Belgrade

Serbia, Serbia, Serbia. After eight hours of delightful toilet breaks, border crossings and passing up horse and buggies on the coach, we arrived into metropolis decked with street signs in Cyrillic. There was honking and tooting, taxi touting and sun glaring, waving arms about to and fro as we decided (wrongly) in which direction to grunt up a hill with 25lb backpacks. Welcome to Belgrade. Population: overwhelming. Again, I will lambaste lonely planet. Idiots! Fools! Nerds! Okay, I feel better. What good is a map written with the English names for streets when all the signs look like this: So Belgrade, Lonely Planet and I were off to a less than auspicious start. And I think that theme was prevalent for most of our two-whole-days-stay in the capital of fashion and beverages. Don't get me wrong, there was lots to see and lots to explore, but we were hot, bothered and in a place much, much bigger than our previous few days. After accosting an innocent passerby who helped us acclimatise to Cyrillic, we chose to cease aimless hostel wandering and took LP's recommendation to stay in a student dorm turned summer hostel. As far as student dorms turned summer hostels go, this one was fine. Nothing to write home about. Not like, say the fourteen-hour Serbian overnight train, which I did, in fact, write a letter home about. But that's a story for another day. 

So our first day of Belgrade involved wandering the streets, eating at Wok to Walk (!) and shopping for shoes because Jen's died. It's not fair on Belgrade that we found a city we loved so much early on in the trip because maybe we would've given it more of a chance. But Belgrade was not Sarajevo, and we couldn't muster the energy to rave into the wee hours like The Book suggested. So we settled for the Braart exhibit: and a quick wander around The Citadel with its modern art More to come!