Sightseeing in Belgrade

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  Belgrade, Serbia and Montenegro
Thursday, October 12, 2006

Our night at the Hotel Dom included breakfast and we were served minty black tea and a ham omlet. It wasn't a Hilton buffet but it made Bro and I happy. We started off the day by checking out the local independent hostel, to stay tonight perhaps. It was on a busy street, but the door facing that street led into a garden with somewhat run down structures around it. The hostel was in a little house and we went in to see the rooms. The hostel had perhaps 10 beds in two rooms, each the size of our medium-sized double room at the Hotel Dom. Bro and I had a confab and decided that the three bucks each we were paying at the Dom was worth it.

First on our "tourist" agenda was to do some civic sightseeing. "Tourist" is probably the right word, but so often it is used to describe a mass of people doing the same thing. Here in Belgrade it doesn't seem appropriate. We only saw three other conscious tourists all day (the rest were asleep in the hostel)!

We rode Tram 2 with its circular route around the city around 10 am. One would think that 10 am is no longer peak hours, but it was packed. A woman yelled at Bro for sitting down; she wanted her daughter to take his seat. That was pretty funny but public transport in Belgrade seems generally crammed. The tram didn't actually give us such a great view of the city, as we were standing up the whole time. Bro saw a car with California plates at one point and we saw a few buses donated to Serbia from the people of Japan.

We got off at the castle stop. We saw 2/3rds of the other tourists at the stop looking at their map. We looked at the castle's grounds and lots of Belgraders were out and about enjoying a sunny day. We made it as far as the castle moat before we had to stop to smell the roses. Or as it was, examine the military equipment. Serbia's national military museum was at the next corner, and they had some larger items on display outside.

There were mortars, guns, and Second World War tanks (this mention of a war museum makes five national war museum visits on this blog so far). I will limit my discription to the more interesting items: they included a Nazi tiger tank and a Soviet missle launcher. Inside, the muesum mostly discussed the middle ages and Serb battles using cold steel against the Turks. But there wasn't much English and coverage stopped right after World War One. Looks like the old Yugloslav curators didn't want to put anything about their Nazi collaboration in that nasty little ethnic war 1940-45, or the early nineties...

Except for a little display on the NATO attacks on Serbia in 1999. It seems that those Nato bastards attacked Serbia for no reason at all. Brave little Sebia defended herself with all her might but the statistics were clear. Serbia had 100,000 soldiers. Nato had 6,700,000. Serbia had 155 airplanes. Nato had 7,500. Etc... The brave Serbs managed to retain their honour by capturing trophies, including a US pilot's outfit and a bit of a F-117 fighter they shot down. They also displayed some bits of American cluster bombs to prove that Nato broke the Geneva convention in their attacks on the Serb defences. Nato bastards. And they had some graphite wire in bombs designed to ruin power and telecommunication wires. How insidious.

The museum's guestbook was filled with two types of English comments: Serbian diatribes of nationalistic pride and appreciative ignorant tourists on one side, and tourists furious with the perverse propaganda of the last little display on the other.

For my part I wrote a little blurb about how well the muesum was done and that I thought their use of propaganda was formidable. I signed it A. Hitler.

For those of you who don't know, Serbia under Slobodan Milosovic's government began a progrom of ethnic cleansing in Kosovo in 1999. Nato's attack against Serbia was an intervention that stopped a genocide. The Serbs still managed to kill about 1,500 Albanian-speaking Kosovars before Nato put an end to that. The Serbs in Belgrade eventually demonstrated against their government and brought it down. Milosovic was hauled before the war crimes tribunal in the Hague and he died earlier this year (I will tell you more about Kosovo in the next days).

Bro and I had ice cream for lunch and then looked at some clothes as he needs to get new trousers. Turns out that Belgraders have an expensive taste in clothes. It seems like everyone here is dressed nicely. Along the main streets, there are Nike, Rebok, and Mexx stores, you can buy Gas and Diesel clothes and all manners of other pricey outfits. Certainly that stands in conflict with the town's infastructure. It's not that it is all crumbling, but perhaps one in five buildings look worse for wear and most of the structures haven't been cleaned in a long time. The people look good but the streets are a far cry from Berlin or Brussles. There are a lot of scowling expressions on their faces too, whyever that is. Perhaps because they've all got parking tickets. There are more bylaw officers giving parking tickets here than anywhere else I have ever seen.

We sat in a park for a while before looking at the federal parliament, a busy basilica, and then walking through diesel polluted streets to the private Nicola Tesla muesum. Nicola Tesla, a Serb who moved to America, was the guy who invented just about everything electric in the 20th century. He invented alternating current, permitting just about everything we do with electricity. He invented the electric motor. He invented the radio, and about twenty other things we take for granted.

Neon lights too: The best part of the museum was that it was host to many of his orignal models. We saw the electric motor he invented more than 100 years ago (and saw it running) and a very cool electric generator that ran at 1/2 a million volts. When it was turned on, neon lightbulbs that we were holding began to glow!

Disappointed as we were by the military museum, Bro and I decided that since we had walked around everything in downtown Belgrade, and we didn't want to see any other national museums, we would leave Belgrade early and take the next bus to Pristina, Kosovo, and see what there was to see down there.

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