Saturday, April 13, 2013

4-13: Vidimo Se, Beograd!

 Today, I leave Beograd forever.

Yeah, not really. But I'll be in Sarajevo until May 10th, which at this point almost feels like forever. I know, I know, it'll fly by when I'm actually there/moving through it. Especially because the weather's nice, and I'm doing something I care about/believe in, and I'm living with some of my favorite people on this side of the world. So naturally, the time is liable to pass like a snap. That, in my opinion, is an excellent excuse to make the most of it.

Belgrade...what can I say? Oh right, this:

The Bad:
  • You occasionally smell like potatoes gone very, very wrong. It has a tendency to go hard when it does, too. You taste that stuff.
  • You can't really make up your mind on this whole "weather" thing, except when you resolve to turn my balls into ice cubes with a three-day long wind running at about Mach 3.
  • Color has been barred entry to the city gates, which is strange, because the rest of this country is a veritable artist's palette.
The Good:
  • You are absolutely beautiful at the strangest times. Not in your average, Bruges-like European fairy-tale city way, but in your scars, your being, your propensity to stand back up and stoically go about your day after being knocked down.
  • You are delicious. Sarajevo gets the rap for good ćevapi, but they don't know how to serve it like you do. What a shame.
  • Your people are plucky. Maybe not always outwardly friendly, or even outwardly tolerant, but plucky. Which is much more endearing if you ask me.
  • YOU MAKE SENSE! Layout-wise. Okay, maybe your streets will occasionally, inexplicably change names once or twice or five times in their run, but that's to be expected in a post-communist country. Beyond that, it's logical, it's well-arranged, public transit goes damn near anywhere, and the layout is rational!
Is this an exhaustive list? Hell no. But it's been on my mind, so I figured I'd share. Observations:

  1. Yesterday, I visited a wretched hive of scum and villainy. Okay, that's not at all a fair epithet for the Chinese market, but I justify it with reasons twofold. Firstly, it's a Star Wars reference. Come on. Secondly, the Chinese market, located deep in the heart of Novi Beograd (New Belgrade), is renowned as somewhere you can go to find just about anything that you need. Raw octopus? Easy. Obscurely-sized screwdriver? Done. Remote control for a VCR from the Yeltsin era? Got it. For all (read-both) of my Pennsylvania readers, think Zerns, but stacked up two stories high, plus many fewer Republicans and many more Chinese people. It's entirely possible I just saw the entire Chinese expat population of Beograd while I was wandering around looking for a button-down shirt. They seemed nice.
  2. I was served rakija in a kaffana yesterday in a small vessel that I quickly identified as a crackpipe. My friend told me it was shaped as such to keep people from drinking it like a shot, as apparently in kaffanas they serve "the good stuff". I have my suspicions concerning other reasons, which mostly concerns how the band managed to play so fast.
  3. Post-kaffana, we spilled out into the beautiful night and headed to a park, to carouse in typical Serbian fashion. We quickly discovered the playground and proceeded to rapidly regress to childhood. I am officially awesome at jumping off of swings.
I'm off to catch the bus to Sarajevo. Updates about my bitchin' swank pad are soon to follow.

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