent of $50 each, so wandered back to our apartment to drink some Birra Moretti on the balcony and watch the people walking past.

Serbia was hot at 33 degrees. Hungary was hot at 35 degrees. Croatia seems to continue the trend at 34 tomorrow, but at least we’ll be by the sea. I’m ready for a swim.