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. Continue reading “On Serbia”