Federal Association of Globe-Trotters, Belgrade

I'm writing in a bar called the Federal Association of Globe-Trotters, which is only the best name in the world. It's one of the hidden bars of Belgrade, which I found thanks to my trusty LP.

To get in, you ring a buzzer at a nondescript, concrete apartment building (several times maybe, if the bartender is busy), and when they buzz you in, you open a heavy black iron gate, walk down an unlit hallway, go down into the basement, and suddenly you're in a large bar with several rooms. It's late afternoon, so it's pretty empty, but the decor is amazing. One table is a piano, another a sewing machine. There's a mirror with flashing Christmas lights and a fish tank. The ceiling is painted lik a partly-cloudy night sky, complete with glow-in-the-dark stars. One of the rooms is a sort of basement terrace, and it's filled with plants, though I'd be surprised if a lot of sun finds its way down there. All the lamps are different, and there are no more than a few of any particular kind of chair.

The black and white photos on the walls are fantastic: an old-school aviator with cap, a hockey player and topless figure skater in a weird studio, a random wedding picture, some whitewater rafters. There's paint peeling of the walls, and some of the brick has been exposed by missing plaster, but they just painted it gold and it fits perfectly.

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

The Cafe at Hotel Moscow, Belgrade

Cyrillic sign at Belgrade train station (it says "Beograd")

My book says that Belgrade "is not a beautiful city." In a sense, this is very true: colors, other than gray, rarely show up in the cityscape. But many of the buildings, even in the cloud-covered blah that characterizes this day in particular, have ornamentations that would fit well in Paris or Prague. Of course, there are also plenty of Communist-era monstrosities of concrete, glass, and metal. (I think it's interesting that glass can be so cold and utilitarian here, but in the John Hancock Tower in Boston, or the Dancing Building in Prague, it can be organic and vibrant).

A street in Belgrade, with the various styles of architecture.

I went to the Republic Sq. last night and walked around. Everyone was out, 12-yr-olds, punks, stilettos, middle-aged women, business men. Several times I saw people pressed up against store windows of shops that were closed, dazzled by the things they could buy within.

Republic Square in Belgrade. I forget who the guy on the horse is, but I'm sure he's important. The building on the right is the National Museum, which, evidently, was closed for renovation.

The large pedestrian area of Belgrade, which starts at Republic Square, is filled with stores, popcorn and ice cream carts, and, at it seems every time of day and night, plenty of people.

I bought some popcorn as a snack/dinner - it was about 75 cents, and then I passed a bar where a band was playing to the people sitting outside on the terrace. The whole thing was underneath this international-style building, very hard and heavy. The band was on a sort of balcony above the crowd. It was a drummer, a keyboardist, a bassist who looked like a bassist, an electric guitar, and then an acoustic that looked like it was straight off Johny Cash's back. The lead singer looked sort of punkish, with a sort of faux-hawk that was well gelled and a long thin braid of dark hair, almost a rat tail, that whipped around to as he thrashed his head and gyrated to the music. He also had a thin line of facial hair that traced his jaw line just until his chin, when it arced up to his nose and back down on the other side.

They were playing 80's music.

I mean, they were playing it. The singer was almost crooning, bringing the mic away from his mouth as he belted out a long note. And he was into the music, too, sort of conducting it absentmindedly with his gestures, relishing every crescendo. He dug Toto's Rosanna.

Afterwards I went to a bakery and got a burek, a very greasy and very salty pastry filled with cheese, potatoes, meat, "pizza", or anything else you want to put inside. It was good for the first several bites, but then the salt got to me, and I decided to go back to the hostel.

The people at the hostel were very nice. The hostel was a dump...but did I mention the people were very nice?

They advertised on hostelworld.com that they are less than a kilometer from the train station, but what they didn't say that they were less than a kilometer, uphill. And that they are located in a weird sort of back alley. Or that neither of the toilets have attached seats. But the people were very nice. And they had free internet, though it was on a laptop so old they had to prop the screen up on a box because the hinge was broken. Plus, for me it was a bed and that was about it, and it was cheap, so I didn't care that much. And it certainly made me feel like I was in the former Yugoslavia.

En Route: Budapest to Belgrade

Well, I'm traveling now.

I took a taxi - hopefully my last one this trip - and got to Keleti Station at about noon, for a 1:35 train to Belgrade. Wending my way to the international ticket office, I went to the end of several maderately-long lines. That is, they would be moderately long in the U.S. But in Hungary, things are different.

See, even though they had computers, and printers, and all kinds of technology, they were still writing out every ticket by hand and using old-fashioned carbon paper. So one person in line could take 3 to 20 minutes. Then, of course, half of the counters are closed for lunch. But, at 1:07, I was at the ticket counter and got a ticket for the 1:35 train to Belgrade - I was on my way! Except the 1:35 train was actually a 1:15 train. And the ticket agent couldn't tell me which platform it was leaving from, and the video screens didn't have a platform number.

After much sweaty chaos (though only minimal panic - chaos is half the fun), running from platform to platform, I finally discovered that the reason the platform was blank on all the signs was that the train was 20 minutes late from Vienna. So, after a lunch of bagel chips and seltzer (which I had thought was still water), I got on, and, hopefully, I am now speeding towards the former Yugoslavia.

Along the way, I pass half-browned cornstalks and fields of sunflowers, most of which are pouting and dull after having lost their seeds and brilliance. As I pass into Serbia, hills and ditches and creeks have begun to gently nudge the landscape from the predominant flatness of Southern Hungary.

In Northern Serbia, a man gets on with his wife. His arms have blue tattoos which portray intersecting shields and instruments of war and industry, some kind of coat of arms, it seems. They look Soviet, both in their style and their crudeness, but the man strikes me as a gentle man, with a close-cropped dark grey beard and mustache and horn-rimmed glasses. He has hives, or boils, or lumps of some kind on the underside of his forearms, and I wonder whether he would be thus disfigured if he had access to doctors and medicine.

When the conductor comes by collecting tickets, the man and his wife seem sheepish, and the conductor scolds them and fills out official-looking slips of paper.

In front of me, an Irish couple - it is their passports, not their accents, that give them away - is studying Serbo-Croatian from a phrasebook, noting that the "square W" is "sh" and the "backwards N" is an "ee".

***

So what of Budapest?

It seemed almost tarnished after five weeks in jewel-encrusted Prague. Certainly it is gritty, with many facades crumbling, their plaster ornamentation sloughed off to reveal ordinary brick or cinder block beneath.

The Danube is mightier than the Vltava, its width more forcefully cleaving the city. While we were there, there was an airshow - a single plane repeatedly doing loops and spins and then flying underneath the Chain Bridge - and a Formula 1 publicity event (there was a big race coming up) that involved F-1 cars speeding across the Chain Bridge and driving around Roosevelt Sq. Out hotel was right by the Chain Bridge and normally it was easy to get over to Buda. But on that day when the bridge was closed, it turned out to be quite an ordeal to walk down to the Elizabeth Bridge and then back up to the castle on the other side, while an equivalent detour in Prague would have been juse a few blocks.

A stunt plane plumetting towards the Danube, in front of the Buda Castle.

A view of the Chain Bridge from the Elizabeth Bridge, crossing the Danube.

Budapest is more real though. It is dirty, and dilapidated, but it is less infected with foreigners. In the trendy, expensive restaurants in Liszt Sq., for example, it seems just as likely to hear Hungarian emanating from the next table as English, or French, or German.

***

A little before Novi Sad, I think, I once again see mountains on the horizon, grey masses that are hard to distinguish against the overcast sky.

For weeks, there has been news of numerous forest fires in southern Europe. At one point, news of evacuations in Croatia made me consider diverting my trip up north. But just before I left Prague, it seemed that the news had died down, except for some fires in Greece and Italy, so I decided to go ahead.

But now I see a small blaze burning in a patch of forest on a riverbank.


An omen, I wonder?