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.