Welcome to Srrrbia

First - Macedonia pictures are up in the photo gallery :).  Now on to Serbia!

My first instinct about what to write here was "We write to you from beautiful Belgrade."  To a certain extent, I'd still agree with that unflattering viewpoint, but maybe I was a bit overly predisposed to have a negative opinion.  After all, we had just come from a rather rickety overnight train from Skopje, and the hostel we ended up finding was in a building that was dark, damp, and - like everything else I had seen in Serbia at that point - reeked of cigarettes.  Now having spent a little more time here, I can hopefully say something a little more balanced.

One of the first things we did in Belgrade was explore the giant Belgrade Fortress in Kalemegdan Park.  It is an impressive, hulking thing from which you can get pretty excellent views of the city, including the not one but two big rivers that meet here (the Sava and the Danube).  In the background of the following picture, you can see the two rivers that come to meet on the right side:

The fortress itself is a mess of older and newer passageways, parapets and reinforcements.  To give you an idea, here are a couple views of the fortress.

 

Also, apparently America is conducting a large PR campaign in the middle of the fortress.  Triangular structures showing flattering pictures of America as well as the location they were taken span probably a quarter mile of one of the paths in the fortress.  Here is the one we found taken in Chicago:

The campaign is called "AMERIKA IZ MOG UGLA," a name we found pretty amusing.  You should try saying it out loud, it's pretty good.  For better or worse, it has a much less amusing if perhaps more endearing translation, which is "America from my point of view."  You can also find more of the photography here, if you're interested.

I had said before that everything in Serbia reeks of cigarettes.  It's definitely true that smoking is much more popular here than in the USA, but still sometimes you see "No Smoking" signs, the classic cigarette in a circle with a line through it.  On the other hand, I think more often, you also see the following sign...

...which clearly says "Smoking Permitted Here" or something along those lines.  Now, I'm going to go ahead and take this as a positive sign.  I assume if places allowed smoking by default, they probably wouldn't have signs that explicitly say that you can smoke here.  I assume that was the case, probably not too long ago.  The proliferation of both this sign and its healthier, less-smelly sibling means that there are enough places where smoking is not allowed that it's worth it to clarify.  Still means that Serbia is generally pretty cigarette-ridden, but hopefully moving in the right direction.

Perhaps my most overarching observation thus far in Serbia is the shift we've seen from mostly Turkish/Ottoman architecture to more classical European elements, though there is definitely still a mixture.  Serbia was under the Ottoman Empire but less than Macedonia or Bulgaria, and it was under Austria at points, meaning that it had things that more resembled what we think of as European, like the following:

Contrast this with one of Belgrade's Serbian Orthodox churches, called Sveti Marko, which looks quite a bit more Ottoman, with the repeating domes as well as use of dark and light stones in stripes.

Overall, my opinion of Belgrade has definitely improved from my bleary-eyed first impression, perhaps aided most by Nikola Tesla.  Just saying, he was a pretty cool guy, and was apparently Serbian though he only spent one day in Belgrade.  Upon our visit to the Nikola Tesla museum, our guide informed us that "he was Orthodox Christian, so he was a Serb."  This says something pretty interesting that I'd like to touch on later about religion and nationality in the Balkans, but for now, I'll leave you with an image of one of Tesla's inventions:

By the way, let me know if you actually know any practical application for the Tesla coil, other than impressing your party guests.

Until later!  We hope you are all doing well!