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").