Merde

Well, I wasn't able to find any tram parties this Easter weekend. Bummer.

Tramway Madness

I just realized most recent posts here seem to be about public transportation in BG, which really needs to stop, but…

If I’m not mistaken (and I’m not saying I’m not, I actually have no idea at this point), Belgrade will host its yearly “Days of Belgrade” events towards the end of this week. It’s some kind of spring festival to celebrate being able to go outside again and nice weather, spring love, kittens n’ rainbows and all that happy stuff.

My favorite part of the celebration from past years, and I have absolutely no clue as to whether it will happen again this year at this point, is the tramway parties that take place. A few of the city’s main lines (number 2 comes to mind primarily but there are others) are converted into rolling clubs with DJ in the back and free rides for all (although a 2 liter bottle of beer is recommended for diplomatic encounters).

The first year I went provided exactly 90 minutes of madcap insanity like you’ve never seen on the public transportation here, as the absolutely jam-packed tram filled with partygoers and revelers cruised around the city to thumping (and well-selected) rock/techno beats while passing pedestrians everywhere danced along, cheered to our total rock n’ roll awesomeness or simply looked confused as hell.

At one stop in Dorcol, I happened to be standing by the door when the tram stopped for a single, lonely 80something year old man with a cane who was apparently simply waiting for his regular ride home. As the doors opened to reveal a tram full of about 200 young drunk and overly enthusiastic young people howling and screaming at him to join the party like a bunch of birthday baboons, he hesitated for a second, understandably surprised and confused.

After a second of consideration, he apparently decided that life is short and, well, carpe diem, because with a shrug and “jeeeeeeeeebiga!” (fuck it!), he tossed his cane to someone on the tram, climbed aboard and grabbed a passing bottle of beer, chugging it to its end and finishing with a whoop and a bow, to the great delight and cheers of everyone on the tram as it set back on its course of noise and chaos throughout the city.

This kind of insanity went on for a few loops around the city before some drunk girl decided to stick her FACE out the window and caught a lightpost with it, causing a major scene and the festivities to stop, and reminding us all of why we are told to “keep arms and legs inside the vehicle at ALL TIMES”. Seriously, now you’ve been warned.

I imagine she might not have been the only person to get hurt during these parties so I have no idea if the city is still organizing them, but I suppose we’ll all find out by the end of the week. If they are though, I’m not going to miss it for anything.

Happy riding to everyone who’s lucky/crazy enough to hop aboard as well! :)

Bus Kontrol

I confess, I’m an unapologetic leech on Belgrade’s public transportation system. For the first few months I was here, I was careful to always buy tickets (about 30 dinars) and conscientiously punched them like a good citizen for every single ride. After a few times where I wasn’t able to do so, I discovered the cheap thrill of trying to spot and evade bus controllers as they get on, thinking I was some sort of Jason Bourne super-sneaky illegal bus rider. As if. Over enough time without ever seeing one though, I started to let my guard down more often, and ended being busted a few times.

Nowadays, I never bother with tickets. While I agree that somebody has to pay for the privilege of public transportation, and tickets are just a form of taxation, I figure that I basically balance out, karmically and financially speaking, with those rare occasions when I do get caught and fined. The amount I pay then is probably relatively close to what I would pay if I was still buying tickets for every ride. And yes, I know you can get more useful month-long passes, but really, I just can’t be bothered to go battle the bureaucracy down at the GSP center to get this done. I’m sure there are many elusive stamps to obtain and many absurd, made up reasons why foreigners shouldn’t/can’t ride the buses to dispute.

I use the buses/trolleys/trams daily and go all over the place in the city, and statistically speaking, I have to conclude there just aren’t that many controllers working the lines. I often go for months at time without ever seeing a single one. However, when it rains, it pours. My luck with the controllers is kind of like that old urban myth about plane crashes, and how they always come in threes. When I do get caught, it usually happens 2-3 times in the same week. Maybe there are controller “surges” or they have to fill end-of-the-month quotas or something, and thus intensify their efforts in certain periods.

When you get busted, you can pay the fine on the spot, which costs roughly just under 2000 dinars, or you can have them mail you your fine, a more expensive but convenient alternative.
I would say I’ve been busted about 5 or 6 times total in my 2 years + here. The first time, I paid it on the spot, thinking that was the only thing you could do. Once I learned you could have your fine mailed to you, I went with that option for the next 2 or 3 times.

On one occasion, I had a particularly bad time with a highly aggressive and persistent controller who categorically refused to write me the mail-in fine. He *insisted* that I pay on the spot, or I was going straight to jail. He was big, mean, rude and very persuasive, and I was taken by surprise and embarrassed about having an argument in English with him on the crowded 31 bus, so I didn’t put up much of a fight and ended up actually taking him to an ATM where I withdrew the necessary funds. He was a mean fucker, and I should have known better, since I was actually within my rights and he was just pushing for some fast cash, he didn’t even write me a receipt for the ticket.

The next control, I was again pushed for cash up front, but having learned my lesson from the previous time (which occurred, karmically again, just days before, so I was fresh with outrage over having been possibly cheated before and just generally treated rudely, and thus was in better fighting form), I knew the law was indeed on my side and was able to argue my case successfully. I was rather proud of myself. It went something like this:

“You must pay!”

“I don’t have enough cash, just write me the ticket and send it to this address” (show white police registration card).

“No, I can’t send it to you, this is not your name (pointing to my landlady’s name on the card), it is your mistake, not hers, you must pay now.”

“Neeee, I know the law, and you must write me the ticket by mail if I can’t pay.”

“As you wish, I call police now.”

“Yes, that is a good idea, you do that, and I will call my lawyer, and he will call his friend at the police station, who also knows me personally, and then we will see who has better “veza” (connections) in this city, ah?” (pull out phone and start dialing).

I was *totally* bluffing, but I didn’t flinch for a second or let my body language show any sign of distress, and it worked. He thought about it all for a second, decided I wasn’t bullshitting, grunted and wrote up the ticket and receipt with a nasty look. I win!

That was many months ago, and since then I haven’t had any encounters with controllers. It was the latest one that ambushed me just yesterday that made me think of this whole pointless drivel.

I was minding my own business on the bus, and suddenly a wallet with an ID is thrust in my face. Obviously, I have no ticket. Busted. I didn’t say a word, and nonchalantly just handed him my white card and ID (from a foreign country, full of confusing, hard-to-read detailed info in English) and hoped he would get the idea and just write me the ticket. He scanned both documents for a good long minute, handed them back to me, and…

Walked away. I looked up at him at that moment like “huh?” and, lo and behold, he actually smiled and *winked* at me as he walked away. Cool! I win again.

Although, I think someone needs English lessons…

Incidentally, that encounter set off a bizarre sort of chain reaction, as no less than three other random people *winked* at me in the course of that same day, in different situations. Good hair day, I guess.

That’s pretty much all I have to say about being controlled on the bus. Oh yeah, that, and the fact that none of the mailed fines have ever actually reached my mailbox, for some reason :)

Mid-day disaster under Terazije

The very center of Belgrade, Terazije, is a large type of avenue where several major streets converge, and it has a couple of undergound passages for pedestrians to get across the main street without stopping traffic. Some Belgraders jokingly refer to these as the city's Metro system.

These underground passages contain a handful of stores and the occasional street performer or gypsy beggar, but mostly an ever-constant flow of people moving all around. You can also find, on most days, a small group of pirates plying their trade down there.

Media pirates, that is. They sell every possible movie that is out in theatres or ever made, new video games, etc. Although copyright laws have officially caught up with Serbia and made this business illegal, it still thrives in Belgrade, and Serbia in general remains (allegedly, but I don't know how anyone would quantify something like this) one of the world's most active "pirating" countries. CDs sell for 200 dinars, and you if you buy five you get one free (or so I've heard, ahem...)

Although the crew down there does fine business, and it is no big secret to *anyone* who spents about 2 hours in the center of Belgrade that they are there, they still apparently operate on the foul side of the law, which I realized finally when I witness a particularly humorous incident.

I was simply crossing the passage as I do every day for some reason or another, and right as I was walking past the CD stand, a relatively loud alarm sounded. I realized later this was from a talkie walkie, and it was a warning from some lookout on the street. "Panduri!" (COPS!) one of the sellers shouted.

Instantly, the CD vendors slammed closed their entire apparatus (basically two gigantic cardboard boxes that open up like a book and allow them to lay the CDs out) and ran for dear life into one of the shops right nearby. No exagerration, it was all so sudden I was momentarily alarmed that something dangerous was happening.
Only, one of them was a bit too hasty and... Tripped, dropping the entire large box and vomiting CD cases all over the entire passage, like a cardboard cluster bomb splaying plastified shrapnel everywhere, I mean EVERYWHERE. It was really a spectacular fall and fumble.

A whole slew of cursing and swearing was heard all around from him, his colleagues, and the two women who were working the "hideout" shop, before they all got down on all fours and started frantically gathering up CD cases. Some people actually helped them, some grabbed some CDs for themselves, some laughed or sympathized with "uuuuuh, jebote..." (oh snap!), some just ignored the whole mess like it never happened.

The CDs were picked up in stunning time though. I think a food relief van in a Sudanese refugee camp wouldn't be pillaged so quickly, but they pulled it off somehow, and the last guy ran into the store with his arms overflowing with CDs *just* as a pair of policemen walked down the stairs into the passage. The two female accomplices had already lit cigarettes and put on a show of smoking them and looking bored in the doorway of the store. 5 seconds slower, and they would have all been busted.

I found the whole thing quite surprising and amusing. I had no idea that these people were taking such risks by selling their wares down there, but I guess that's the only conclusion one can draw in the face of such panic. Not to mention how organized the whole thing was, I mean, really, lookouts in the street?

Still, they continue to sell every day, so I guess their precautions work for them. I have no idea what happens if you get "busted" with pirated software in Belgrade.

Good time with Serbia's finest, round 2

The only thing a foreigner is required to have at all times for identification in Serbia is a flimsy registration white card (with a stamp, of course) you get at your local police station, and this procedure must be done within three days of entering Serbia. Your stamp you get in your passport is basically your "visa", for most countries, and it's good for about 90 days.

As I mentioned before, this bureaucratic procedure has been a decent and frequent excuse for me to get out and see other parts of the Balkans, which is nice really.

The first summer I was in Serbia, I took a weeklong trip to Montenegro with a friend to renew the visas. Montenegro was lovely,beautiful and interesting, but the ultimate goal of the trip was to get that damn stamp.

So, a week later, my friend and I are on a night train back to Belgrade, sharing a cab with what I could only assume were smugglers of some sort, given the utterly random assortment of large duffel bags stuffed with all sorts of clothes and useless crap they had in tow (clearly not for traveling purposes).

Anyway, several hours into the trip, when everyone is asleep and the lights are off everywhere in the train, the purser comes into our cab to check tickets. At this point, I noticed that there was a problem with the single light that was in our cab. All the cabs had a switch you flipped to turn on the light, but in ours the whole unit housing the switch was gutted, and all that was left were a bunch of mangled and nasty looking copper wires.

The purser, though, obviously ran this train route quite often, because he knew exactly how to manipulate the wires into some sort of combination and on came the light, just like hot-wiring a car.

So, he checks out tickets, all ok, disentangles the wires, lights off, and we all go back to sleep.

A few hours later, more men in uniform come into the cab and wake us up. It's the border/customs agents, and at last we come to the oh-so-vital and anticipated stamping of passports.

Yeah, not quite.

These guys did not have the know-how or experience of the purser, apparently. After noticing there was no light switch, the biggest officer starts poking at the wires for a bit with his pen, slapped them around with his notebook (who knows, maybe that works sometimes...), sighed with deep annoyance, and finally just shouted "Ahhh, jebiga!" (ahh, fuck it!) and just... Left the cab, slamming the door behind him, leaving me and my friend and two smugglers in the dark (literally), groggily confused about what was going on.

We waited up for a little bit, unsure what to do and thinking that they would perhaps return with a flashlight or something, but eventually just dozed back to sleep.

Two hours later, we were in Belgrade. They never came back, and we crossed into Serbia without being checked or stamped. Oh well, we tried... I think the smugglers were really happy with this turn of events, because they left the train quite cheerfully with a skip in their step, a marked difference from their paranoid and shifty disposition when we all boarded. I wonder if they brought in anything cool.

I actually don't remember in the slightest what I did about it all that back then, but I did not have much of a problem. The second failed border stamping would have much more significant consequences, in the form of my introduction to my good friend Mr. Bulldog down at the main police station's center for foreigners (see "good times with Serbia's finest").

Things to do in Belgrade

I've been a bit uninspired lately, so in response to Belgrade.com’s new list of “things to do in Belgrade” for foreigners/visitors, I decided to go through it for my own interest and see what I had accomplished from that list, with my own opinions about it.


- Look for an music or art event in Students’ cultural center (SKC) – there’s great chance something interesting is on.

Good call, I’ve seen several interesting concerts there, including Darko Rundek and Mike Patton (although highly anticipated for me, that turned out to be somewhat of a disappointment, way too much artsy screaming and howling and not enough *music*). Also been to see some cool comic book/strip art exhibitions there, as well as a handful of smallish parties/ cocktail gatherings and even a pretty good bluegrass band playing. So yes, always something interesting going on at SKC.


- Buvljak – New Belgrade flea market is always a good place to lose a couple of hours.

Took a wrong turn and ended up here the first time I went looking for Blok 70, Belgrade’s Chinatown. This place is a huge, messy, chaotic and interesting mess to wander around for awhile. Cheap cheap goods everywhere. It’s a bit in the middle of nowhere in Novi Beograd but a quaint place to check out at least once, if you’re into ghetto flea market kind of places.


-Try water skiing – just a couple of kms away from the city center – at the end of Ada Ciganlija lake.

Never tried this, but seen it plenty of times. Looks snazzy, you get to ski on a circular “track” in the water, pulled along at high speed by a sort of ski lift handle. For show-offs, mostly.


-The Roman Well (Rimski bunar) at Kalemegdan is an interesting place for fans of mysterious and scary stories.

It’s in Kalamegdan. It’s closed off. There’s a lot of history behind it, just as all in all of Kalamegdan. That’s pretty much all I know about it.


- Slavija Square hides a mystery as well. Sometimes it’s a mystery how come not so many cars crash when driving around it.

Oh-so-true. Slavija looks, sounds and bustles like a roundabout from Pakistan or Nigeria or something. Yet Serbs, being confident and efficiently aggressive drivers, somehow make it work. Sort of. I have seen a few fender benders there, and my friend reports that the intersection on one side of it, where trams, buses and cars simultaneously merge onto Nemanjina, is the #1 pedestrian death zone in Belgrade, so keep your wits about ya when crossing.


- A quest for bakeries, cakes and sweets shops in Belgrade is always rewarding one.

Yeah, I guess, if you’re not used to the food around here, try some burek or pita or something. Ask locals for good bakeries though. Bad burek will make you feel like crap for the rest of the day. Some bakeries leave their goods out all day, so earlier is always better.


- Zeleni Venac pedestrian passage offers a thrill of living on the other side of the law, as well as a cozy little black market shopping area.

This one is easy to check out and pretty fun. The “other side of the law” refers to the dozen or so gypsy sellers that line the passage, conversing/arguing loudly between themselves and hussling passer-bys. During rush hours the passage is filled to absolute capacity with commuters heading to/from the buses at the station next to it, it feels like a small taste of the New York subway or something.


- Find a local souvenir salesman at Kalemegdan or in Skadarlija and browse through weird Belgrade memorabilia – like the five hundred billion dinar note, now being sold for about one hundred dinars.

Yes, this can be cool and fun, lots of interesting and nifty little souvenirs and thingies there, although sometimes the sellers will try to rip you off if you reek to much of tourist money.


- Go see the oldest preserved house in Belgrade in Cara Dusana street 10. House was finished in 1727, which makes it almost 300 years old. Considering Belgrade was bombed five times in previous century alone, this is deemed as a great success.

It’s a nice looking empty house.


- Vukov spomenik underground station reminds us that we do need a subway system in Belgrade. It is also a fun and long ride down.

Yeah this place is worth a look, there’s a neat looking mural/bench down there, some smoky coffee places. Most interesting for me is the underground gaming center you get to through one of the side doors. Inside are some halls that accommodate a dozen or so LAN gaming centers, cafes, computers stores, etc. The place has a seriously gritty, futuristic/underground cyberpunk feel to it, like someplace out of a techno-thriller or something. It never, ever sleeps, and you’ll find all kinds of geeks and hardcore technophiles/gamers milling around (but mostly intensively gaming) at any hour of the day. You could disappear for days down there, completely cut off from daylight, Belgrade, and reality, and I suspect many do. Unlike any place I’ve ever seen, very dark, gritty and atmospheric, highly recommended at least for a look.


- Visit the Red Star football museum – it’s small but managed to inspire Gordon Taylor to organize various football exibitions througout Europe.

I don’t know if this is connected to/part of the Red Star stadium, but that place/area is also worth a look. It’s up on a hill so you can catch a nice view of the downtown area, and you can even check out Ceca’s house (Serbia’s biggest turbofolk star, and the former wife of one of Serbia’s most notorious gangsters from the 90s), a most ridiculous looking yet imposing wedding cake Barbie concrete type of… House, I guess, if you can call it that.


-Try one beer at every stand at the Belgrade Beer Festival, held every august in Belgrade.

Beer Fest was a great time the first year I went there, when it was still held at the bottom of Kalamegdan, providing the most awesome backdrop for a large open air drunk fest I’ve ever seen. This past summer though it was held across the river in the large field of Usce, and I just couldn’t enjoy it as much. Highly overcrowded, overpriced, and Usce is one gigantic dustbowl. People were complaining about blowing their noses and coming up with nasty black soot and dust for days afterwards, and I had to hear about it from every single person during my language classes.


- Kosutnjak is a bit away from the city center, but if you like hiking, this enormous park is the perfect location. You can rest at Ski staza (Ski path) cafe while you’re there. Ski staza got it’s name because the steep hill under the cafe actually is perfect for skiing lovers in the winter time (ok, it’s not perfect, but it’s the only ski path near city center).

I used to live by this park. It’s awesome, albeit yes, a bit out of the way from the city center. One of the few places where you can really get away from the crowds of the center, go for a nice long job or hike, have a nice barbeque, etc. Ski Staza café is also really cool, with perhaps the coolest vista of the city center you can find in Belgrade. Highly recommended.


- The Tram number two (Krug dvojke) unguided tour of the Belgrade city center. I’ve mentioned this one before, but it’s a good tip, so it has to be on the list.

Yeah, it’s an easy way to get a good look-see of the main parts of the city. Kind of like going on the mono-rail to get a whole view of the park when you enter Disneyland or something.
If someone tells you they are from within the Krug dvojke part of the city, they are usually “fancy” a.k.a the snobbish segment of party people in Belgrade.


- Go to a Belgrade football derby, between Red Star and Partizan and observe some of the loudest and wildest football fans in Europe.

For the brave and adventurous, or those who just like to see chaos, destruction and testosterone let loose. The stadium destruction and mayhem following some of these matches is a sight to behold, I can tell you from experience.


- Ada Medjica river island is a non-mainstream version of Ada Ciganlija. It’s your choice really.

Ada Medjica is awesome, lots of lovely little river shacks all along the bank, a most fantastic spot for an afternoon of barbecuing and drinking rakija, if you ever have to chance to go there. You need to take a little ferry to get there.


- Take a stroll in Balkanska street and find a vintage hat from one of the stores that somehow survived the modernization.

I lived on this street during my first 6 months in Serbia, and it was a cool place to have my very first impressions of Belgrade. It’s a steep-ass hill, and is actually a serious hike that will take you right from the train station area directly into the very center of the city on Terazije, next to hotel Moskva. On the occasional icy day that blows through Belgrade, the steepness can actually be a bit dangerous. I once saw a man fall and slide 20 feet down before coming to a stop. It was hilarious in the end because he wasn’t hurt, but you could be less lucky. Good pljeskavica place near the top of the street. Definitely worth a look, it reeks of old Balkan atmosphere and mystique.


- Pass through Bezistan passage connecting Terazije street and Nikole Pasica square and try to imagine that this place was the favorite spot for rockers, punkers and other Belgrade headbangers.

I had no idea about the rockers n’ whatnot. It’s just a passage I go through often… Nikola Pasica square is pretty cool, nice fountain there, nice view of the Parliament(s), a long view down the main Boulevar…


- Cab rides – engage in a conversation with the cabbie about politics, life, universe and everything else, because they know all about it. If the conversation turns out ok, tip the driver. If not, try not to get ripped off. Most cab drivers like to talk with the customers, or to be more specific, they just like to talk. Good thing is that you can find out about various things known only to the taxi drivers of the world – global and local economy, where’s the good food, where’s the best place to drink, which cafes are open 24 hours, which politician is sleeping around, and useful things like that.

Not much to add on this one. Taxis in Belgrade are always something of a small adventure.


- Flirt with a Belgrade girl or guy (see the comment from Anonymous Manslut on some tips for the girls concerning Serbian girls). Or just observe from distance.

Oh yes, this is most certainly highly, highly recommended. Fortune favors the bold! :)


- If lost in the city center, ask one of the police officers for directions. They need to practice their foreign language skills and you need to practice your Serbian.

Yeaaaaah, I think Viktor is being cheeky on this one. As a general rule, I just give police officers a wide, wide berth in Belgrade. The few that I have had encounters with are usually not friendly at all, albeit respectful (somewhat). One was most particularly and unnecessarily rude when I was just sitting in front of a church, he was bored with nothing to do and just went out of his way to hassle me and try to f*** me up for anything. It was only the fortuitously timed arrival of my at-that-time-visiting mother with her elderly friend that kept him in check. Others though, on occasion, I admit, have been surprisingly friendly, usually after I tell them I’m in Serbia (because they always ask why you’re here, if you’re a foreigner) because of a Serbian girl.


- Have a smoke in the smokers’ section – in a local hospital building. With most of the neighbor countries starting to think about banning smoking in public places, Serbia remains as an nicotine-filled island of joy for many smokers.

Yes, if you smoke and like cancer sticks, welcome to your Nirvana.


- Visit Etnological museum in Vasina street across the street from the Belgrade University and try to discover what kept Jean Paul Gottier there for three hours, forgetting the fact he’s obviously insane.

Myeaaaah. Decent museum, if you’re into that. I was highly bored, although that may have had something to do with the overcaffeinated and annoying company I was with at the time I visited.


- Go to a nearby green market and buy some tasty fruit from a local farmer.

Sure, why not. As they said in one South Park episode, “it’s so cultural!”

Good times with Serbia’s finest

Most of the time I’ve been in Serbia, I’ve simply been staying on a standard 90 day tourist visa, with a quick border run to renew it when it expires. It’s a bit of a pain in the ass, but it’s also been a good excuse to get out of Belgrade and see other places in the Balkans.

For this border run, I had gone to Sarajevo with a then-girlfriend for a few days. The visit there was lovely, strange and interesting, but that’s another story. The overall main point of the trip was to get that oh-so-precious stamp in my passport.

I came back into Serbia late at night, around 2am, on full bus of about 100 people. Long story made short, they somehow neglected to stamp my passport going back into Serbia. Now my visa was expired, I didn’t have a new one, or even any record that I had left the country, except for a bus ticket.

Ok, so this had happened once before coming back from Montenegro, and somehow I hadn’t had an issue with that (the tricky part comes a day later, whenever you enter Belgrade, foreigners have 3 days to register at the local police station…that is actually why you need that stamp). But that time, I’d had other stamps from Croatia & Montenegro confirming my various border crossings around the same dates, along with the bus tickets, and no one asked anyway. This time, I had no indication of any border crossing at all, in or out of Serbia, and I was not going to make another trip out just to get a damn stamp.

So the next day, back in Belgrade, I consulted with my very close friend Igor, who happens to also work as a lawyer, and has helped me out of many a sticky bureaucratic situation. We discussed this new problem, and decided that the best course of action was simply to go down to the main police station and explain what had happened, and let them figure out a solution, which we figured could only be to grant me a visa outside of the regulations or whatever. After all, I had done nothing wrong, as much as they were going to want to frame it that way at the station (they’re really not so big on being helpful to foreigners there, especially when you come from my country). It was their problem to figure out.

We had been there a few times before, for similar visa-type stuff, and handled all obstacles with grace and aplomb. It was kind of fun, really; we’d barge into offices, cut in front of lines of hapless Chinese and Italians, flirt with the women at the various desks, make a few big theatrical scenes, and always emerge victorious, feeling like dashing swashbuckler pirates of bureaucracy.

I must confess, we were woefully unprepared for the perfect storm of shit that was waiting for us this time.

It couldn’t have come on a better day. I was working as a language teacher in those days, and Igor was working at his law firm; I had a seriously important first class scheduled for later that morning, with a VIP student (who shall remain unnamed, but let’s just say that if you watched Eurovision, you saw/heard the results of my teaching along with millions of other Europeans). Igor had some case or something to handle in the afternoon, so we showed up bright and early at 8am to get the whole mess out of the way quickly.

[8am]- No one was around to even deal with us or direct us (always the first step when you embark on a bureaucracy quest in Serbia) to whatever desk we needed to check out. Eventually we went to one desk, where a sleepy and grouchy guy looked at my stuff, and decided it wasn’t his problem to deal with. Go upstairs.

We go upstairs. Again, wrong office. Go to office number whatever. We go there. Nope, not here, you gotta go downstairs to XYZ. But we were just there?!

Wait here, let me check . We wait. And wait. And wait.

[9am]- Ok, you need to go upstairs to talk with the “Boss”.

The “Boss”? That sounded ominous. Office 616, I believe. It’s actually pretty well known among foreigners, I would later find out; many are those who’ve had the pleasure of “quality time” with “Ze Boss”.

[9:15am]- We go to said office, knock on the door. Someone growls at us to come in. We meet a heavily muscled, completely bald, immaculately dressed gentleman with all the charm of a pit-bull. I kid you not, this man could make paint crumble off walls with his intense, penetrating stare of psychotic death. I’ve seen the same look on drugged child soldiers in Africa right before they decide it’s a good idea to blow your face off, or prison inmates right before they’re about to shank someone (both stories for another time ).

So the introduction was a bit rough. Still, this was the man we’d come to explain my woes to, so Igor did his best authoritative lawyer routine while I did my best I’m-so-booored-with bureaucratic-incompetence-and-I-really-have-better-things-to-do-so-can-you-please-hurry-this-up routine, a combo that is surprisingly intimidating and effective at getting results, when delivered right. Most of the time.

This man was having *none* of that. He cut us off almost immediately, and told us to sit our asses down with the authority of a school principal and made us repeat the story three times over, listening carefully with utter contempt and, somehow, fascinated boredom, if that makes any sense.

He then ordered us out of the office into the hallway for a moment. By a “moment”, he apparently meant an entire HOUR. He even walked out of the office at one point with his briefcase and came back with breakfast, never even acknowledging our presence. It was all psychological mindgames, I would later learn.

[10:30am]- We go back into the office. He grilled us again on everything that had happened (because, you know, it was *such* a shady story…). Then, somehow, the conversation turned to my work and what I was doing in Belgrade. What school was I working at? What did I do there (I teach… go figure)? Who’s the head of the school? Where do I live? Who’s my landlady? Who are my students? How do I get paid? Who pays me?

The man was a maestro of conversational misdirection and evasive tactics. Igor had met his match; anytime we tried to bring the topic back to the visa/border situation, he somehow enlarged the issue to something peripheral, unrelated, and personally invasive.

[11am]- At the conclusion of that conversation, he demanded to see my pay receipts from the school (which, by this time, coincidentally, I had had to call, to cancel my VIP class… “yeaaaah, this is awkward, but umm, I’m not going to be able to make it to the class with [VIP], I’m, ahh, stuck at the police station, you see… It’s a long story”).

Time was short and we’d already wasted 3 hours of the day with this monkey business, but it looked like some sort of resolution might come of this demand, a reward for our cooperation and goodwill and whatnot. So, Igor and I were “released” (I wasn’t aware up until that point that we were being detained, apparently) so that we may grab a taxi, race back to my apartment, grab said pay stubs, and race back to the station.

We had to wait another 45 minutes in the hallway because it was lunchtime when we got back.

[1pm]- He was not happy with the pay stubs when he got them. Why?

-“There’s no stamp on any of these!! What kind of school do you work for?!”

More questions. He was joined this time by two assistants, who were much more sympathetic characters, but painfully dimwitted. They all started grilling me about the school, how I got paid, how much, by whom exactly, names, dates, etc. I realized what was going on, and this was *not* a good situation. I was being full-on interrogated/investigated because:

- I was a foreigner who apparently had not crossed their radar before, and a semi-suspicious one at that, I admit. I came to Serbia with no particularly good/logical reason or excuse, I have a bizarre, highly international background, and I come from a country that has, ahem, “politically tense” relations with Serbia, so they probably were at least mildly suspicious that I was some kind of spy or dubious character on the run from something.
- I was working for a very big, successful language school, that owed some of its success to, let’s say, dubious business practices, what with registrations, paying its teachers (mostly cash under the table), taxes, etc. I knew this going in to the station, which was why I realized from the get-go that probing questions about my work were not really a good direction for things to be going in. Now, here we were, deep into it, and I was looking more and more guilty by the minute of… something?! I hate cops.

So they grilled me for an hour, and it was getting really stressful. I knew we were in trouble when Igor asked if he could smoke a cigarette. There was a “no smoking” sign prominently displayed on the desk, but in Serbia, most of the time those are put there as ironic humor.

They brought us an ashtray and a bottle of water. This meant we were going to be here doing this for awhiiiile.

[2pm]- After that grueling interrogation session, we were banished back into the hallway while they checked up on all the facts and information I had given them. I was starting to freak out at this point that I was going to be deported or something, and that I had sold out my language school up the river to boot. Not that I particularly cared about their well-being, but they were my main source of income at that point. Igor was just confused about what the hell was going on in there and why they were doing all of this.

[Whothehellknowshowmuchlater, pm]- Eventually, we were summoned back in. This time, Mr. Bulldog told us that he was going to go check on something, while his “assistants” would fill out some statement on me.

That was the key moment. Igor and I both caught just the slightest sneer or twitch on the face of one of the dimwitted “assistants”, when that word was used. Something was fishy, and we shared a knowing look.

So, while one of the guys, who spoke decent English, asked me a bunch of the same questions again (name of the school, name of the boss, basic things) to fill out a report, Igor made small talk and bonded with the other guy. They started to hit if off relatively well and we just played it cool. Cigarettes were smoked, coffee was made, Igor chatted, I cooperated with all the questions.

Igor then cleverly made some small remark like “Man, your boss is a real hardass” (he’s a sharp fellow, and this is why he is my lawyer). At that point, assistant #2’s ego couldn’t handle it anymore and he let the cat out of the bag.

-“ Ahhh, that guy… He is not boss, you know. He has same rank as us!” he pointed out, somewhat indignantly. “He just like to make big theatre spectacle, it is boring job here sometimes.”

Ooooh? Reeeally now, you don’t say?

Suddenly it all made sense. Ze Boss was not some higher authority, had no special power, and ultimately couldn’t really do anything about my situation except give me the damn visa. What we had calculated going in that morning had actually been correct. Mr. Bulldog, a nonetheless highly clever foe, had immediately seized upon the fact that we figured him to have more authority than he did, and he had decided to enjoy the power trip as much as possible, laying out a full battery of devious police interrogation tricks and psychological intimidation tactics to keep us disoriented and squeeze me for information in the process. I later learned, through a completely different story, that he had years ago likely worked for Tito’s secret services and had been trained by old-school KGB, which would explained how good he was at what he did and why we bought into it all hook, line, and sinker.

Once we learned this though, we knew we were in the right, and were just being jerked around. Assistant #1 finished his report/statement, and when Mr. Bulldog came back, an emboldened Igor caught him by surprise with bunch of nice lawyer-babble insinuations about intimidation, unjust interrogation, and brought the topic back to the damn visa and basically laid it out for him. We had cooperated with him all day, jumped through all his hoops, and had done nothing wrong, and we both had had quite enough of the bullshit and wasted time and would like to just get the issue resolved so could we just get on with what we all knew was going to happen and get me the damn visa?

Well, not exactly, but it turned out even better in the end. Knowing the game was up, Mr. Bulldog said that he couldn’t give us a 90 day stamp, but that he’d open a special file for me to start the application for a real working visa, which was worth much more and good for a longer period of time. This was most satisfactory.

After it was all over the mood lightened, I got all the necessary paperwork and everyone left on good terms. They’d had their bureaucratic fun with us, and we couldn’t be all that mad about it because Mr. Bulldog had been a most worthy opponent (Igor and I enjoy psychological games) and we’d been bested fair and square for most of the day.

In the end, I walked out with a better visa deal than we’d hoped we could get, so all is well that ends well. I had the interesting experience of being on the receiving end of a Serbian police interrogation (not my first police interrogation, but it was very different than how it happens back home… I digress again, different story), Igor got to practice flexing his argumentative muscles with a valid foe, and a good time was had by all.

Oh yeah, and I learned that *everything* in Serbia depends on STAMPS. Reports, documents, pictures, whatever, none of them mean a damn thing at all if there is no stamp. You must have the holy stamp. Word from the wise.

I just thought I’d write up this long day as a fun little scare story to any other foreigners who may have to venture over to office 616 or whatever it is. When you meet Mr. Bulldog, you’ll know ;) Good luck, suckers! Haha.

So, thanks for the memories Mr. Bulldog, even though they weren’t that great.

So much for hospitality...

Mark showed up in our lives immediately after Rachel, the Australian backpacker, left us and Belgrade. Her delightful three-week stay had made a bigger impact than her predecessor (one of my countrymen, a strange little hobbit of a fellow) had made in all his 6 months living with us. We (Goxy and I) were deeply saddened by her leaving, and were hopeful that we’d be able to replace the hole she left in our lives quickly by finding someone else to crash with us for awhile; we were on a Good Samaritan hosting streak.

Probably not coincidentally, within days the voodoo of Belgrade brought us Mark. Goxy’s sister had a friend who’s friend was dating this British guy (did you follow all that?) and word trickled down the cell phone vine that this guy was in some sort of difficult situation (something about his mother attempting suicide back home) and needed a place to crash, and hey since you guys have some space and are good with foreigners and all would ya mind?

So we said sure, no problem, optimistic that we were welcoming another stray yet cool traveler working his way through Belgrade, like so many others we had met out here.

Mark, however, was most definitely *not* cool guy. Every name on this blog has been changed to protect the innocent, but I’m using his real one in case he ever tries to wander back around here. It’s a shame I don’t know his last name, but I digress.

He was, allegedly, an English teacher, had been living in Belgrade for awhile, British, had a local girlfriend, some family troubles back home, and had just fallen out of some housing situation, and that was how he ended up with us. This was the only information we had about him before he showed up on our doorstep.

I met him late in the evening after a long day of work. He had a distinctly malnourished look to him, a sleepy expression of what I can only describe as total blankness, dirty wrinkled clothes, a greasy mop of hair and an almost completely incomprehensible mumbling cockney sort of accent. His whole appearance was vaguely reminiscent of Cletus the Redneck from the Simpsons. The entirety of his belongings fit into one minuscule messenger bag smaller than most girls’ purses. Basically, he had one pair of jeans, two shirts, a small toiletry kit, a book, and that was… all of it. Maybe that should have been the first thing to make us go “hmm”, but anyway…

He was supposed to crash with us for a couple of days, 3 or 4 at the most, after which Goxy’s sister and her visiting boyfriend from Spain were going to come stay over for the rest of the month, a visit she had been planning and looking forward to for a long time. Mark had no problem with that.

So he stayed with us for a few days, keeping quiet and a low profile. He spent the virtual entirety of his waking hours sitting in the living room just reading and chain-smoking, putting away easily 4 to 5 packs of Serbia’s cheapest cigarettes a day. When he wasn’t doing that, he was eating all of our food and not contributing anything whatsoever to the fridge, or our wallets. He clogged the toilet 4 times over the course of his stay. He cut his own hair at one point leaving our bathroom looking like we’d massacred a family of goats in there or something. He left piles upon piles of dirty dishes, glasses, and ashtrays filled up like an entire kafana of smoking Serbs had used them, all untouched and filthy and all over the place.

But ok, we are nice polite guys and he was supposedly traumatized or whatever, and he played that part well, so nothing was said. 4 days passed, then 5, then 6, and Goxy’s sister Nevena + boyfriend showed up. At this point the topic of Mark leaving was politely brought up several times (“hey, have you found a new living situation yet? What’s going on with your apartment search? Have you found anyone else you can crash with?” etc.). Each time he would smile and say yes, sure, absolutely, and agree with whatever it was you told or asked of him, and then…. Just go on as if nothing had happened.

At this point I vacated the premises temporarily myself, as I had found my own new apartment in the center (we were reaching the end of our lease at that apartment in Banovo Brdo) and so it wouldn’t be so crowded in the apartment with 5 people there. Within a day, Mark had comfortably moved himself into my room, where all my stuff was, without asking me, started using my stuff (rampaged through my medicine cabinet, took all my spare toothbrushes for the year, my spare socks and tshirts, going through my books/photos, etc!), and decided that my room (and bed) was a much better place to have his girlfriend sleep over than the room we had provided for him.

Meanwhile he continued his habit of smoking out the living room each and every day, all day, eating all the food, being very quiet and weird, and agreeing whenever someone suggested he should start moving on. Any normal person with basic social skills would take a clue that the hospitality was stretching thin. Goxy’s sister started to freak out b/c of his creepiness and well, ever-constant presence. She was, after all, trying to have a romantic time with her visiting boyfriend, who wouldn’t be back for months thereafter. Goxy spend most of his days working at his office so his contact with the whole situation was minimal, and he didn’t get how out of hand things were getting until too late.

This bizarre dynamic went on for TWO WEEKS. I didn’t even know he was living in my room until a week into it, and I wasn’t exactly thrilled to find him living comfortably with all my stuff, especially considering he hadn’t even asked my permission. Nevena finally lost her patience completely and didn’t want to come back to the apartment.

The situation having gotten completely weird, Gox and I finally sat down and had a serious talk with him. Since whenever we told him he should go he just kept saying yes, sure, and then did nothing, we made up this whole story about how Goxy’s brother now was coming to visit from London and was going to come stay in my new apartment for a month, so I was going to come *back* to Banovo for this time and he needed to be out of my room NO LATER than Saturday, no more extensions, is that clear? You sure? You got somewhere else to go? No kidding though, you gotta be out of here by Saturday, I’m coming back with all my stuff and there’s no other room. I will be here Saturday at 12.

As usual, he nodded, acted like he understood, yesh hokay great fine no problem, aye.

Saturday rolls around. I even packed a damn duffel bag full of clothes to make our lie seem plausible. I couldn’t believe this weirdo had reduced us to this, just to vacate him from our *own* apartment, and yet somehow we had been manipulated in our hospitality.

When I got to the apartment, Goxy was there. Mark was not. He had packed his stuff into his bag and left it by the door, with a note saying “I will be back to pick up my stuff later”. Ooookay… He had no apartment key, no CELL PHONE, and the intercom on our building didn’t work. He had basically vanished into thin air, with no way of reaching him. So now, we had to stick around in our own place waiting for him to come back. Because, best of all, you see, he had wandered off into Belgrade with my winter jacket, the most expensive piece of clothing I own, a highly necessary survival item; this was November and it was raining and freezing every single day. Lovely.

So the bastard had basically vanished into thin air into Belgrade, leaving us with no information on how to find him or get in touch with him, no clue as to when he would return, and having taken stuff from us. When we went through his bag (after 7 hours of waiting) we found several items of ours that he had tried to smuggle out, some books, a sweater, shot glasses, etc. It would be infuriating if it wasn’t all so pathetic.

We wasted the entire Saturday afternoon and night waiting around for him, and of course, he didn’t appear. The next day we called his girlfriend, the friends who had originally sent him our way, the language school he supposedly worked at (they had never heard of him), desperately trying to find where the hell he had run off to. No one had a clue. I was *not* pleased at this point. We found out then that he had previously been living with his girlfriend’s family, and that after a week, the mother had kicked him out and threatened to call the police on him for something. It would have been nice to know that before he came to us.

At this point, to speed things up, thinking we had been royally taken advantage of, we stopped playing nice and ended up finding him quickly through some not-so nice means, and made it very clear that he needed to get back to the apartment to get his stuff and bring back my jacket *now*, not tomorrow, not tonight, as soon as the bus can bring his skinny little ass back. He knew at this point he had run out of options, so he came. I was the only person home at that point, got my jacket back, gave him back his three pathetic things and sent him off into the cold with my very *best* regards.

The story doesn’t even end there. A few months later, a female friend told me about her neighbor and some terrible experience he had had with this weird foreign guy. Apparently this guy contacted him on Couchsurfing.com, had some dramatic story about how he was through through the Balkans and had just come from Albania, where they had stolen his passport and all his money, he was out of options and could he crash for a few days? The Serbian guy being a tremendously hospitable fellow, like so many here, agreed of course. Insert familiar-sounding story about weird behavior, rudeness, eating all the food, going through personal things… Eventually the Serbian guy got suspicious and first found this guy’s passport, looked through it, and of course found no trace of any visit to Albania. Mark had managed to take advantage of his hospitality for 11 days, right after he was done with us.

The vast majority of foreigners I have met here in Belgrade have all been splendid people, and their enthusiasm for this place and all it has to offer is matched by Serb’s wonderful hospitality, which is why it is really infuriating that there are fuckers like Mark out there to take advantage of them.

The only positive element to the story is that he eventually got his due; still many months later, we heard from a reliable source that he somehow ended up spending time in Serbian prison before being deported back to England.

Remember how I mentioned Goxy loses *everything*, anytime, anyplace, anyhow, no object too small or large?

This was 5 minutes ago, 2 days after New Year's 2009:

[2:45:34 PM] Goxy Whatever-ovic says:
Did you know that I lost my wallet in that shop where we bought drinks for sujas party///

I rest my case.

Yugo Joke #1

Just because yesterday's post made me nostalgic for the now-discontinued Yugo.

How do Japanese carmakers test to see if their cars are airtight, once they come off the factory assembly line?
They lock a cat in the car, and after three days, if the cat is dead from suffocation, the car is airtight.

How does Zastava test to see if a Yugo is airtight?
They lock a cat in the car, and after three days, if the cat is still IN The car, it's airtight.

Faux Pas

The biggest cultural "foot in mouth" moment I had in Serbia, thus far, involved a Yugo.
Four of us were driving to Srebreno Jezero (Silver Lake, unsure about the spelling), outside of Veliko Gradiste, near the border where crossing the Danube leads you into Romania, for a weekend of fun, relaxation and rostilji (again, I suck with Serbian spelling... BBQ). I believe it was the weekend before Easter, 2007.

Anyway, I was going with Goxy and a crew of his colleagues from [unamed big advertizing agency in BG].
We piled all our bags into the smallish car, which belonged to a very, very large guy named Branko (very amusing to watch him squeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeze into the driver's seat, then ask me to close the door HARD from the outside), and set off on the road for a cramped 3 hour drive out of Belgrade. It was all good though, and we were all excited to get out of the city for a bit.

At some point in the conversation, Goxy casually turned to me and asked:

- "Ej, check this car out, what year do you think it was made in?"

I looked around at the beaten up seats, very basic dashboard instrumentation, flimsy or non-existent seat belts, missing window rollers, scuffed up floor mats, etc... I figured, based on my own experience with cars and how much wear and tear it would take to get one to this point, that it had to be AT LEAST a decade old, possibly much more, although in relatively good condition for that age/mileage.

- "Ummmm, I dunno... I would guess about 1985 or something." I answered, thinking I was being generous. I assumed that the idea was for me to guess too recently, then they would tell me some shocking age like 1972 and then boast about how durable Yugos are or something.

There was a second of awkward silence, and they all looked at me kind of funny.

- "Brate, this car was made in 2001..."

Ouch.

Sticky Business

For the second half of my first year in Serbia, I lived in a large apartment with my initial fellow-countryman roomate (let's call him Al) and my best Serb friend, Goxy. It was all good and a fun ride while it lasted, although Al decided he had had enough of Serbia come about September and bailed on us, leaving us with a free room to use for the remaining month and a half or so left on our lease.

Being social, friendly and hospitable guys, Gox and I agreed we might as well put the room to use. As destiny or coincidence or karma or whatever would have it, very shortly after Al's departure, we met and befriended a lovely young Australian girl passing through Belgrade. She was a pretty hardcore traveller and had already put quite a lot of mileage under her shoes, and had arrived in Belgrade with a group of hippies or something and not a clue about what to do or see. They all ended up stopping by our place for a small-ish party one night, and then Gox ran into her on Knez Mihailova street a day or two later, and invited her to crash at our place while she was in Belgrade, rather than stay in hostels, an offer she gladly accepted.

She stayed for about three weeks and proved to be a wonderful roomate for that time, always positive and cheerful, fun-loving, and just generally very relaxed and pleasant to be around. She helped clean around the apartment (which was sooooooooo badly needed and appreciated), cooked a bit, and drank all our booze.
She liked to party, and I would be lying if I said she wasn't a little bit promiscuous... I don't judge though. She did get to know an impressive number of Serbian dudes in her time in Belgrade, and undeniably left with a favorable impression of the place, ha. Positive international relations...

Moving the story along... Our apartment was near our good friend Geppeto's place (see the Plastik story at the beginning of the blog), so he was often stopping by to hang out, and as these things tend to happen, a liaison formed between him and Rachel, our new roomate.
One evening, while Gox was still at work, Geppeto stopped over to get down to business with Rachel for a bit. The key element in this story was that Rachel was wearing one of Vuk's sweaters while it (apparently quite spontaneously) happened, and somehow, at the, ahem, climax, Geppeto, uuum, let's say, "desecrated" the sweater, quite significantly and frankly, impressively.
I was watching TV when they both emerged from the room looking happy, yet slightly concerned; they explained to me what had happened, and Geppeto was worried that Gox might get pissed about the sweater, and asked me what he thought he should do about it.

I told him Gox would never even notice the sweater was missing, so Geppeto should take it for a few days to wash it at his place. Gox is the single most scatterbrained person I have EVER met, bar none; his is a true creative soul, which apparently means that there are no brain cells whatsoever left in his head for remembering the location of objects. He loses things like he's paid to do it, house keys, DVDs, wallets, money, books, clothes, drugs, pets, people, maps, appointments, vehicles, food, whatever. His pockets are like a portal to another dimension, you put something inside and SHAZAM!!! It may well reappear in Beijing or Purgatory or wherever. I really am not exaggerating, it must be experienced to be believed. Gox losing something is going to be a recurring theme in many of these stories, let me warn you.

So anyway, Geppeto also agreed this was the wisest thing to do, and packed the sweater in his backpack. We all agreed to just not mention anything, and he'd return it sometime down the line all clean and that would be the end of it.
Gox came home right around then, and we all hung out and chatted in the living room for a while. He had plans to head out for the evening though, so he got up to go take a shower and get on with his evening.
Just at that moment though, through freak bad luck, he spotted the tiniest corner of his sweater protuding from Geppeto's backpack...

-" Hey, is that my sweater? Did I borrow it to you at some point?"
-"Uuuuuuuuuuuuuum, yes.... Yes, it is. " replied a totally busted and suddenly nervous Geppeto.
-" Oh great! I was looking for that the other day, I forgot where it had gone! (no kidding.) Lemme take it back, I'm gonna wear it this weekend! "

Geppeto said nothing and just pulled out the sweater and gave it to him. Rachel was looking at me with a gleefully anticipatory face that said "holy shit, this is going to be hilariously awesome!".
However, sadly, Gox never noticed a thing. He just grabbed the sweater, went to his room and apparently tossed it into some corner and took his shower. The three of us had a good "whew, that was close!" laugh about it all, Geppeto went home, and that was the last I thought about it all.

Until about a month later, that is. Rachel was long gone. It was a saturday night, and Gox and I had big plans for the evening. We had come back to the apartment after a large Serbian dinner to clean up and get prepped for the night.
As we were getting dressed, talking loudly to each other from our respective rooms, Gox noticed something.

-" Ej man, this is weird... This sweater I'm wearing has something on it, it looks like...."

I looked over to see him holding THE sweater, pressed up right to his face, sniffing the weird crusty stain deeply and scratching at it, a quizzical look on his face as he tried to figure out what it was.
The entire scene came suddenly crashing back into my memory, and I froze... I had totally forgotten about the whole thing, but now the implication of it hit me like a ton of bricks. I started laughing hysterically.

- "What, man?!?!" he said, perplexed.
-" IT IS!!!!"
-" It's what?!?"
-" What you think it is!!"
-" What?"
-" The stuff on your sweater... It's what you think it is!"
-" Huh? What?"
-" I know what you're thinking! What's on the sweater, I know what you think it is, and IT IS!!!"
-" .... Huh?! Wait...WHAT?!?! WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT, MAN!?" he said, now seriously alarmed.
-" What does it look like? WHAT DOES IT SMELL LIKE?!" I almost peed myself I was laughing so hard.
-" DON'T SHIT MAN!!! IS THIS..." he asked, horrified. He couldn't bring himself to say it.
-" YES!!! YES!!! IT IS!!! BWAHAHAHAHA!"
-" AHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!! WHAT THE FUCK!?! HOW DO YOU KNOW!?? DON'T SHIT MAN!!!!"

I quickly explained the Geppeto-Rachel crime as quickly and clearly as I could. The whole situation was so ridiculous and gross that, once the initial horror had passed, he also couldn't help but laugh at the hilarity of the whole thing.
The amusement continued still a few weeks later when we finally saw Geppeto again, who had also forgotten about the whole episode. Time heals everything, including guilty memories. Gox simply went up to him and said "I know what you did man. That was not cool." The look on his face as he REMEMBERED, OH SHIT! was really worth paying for and unforgettable.

Goxy still wears the sweater sometimes, but I can just never look at it the same.

Norwegian Heat

For the first time ever, we weren't able to get into Plastik. The usual routine of Goxy telling the doormonkeys that he had a foreign friend (me) looking for a good time didn't work, to our great surprise and consternation. The simians flatly told us we weren't going to get in that night, so we got out of the line and had a little pow wow on the side to decide what to do with the rest of our night. Getting turned away turned out to be a great stroke of luck for the entire rest of that week.

"Hey!!! You guys are speaking English!" an inquisitive voice cheerfully exclaimed behind me. I turned and saw a short, cute, exotic little ponytailed girl, and her even more diminutive chubbier friend.

They turned out to be Norwegians, part of a group of about 40 visiting political science students. They came in the wake of all the Kosovo excitement, to have all sorts of seminars and classes in Belgrade for a week.

She was half Norwegian/half Mexican, and filled with manic, bouncy positive energy and a terrific sense of humor. We all hit it off instantly, and me and Gox were more than happy to take them up on their offer to be their "party guides" in Belgrade for the week. We chatted excitedly outside of Plastik for almost two hours, oblivious to the party we were missing inside, and exchanged phone numbers at the end.

The following week lived up to its potential. Let there be no doubt, Norwegians are indefatigable party animals, and they can drink anyone under the table. Apparently, in Serbia they say "you drink like a Russian!" when you can hold your liquor. In Russia, they supposedly say "you can drink like a Swede!". And in Sweden, they say "you drink like a Norwegian!". So I guess that places them at the top of the totem pole. I can now most assuredly vouch for their party endurance.

The entire following week was filled with long nights of crazy drunken adventures all around Belgrade, meeting and making new friends and having healthy cross-cultural exchanges. We showed them the cultural side of the city during the daytime when everyone's schedules coincided, and took them out to different nightlife spots almost every night.

They were all a fantastically clever bunch, apt to discuss the intricacies of anything from Norwegian education policy to Kosovo's future status in the UN while simultaneously explaining the rules to Norwegian drinking games (and soundly beating us at them).

The group was demographics leaned heavily in favor of females, I think there were about 6 guys in the entire mob, and they all came ready to party. The local (mostly other Bg foreigners) crowd we brought along with us each night varied, and numerous romantic liaisons were attempted, with arying degrees of success.

They left us exhausted, broke, shellshocked and hungover at the end of their week, but it was all totally worth it, hands down one of the funnest weeks I've ever had in Belgrade. They stormed through the city like a flock of beautiful, exotic party butterflies, and their inevitable departure was most bittersweet.

In the end, I guess the funniest thing about it all was that it all happened because we were snubbed at the door of the club by the gorillas; had we gotten in, we probably would have simply had a few expensive, stressful and ultimately unsatisfying hours in the club and maybe never have run into them.

So, I suppose the moral of the story is that I should be grateful to the doorbaboons for being assholes to us. Belgrade irony.

A business proposal

One night, in the earlier days after my arrival, I was up late and unable to sleep due to leftover jetlag and overall mental excitement.

I decided to step out to grab a quick little snack from the kiosk at the bottom of our street. It was late, so the street was virtually empty. I saw her spot me from a distance and start moving towards, clearly intending to ask for something.

She was a young gypsy woman, short, poorly dressed and quite dirty and unkempt looking. My Serbian at that time was virtually non-existent, the most useful sentence for me at that time was "izvini, ne govorim srpski" (sorry, I don't speak Serbian). This is virtually always sufficient to deflect any unwanted impromptu conversation in Belgrade, so I dutifully used it when she stopped me and said something. I figured she was asking for money.

When I said that thought, she instead perked up, held her finger up to say "wait a sec" and after a few uuuuum and aaaaahs, found the words she was looking for.

"Umm, SEX?" she said, pointing to me, then her, then rubbing her fingers together in the international money sign, with an eager smile.

I wasn't exactly expecting that, so the surprise of it made me laugh. I politely declined and went on my way.

Mean dogs

One night, I was leaving a packed house party with a trail of friends, to go off to our next nocturnal adventure.

Leaving the house required walking through a narrow, pitch black driveway to get to the street. I was the last out the door, and so the last of our convoy.

As I walked through the driveway, I heard a strange low rumbling nearby. I guess my senses weren't so sharp given my slight drunkeness at that particular moment, so it took juuuust a bit of extra time for me to register that the sound was coming from a large dog growling... At me.

My stopping right in front of him (I still hadn't located him in the dark) to listen, combined with my hesitation about the sound, clearly made the large, nasty mutt lose his patience.

He lunged out of the dark with a loud attack bark and savagely bit me in the back of the knee.

It didn't break the skin, but it still hurt like a mofo, not to mention scared the living bejeezus out of me. I had toothy bruise marks for a week.

That is the definition of a "buzzkill".

Bizzare scene #1

Belgrade has virtually no real homeless people like you might see in any major city in the US or Europe. It does have a handful of vagrants and bums, but they're so rare that these tend to become local celebrities of a sort.

One day I was walking near the train station, a crowded, chaotic noisy area that serves as a hub for numerous bus and tram lines, along with a taxi station, hundreds of pedestrians, etc. If you ever visit Belgrade and arrive by train, this place will be your first impression of the city.

In the midst of all the hussle n' bussle, I walked by a man sitting to my left on a curb, sort of out of the way between two kiosks. I glanced at him fleetingly, noticing he was clearly some sort of vagrant; he looked like he was drinking something, but when I looked back a second time over my shoulder (along with an elderly businessman, who noticed the man at the same time as me), I realized he was holding a dirty old jerry can of something and inhaling deeply from it.

It was a bizarre and unsettling sight, right in the middle of hundreds of people going about their daily business.

The elderly business man and I shared a shocked look, we had the same reaction time and the same surprise. He then said something to me which I didn't understand but was clearly some sort of lament, and asked for my opinion or something. I just shook my head and said "strasno" (scary). He tut-tutted and exclaimed "DA! STRASNO!!" before we parted and went on with our lives.

The bum kept calmly sniffing his can.

Havana

Havana is the main club in Belgrade for afficionados of salsa & tango dancing, although it's not so exclusively dedicated to that. Located off of Knez Mihailova, the main pedestrian strip, it features an unexceptional interior and, in the summertime, a larger and more interesting outdoor area.

The atmosphere inside the club is always pretty good though. The place attracts a varied demographic, with some funny dynamics resulting.

On any given weekend night, it is of course shock full of women who are there to dance dance dance dance dance dance the night away, hopefully with some slick stud who knows the moves.

However, slick studs with moves seem to be in short supply. From what I've seen, on any given night there might be half a dozen to a dozen guys there who actually know how to dance, and half of that elite group are clearly gay. Not that the place doesn't have lots of guys, mind you; they come in droves as well, because, y'know, there's like, lots of girls in there and they go crazy for dancing! Most of these guys usually tend to gather along the walls, standing around trying to look cool. No one makes many approaches since most of the girls are dancing.

So you end up with a rather high-schoolish scene with a dancefloor packed with women, a handful of guys with moves grabbing all the attention, and a wall to wall peanut gallery of dudes watching the whole thing.

Havana is not really my type of place.

Ada

Ada is to Belgrade sort of what Central Park is to New York, I guess. It is an artificial lake/water reservoir just outside the city center nestled into a bend of the Sava river.

In the spring and summertime, Ada is where Belgraders get their outdoor time fix.

The whole area, which can be seriously crowded, teems with locals going about whatever activity they want to indulge in.

The gravel beaches fill to capacity with sunbathers or cafe-goers. The paths that line the water bustle with bicyclists, rollerbladers and pedestrians. There are tennis courts, volleyball fields, a rock climbing wall, a bungee jump, exercise facilities, football fields, a paintball arena, golf course, rowing/crew clubs, paddleboats, a tiny waterpark, well used BBQ pits, restaurants, and even some clubs that are quite popular in the summer months.

It's pretty much impossible not to have a nice time there, whatever you're doing, and this is testified by the thousands that go there pretty much any day that brings pleasant weather.

Heat

Close calls don't get much more lucky than this.

I was having drinks and hanging out with Gox in a run down but popular bar called Idiot. We bumped into a Belgian friend of mine when we arrived, and after some chit chat, we all decided to discreetly roll a joint from the stash me and Gox had acquired earlier that evening.

We all agreed to meet outside to smoke it.

Me and Gox went first; we had spotted the cop car stopping in front of Idiot on our way in, and the cops staring at us, so we were highly wary of being in possession. In a quick moment of extremely wise paranoia, Gox quickly tucked away the packet of weed into a dark corner next to the entrance door. Seconds later, as we stepped up the stairs (the entrance is down some stairs, after you pass a small outside seating courtyard), we bumped almost head first into a full quad patrol coming in to check out the bar.

I had a few seconds to grab my phone and pretend to be speaking into it loudly in English. Gox vanished, so I was the first person they ran into. I pulled a quick dumb, happy-go-lucky dumbass drunk foreigner routine which distracted them long enough for Gox to run into the bathroom and hide the joint in his pocket. Fast thinking on everyone's part.

Once they figured out I was just some "dumb drunk foreigner" unworthy of any suspicion, one cop gave me a big genuine grin and said "Dasvidanja!" in Russian (don't ask me why, I'm not Russian...) with a thumbs up, so my little act clearly worked.

The cops were looking for someone with a car and the Belgian had spotted few nasty fights earlier elsewhere in the city, so they obviously weren't looking for us and we went under the radar until they left and went back across the street, still waiting outside Idiot.

Realizing that they were looking for someone specific and that we were now above suspicion, we took advantage of the situation to "stealthily" smoke the joint right there in their plain view, just 10 meters from them . That was a bold Belgrade first for me.

Had Gox not hidden the stash at that EXACT moment though, or had the cops walked up just 2 seconds earlier, they would have actually spotted him hiding the stuff and god knows how it would have turned out. Lucky night for us.

Family Values

I was standing in the back of a crowded bus going into the center of the city. We reached a stop and a gypsy family got on.

There was the father, followed by an extremely pregnant wife carrying a young toddler.

The buses in Belgrade have single seats that are reserved for the elderly/handicapped/women with little kids. One man sitting in one these seats, upon seeing the pregnant woman, courteously stood up and offered his place.

Only, instead of the woman and child, the father actually sat down, leaving his pregnant wife standing and still holding their toddler. They rode the entire way into the center like that.