So clearly I was a little slow about working the blog since my arrival in Belgrade. Meh well, better late than never I suppose… Perhaps it’s better this way, as first impressions have been tempered by time and I have had a chance to experience the place a little more in depth.
After my basically uneventful and hassle-free arrival (no lost luggage, met up with my roommate at the airport just fine, etc…) I moved into my small but adequate apartment and got to work adjusting to the city. Over the past three weeks I have made tons of new friends, explored many of the exciting things in Belgrade, had a chance to get out of the centre itself into various suburbs, and I’m still just getting started.
Belgrade itself is fascinating and (at least to me) really cool. It is bigger than I expected, and yet far more compact and concentrated than I initially thought. Living in the center, this is a boon; it literally never takes more than 15-20 minutes of walking to get almost anywhere I want to go here. It also makes for a really interesting place to explore. It’s easy to keep one’s bearings since landmarks are never really far from each other, and there are countless small alleys, underground passages, and various other paths to get to wherever you’re going.
What I like most about the place is how packed with detail everything is, because of this relative compactness. People complain about the city looking run-down, but I would describe it as lived-in instead. Every street is packed with tons of small shops of every type, the sidewalks are almost always bustling with people going about their daily business (or just wandering…) at all hours of the day or night, parked cars swarm all over the sidewalk in other places, countless buses, trams and trolleys race around frenetically everywhere while suicidal drivers in tiny Yugos and Opals drive like their lives depend on their getting somewhere RIGHT NOW GODDAMMIT (although that sounds different in Srpski)… Elsewhere, graffiti, posters, signs and random artwork fill almost every free space on every wall, stray cats and dogs laze around looking for some trouble to get into (the plus side of stray critters? I have not seen a single rat so far in Belgrade)… People often describe Belgrade as “dynamic”, but that’s a rather vague and empty descriptor. A few hours spent strolling the streets here, however, makes it clear what is meant by this; every inch of this city seems to teem with life of some sort, there is always something interesting going on, and oftentimes something may be happening right around the corner and you’d have no clue if you didn’t look into it.
This is in fact my second favorite thing about the city, the fact that it is packed with secrets. Well, at least they seem like secrets to my foreign ass; all the locals seem to know the place inside and out. Nonetheless, I’ve lost count of the number of places I’ve been taken to (key word) that I would absolutely never have been able to find unless someone took me there. Secret bars, clubs, parties, even stores… They hide away in dark alleyways that just scream “enter here for rape, sucka”, on rooftops just a few floors above your head, in little courtyards that seemed empty and quiet from the street… Discovering these little secrets is always a treat. I recall waiting with a friend to meet up with some people who would take us to a party… That turned out to be on the rooftop right above our head, thunderously loud and drunken, and yet I didn’t have the slightest clue it was there just minutes beforehand while sitting in the street…
Other times I’ve been to a small party deep within an actual dark, dungeon-like wine cellar (complete with a crazy old drunk Serb winemaker living it up with the young’ins), a club built within what appeared to be a natural cave (think the bat-cave with Madonna, on ecstacy…), or even a snazzy New York-style art exhibition straight out of Sex and the City or something. Serbs are party animals and they definitely know how to pick cool locations for their rabble-rousing…
The food has also been *extremely* to my liking, another great surprise. It’s definitely not for everybody, but I feel like I’ve found meat-eating nirvana… Serbian burger (pljeskavica) is pretty much the greatest thing I’ve ever had and the addiction shows no signs of slowing down. I also can’t describe how good the Giros are without using too many expletives, so I’ll just refrain all around. Death by clogged arteries, how very… American, I guess. Go figure, huh? I go halfway across the world to die of the same shit most Americans will.
If not that, then it’ll be the smoke here… I knew it was going to be bad, I had braced myself mentally, and I thought my upbringing around the French would have provided all the necessary training in this field, but HOLY BATSHIT HELL are Serbs hardcore about their smoking… Last weekend was a humbling experience, as my eyes actually started to burn just like with tear gas in one particularly stifling, smoked-out underground dungeon… The pollution in the city is also a good bit worse than I expected. On many evenings you can easily see a sort of thick haze lying over the city, and sometimes even taste it… I thought these things wouldn’t bother my iron lungs and yet I sit here with a hacking cough writing this. Comes with the territory, I guess.
By far the greatest thing about Belgrade, though, is the people. Although Serbs tend to be just a *tad* bit grouchy in their day-to-day life (and who can blame them, they’ve been through rough times and life isn’t always easy in this city), every single person I have gotten to know on a personal has been nothing but exceptionally friendly with me. I can largely generalize and say that I find Serbs to be particularly clever and “switched-on” people. I won’t even get started on the women in this city, because I know I will just get carried away and that’s a whole other blog right there, and their reputation probably precedes them anyway, so I’ll just confirm the rumors and leave it at that. Yes, the women of Belgrade are unbelievable. It’s got to be something in the water…
I guess that’s it for now… Hopefully I’ll be updating this more often now so that the entries aren’t so massive.
Adieu
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