Srbija!

Much as I love the nomadic lifestyle, I was relieved on Tuesday to arrive home again, albeit a new home where James and I were, at least for the first night, sans apartment or mobile or any other signifiers of a life. My first view of Belgrade, the said new home, was not overly promising, as we arrived in the middle of a thick fog when no one could see more than half a metre in front of them, and the ground was covered in snow and treacherous ice (I saw at least four Belgraders come to grief on it, which only seemed to amuse them...) If I wanted to be poetic a could say the fog was a good metaphor for my own semi-blindness in a new country, but really it was just annoying as I was impatient to explore Belgrade having heard so much about it from James and Serbian friends.

Luckily, by yesterday the fog had lifted and we had a beautiful day wandering around and exploring before we moved into our new apartment in the evening. Belgrade is both as run down and derelict as I expected, and as vibrant and festive feeling as I had been led to believe by friends who had been here. The best way I could think of to describe Belgrade (having just come from St Petersburg) was the Dublin of the Balkans - not as pretty as the other showcase cities of Eastern Europe, but much friendlier, cheaper, and more quirky. The main legacy of centuries of Turkish rule is a plethora of great cafes, a relief after the hell of drinking coffee in Rossija. Everyone here seems to spend their time, as far as I can tell, sitting in cafes chatting and waiting for the bars to open so they can go, drink rakija and dance the night away. As a result of this, the city has the vaguely romantic yet decaying look about it, as no one seems to want to take the time to clean it up. That said, the few really tourist-tastic sites in Belgrade live up to their hype - we spent the afternoon yesterday wandering around Kalemegdan, the most ancient site in the city. This is where the Romans built a fort in the first century AD, which was later turned into a medieval stronghold and has been crumbling and being rebuilt ever since. One of the great benefits of the aforementioned aversion Belgraders seem to have to beautifying their city is that, with sites like Kalemegdan, what you see is what you get - no one rebuilt it in faux-gothic style in the early twentieth century or anything. You really are wandering over an ancient fort and the effect is magical, something heightened by the position of the site which is on a promontary overlooking the confluence of the Sava and Danube rivers, the two great Serbian waterways. I wanted to add a picture we took while tripping through the ruins yesterday but unfortunately my camera isn't hooking up to my computer properly at the moment, so here is one not taken by me to give you a feel for the place...



The big news in Belgrade at the moment is the Presidential election, due to take place in ten days. Having just come from a Russia gripped with election fever, I felt a distinct sense of deja vu when I was confronted by the election posters advertising Boris Tadic (incumbent President and quasi-liberal) and Tomislav Nikolic (the candidate for the Serbia Radical Party, which is led by Vojislav Šešelj - Šešelj cannot run for president as he is currently on trial for war crimes in the Hague...) Unlike the Russian election, the result of this one is not a foregone conclusion - though Tadic is likely to win, Nikolic has a lot of support. Flicking through the Serbian television news last night I saw campaign speeches on ten of the fifteen channels, and many people interviewed on the news were voicing their support for the Radicals. Time will tell what the result will be...and what the affect of that result will be on the negotiations regarding Kosovo.