At ? Restaurant, Belgrade

What's the name of this Restaurant?

Exactly.

Well?

You've got it...

The restaurant is called "?", and the Abbott and Costello possibilities are endless.

Belgrade goes well with the rain, which is lucky for me I guess.

There is an old fortress - almost every city, it seems, had a fortress designed to defend against the Turks - which is now mostly parkland. There's a fountain entitled "Suffering", very cheery, and a monument celebrating the cooperation between France and Serbia in WWI. Wonder what they thought of that when NATO started the bombing in 1999.

The space between the inner fortress (left) and the outer fortress is now used for tennis and basketball courts. What's interesting is that there were also tennis courts between the walls of Vesehrad in Prague.

Walking into the Belgrade fortress in the rain.

Part of the fortress is now occupied with the military museum, whose large collection of artillery, tanks, torpedoes, and machine guns line the paths on top of the city walls. Inside the museum, they have plenty of exhibits on Serbian military history all the way back to the first settlements, though hardly any of it is in English. I got in for free because they couldn't change a 1000 dinar bill (about 15 dollars) for the 100 dinar ticket (about $1.70). Throughout Eastern Europe, all kinds of businesses will keep astonishingly little change, and paying for a $3 coffee with a $20 bill might not be possible. But of course, you go to the ATM and get a $40 bill, so what is there to do? (It makes sense, though, since there is a history of high inflation, for businesses to want to keep as little cash on hand as possible.)

Anyway, I went to the military museum for only one exhibit (featured in my LP), so I didn't mind that the captions to the Serbian army uniforms from various periods, and the many, many, many ceremonial swords and sabers, and the pistols and rifles from all sides of various conflicts, were not in English, and I breezed through the small museum, which has a curious gap from the end of WWI to 1999.

The NATO conflict exhibit, which is only one room, starts by listing the number of soldiers, tanks, planes, etc. that Serbia had, and then the corresponding figures for NATO, which, considering that NATO is many countries including the U.S., are all much higher. Interestingly, this exhibit was the one best labeled in English, and the whole thing was clearly a defense of Serbian performance. They also played up the various tactics used by NATO, such as metal filaments that were dropped on power lines to short out the electric grid, that adversely affected the civilian population. Of course, no mention of ethnic cleansing, or Slobodan Milosovic, or the previous wars in Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina.

But the most bizarre part of the exhibit was the display that included an American pilot's uniform, pieces of his F-117 that Serbia shot down, and the weapons and equipment that were recovered with the plane.

Just some of the guns and other materiel that line the paths to the military museum.

Display of a bazooka and uniform recovered from captured American soldiers