Scenes & Impressions of Belgrade

4 June 2023

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The airport in Belgrade is named for Nikola Tesla, a man born in a part of the Austrian Empire that is today in Croatia. He grew up there and went to college in Graz, which is still in Austria today. In his twenties he left Austria for the US, where he did most of his important work. He died in 1943 in New York in in his 80's and in a interesting twist of history the FBI seized everything in his lab (it was the middle of WWII at the time) and Donald Trump's uncle, who was an electrical engineering professor at MIT, examined everything to see if it was of military value. It wasn't until the 1950's that his ashes and estate were shipped to Belgrade, where Tesla was enshrined in Yugoslav and then Serbia state mythology. Tesla's only trip to Belgrade during his life was for about a day, just like us.

After landing yesterday evening and making it through customs we grabbed the A1 shuttle into the city. The bus driver smoked on the way from the airport and the old Mercedes minibus had English and Turkish written on the emergency exit.

We arrived at the main bus station and headed up the hill through a pretty run down, graffiti covered part of town up to Stari Grad. Along the way I bought a souvenir shotglass from two guys selling "Z" and Wagner group t-shirts. They said "god bless Serbia and Romania and Russia" - I'm still not sure why Romania was included. Actually pro-Russian and anti-NATO sentiment was in evidence many places. Also along the way we saw protest marches with politic signs and large crosses. The religion and the state seem to have a strong bond here.

Our hotel, it turned out, was just a floor although it was associated with a nearby restaurant of the same name where we got breakfast this morning. The main shopping street was just a block away and high end, not cheap. Cash is king throughout the city but most places on this street took cards. Iwona still went hunting for deals and managed to find a few things.

The consierge at our hotel recommended we go down to the Skadarlija for dinner. She was right! There was delicious food on Skadarlija with live bands - guitar, cello, accordian & singer. We also sampled a red wine, Prokupac, which is excellent but only grown in Serbia. After dinner while Iwona shopped I sampled some of the local beers at a dive bar with walls covered in bottlecaps. I also did some people-watching and compiled notes of the day. Belgrade has many more tall people, especially men, than I expected. There are plenty of fat people too, especially women. Signage seems to switch between the Cyrillic and Latin alphabets randomly, and, while I know most of the Cyrillic letters, like Greek it takes concentration to convert the letters to sounds and then translate the words to cognates I know in international words or words in other Slavic languages. Much of the time that means I'm at a loss for what a sign says. Fortunately there's also sometimes an English translation. If they're going to use a second language on signs it's almost always English. Restaurants have lots of reserved tables, but people show up for them. Smoking in restaurants is also still very much a thing.

We saw the old fort in the morning; and then the cathedral of archangel Michael. Then we checked out and were back on the A1 to the airport.

At passport control the guy stamped Iwona's passport and handed it back. Then he scanned mine and said "Bradley?". I responded in the affirmative and then he said "military?". I said "no" and he picked up his phone and started entering something into it. So there I am wondering what sort of list I've come up on. Does he think I'm in the American military? Am I on some Interpol list I don't know about? My heart was racing by the time he held up his phone showing a picture of a Bradley tank and with a wide grin on his face he repeated "Bradley". I smiled back and then he stamped my passport and handed it back to me. An exciting end to our 20 hours in Beograd.