Entering Tito's territory
Trip Start
May 06, 2007
1
87
166
Trip End
Jul 24, 2008
Belgrade,
Serbia and Montenegro
Thursday, November 29, 2007
I was in and out of sleep for most of the night, until we reached the Romanian side of the border at 6am and I had to wake up for passport control. Once the train started moving again, it took about 30 min to reach the Serbian passport control. This time it took forever. Well, not actually forever, but over an hour and it seemed like forever. And once we started moving, we moved very slowly for most of the way into the city, arriving almost 2 hrs later than scheduled. I found out later that the train was moving so slowly because they still haven't repaired all the train tracks that were damaged in the 90s during the war.
Once I got settled into my hostel, I spent some time walking around exploring. I tried looking for a couple of bomb sites mentioned on the map. There are apparently a couple of bombed buildings that they haven't even attempted to rebuild that are still standing as remnants of the war. Unfortunately I couldn't find them. I later found out that they're somewhat hidden behind other buildings, but didn't have a chance to go back and look again.
The main tourist attraction in Belgrade is the fortress, Kalamegdan. The fortress includes inside and is surrounded by large parks. Luckily the weather was nice for me and I was able to spend some time walking around and enjoying the parks. The other major attraction of the fortress is the military museum. This museum details the history of wars in Serbia. What I found most interesting was the proudly displayed chunk of plane wing and uniform of an American pilot shot down during the Yugoslav war. This is obviously a treasured piece of their collection.
I also visited the Nikola Tesla Museum. Tesla is a famous physicist and engineer who contributed a lot to the fields of electricity and magnetism, forming the framework for AC power. He also grew up in Serbia, though most of his work was completed in the United States, and the Serbs are quite proud of him. The museum was pretty cool. It started out with a 20 min movie about his life and work that I swear was narrated by the guy who plays the lawyer in Scrubs (if it wasn't him, there's someone with the exact same voice doing narration work). Then there were about 10 different demonstrations, mostly using Tesla's original models.
My biggest excitement in Belgrade was that my hostel had both a washer and dryer. Dryers have been pretty rare along my trip, most commonly everything air-dries either on drying racks inside or hung on a clothesline outside. Because of this, my clothes, especially my jeans, keep stretching and expanding without ever being shrunk back to their original size. It was very exciting to shrink everything back down so it fits me again. Also while in Belgrade I began to teach myself Cyrillic. Most of the signs included both Cyrillic and Latin versions of the words, so I worked on comparing them back and forth trying to remember what each one stands for.
