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friend of a friend in Belgrade
Thursday, March 29 2018
location: room 311, MS Joy, Docked on the Sava River in Belgrade, Serbia
I had some alone time this morning while Gretchen biked around Belgrade by herself. But later after she returned, we both set out on bikes. We headed north along the east bank of the Sava, rounding the peninsula where the Sava meets the Danube. There are a series of parks and recreational areas on the water front. In one place there was actually an outdoor pingpong table where a couple were batting a ball back and forth while their dog looked on. Our plan was to get up to the fort that dominates the highlands above the peninsula. But there was a road, a railway, and often a wall (or other barricade) blocking us, so we continued until we found a tunnel under the road (44.827964N, 20.462981E). We then made our way through the edge of a zoo into parkland below and northwest of the fort. From there, we climbed a series of steps and then steep paths all the way to the top, pushing our bikes the whole way. Near the top, there was a guy playing "The House of the Rising Sun" on his guitar, and he eventually switched to "Knockin' On Heaven's Door." At the top of the wall, there were groups of kids hanging out, many of them looking like they were drinking beer. We all had a good view of the confluence of the Sava and Danube.
Southeast of the wall, the hill slowly slowed downward, and we followed the grade first through a semi-formal park past a display of variety of military equipment outside a torture museum, past a park of life-sized dinosaur models, some of them animatronic, and then into the heart of downtown Belgrade. Before proceeding further, we locked up our bikes just off Knez Mihailova, a pedestrian-only street similar to Charlottesville's Downtown Mall. Gretchen changed some dollars into the Serbian currency (dinara) and then we stayed on the lookout for the things we wanted to buy: wine, hot sauce or peppers, and sunglasses.
I was immediately struck by the palette of colors worn by Serbians in Belgrade. It mostly just black or grey, like a particularly severe Manhattan. Ethnically, the people looked noticeably more Mediterranean than the people of Budapest, with darker skin and hair.
One of the things one learns about Belgrade is that it has had the shit kicked out of it many times. It changed hands perhaps a dozen times between Hapsburg and Ottoman rule, and the Ottomans tended to "raze" it as the process of every reconquest. It was also bombed in WWI and bombed by both the Allies and the Axis in WWII. Indeed, it was bombed as recently as 1999 as part of the war over the breakaway republic of Kosovo. As a consequence, there are many ugly newish buildings interspersed among older ones. Gretchen kept pointing out the ugly infill as we walked.
We found a grocery store, which was also a place where one could buy wine and booze. But the only hot sauce they seemed to have on hand was sriracha.
Eventually we emerged from the pedestrian mall and made our way across a couple busy street to another pedestrian street, one older, narrower, and more winding called Skadarska. We wanted a place to sit and have a drink and also take advantage of a better internet connection that whatever was being provided on the boat. Given how terrible it is, I can't imagine how pissed we'd be if we'd paid twenty euros for the boat internet; I really needed to pull a code repository from github.com, and that had been impossible. On Skadarska, we found a place called the Red Bar with a tables on a porch and a solid internet connection, so we set up there. Gretchen ordered something girlie and I ordered a glass of red wine. As I cloned a code repository, I checked all my usual web haunts and sipped my wine. A couple female cats were hanging out nearby, sometimes on a chair at the Red Bar, sometimes out in the pedestrian street, sometimes at the restaurant across it, and sometimes ducking into the space beneath a floor. One of the cats took a particular interest in Gretchen's bag, perhaps because it had come into contact with catnip at some point. Anyone planning a visit to Eastern Europe would be well advised to bring some.
Gretchen took the opportunity to upload some pictures to Facebook, and that soon led to one of our friends bring a friend she knew in Belgrade into the conversation. That friend was named Anne. Anne had lived in Paris but now worked in Belgrade as a French diplomat promoting French culture. It wasn't long before Anne and Gretchen had arranged for us to meet up at the French Cultural Center.
After some confusion, we eventually found both the FCC and Anne, a silver-haired woman dressed for promoting French culture with a solid cube for a head. S he immediately took us to her preferred coffee shop, Bookastore, a bookstore that also sold beer and coffee and had a little loft for hanging out. I could tell we'd be here for awhile, so I ordered a Serbian "IPA-style" beer called Kabinet SuperNova. It wasn't very good.
We spent some time up there while Anne went on at great length about her love of the farm sanctuary nearest our house. Her connection to our friend was via farmed animal rescue, and that was mainly all she wanted to talk about. Her ultimate hope was to have her own farmed animal sanctuary somewhere in France. Of course, none of this material was particularly interesting for us. We're steeped in animal rights and the rescuing of farmed animals, and we would've much preferred to talk about life in Belgrade. Anne talked about it some, though of course her problem was the opposite of ours: she talks about Belgrade all the time, and today was a rare chance to hang out with someone from the animal rights world. She did, however, tell us that Belgrade is one of her favorite cities. She likes the indescribable energy of the place. Though she has yet to learn Serbian, she says she can get by fairly well on English (her French is less useful). She spent a considerable time making wine and hot sauce products (she recommended a kind of ajvar), which all seemed too specific, but Gretchen took dutiful notes. Eventually, mercifully, Anne had something culturally diplomatic to go to, and we could finally wind down our Belgrade experience.
We found our way into a liquor store with almost no selection; it's bottles were individually presented on shelves with lots of space around each (and they weren't even expensive), so we went somewhere else, where a crafty young man tried to charm his way through a series of upsells beyond what Anne had recommended, though we ended up getting exactly what Anne had told us to get.
Back at that grocery store we'd visited earlier, I got a bottle of vodka and a packet of peppers held together with a rubber band. They looked hot, and I assumed I would be able to use them to spice up my food on the boat, but it later turned out that they were just mild paprika peppers.
After returning to our bikes, it was difficult finding our way down to the boat, which was well below us down a steep incline to the north. Evidently downtown Belgrade is mostly on a plateau high above the rivers.
This evening, Gretchen and I dined with Kelly & Brian, a lovely Scottish couple about our age. They'd come with their shy 15 year old daughter Nancy, who had befriended Angel, the daughter of the boat photographer. Those two ate at our table as well. Both Brian and Kelly write reviews for various publications in Edinburgh, often about events at the fringe festival. They had exactly our sense of humor, so we all had a wonderful mirth-filled time.
A cute cat likes Gretchen's bag at the Red Bar in Belgrade.
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