Impressions of Belgrade – February

Impressions of Belgrade – February – March 2004

Meeting Ivan:
We arrived in Belgrade amid a gray cloud of smoke and car exhaust, navigating our way over roads filled with potholes and trash. It was not easy trying to avoid the potholes and the slippery slush when there was no shoulder on the road there was a steady stream of cars flowing towards the inner city. We crossed a bridge and saw dilapidated boats on the river below through the thick cloud of gray fog. We arrived at the tourist office in the center of the city after struggling up several steep hills. The buildings were quite ugly – stark, plain, without any sort of architectural interest. Window air-conditioning units hung out of some of the windows. Architecturally, the ugliest city we’ve seen so far.

I waited with the bikes while Stephane went into the tourist office to look for information on hostels and apartments. He came back shortly, for the office was closed for the day. In the meantime, however, I had met someone, a tall man in black who wanted to know where I was from. I turned around at the sound of his voice, surprised by his excellent English and American accent. We talked, and then when I asked him about how to find an apartment for the month, he told us he’d check around for us and to call him around 10:00 in the evening. (We needed to find an apartment because I was to go back to Paris for a couple of weeks while Stephane waited for me in Belgrade. To read about my trip back to Paris, go to the entry entitled “Back to Paris…”).

We spent the next several hours searching all over town for a hostel or hotel for the night. It was a search that proved long, tiresome, and fruitless because all the cheap hotels were full. We finally found a room for 20 Euros, expensive considering it was dirty, not vacuumed, had no toilet, and there were big holes in the sheets. But it was our only choice at that point and we were glad to take it. We spent the next couple of hours trying unsuccessfully to call around about apartments that we had seen advertised in a magazine that we had bought.

At 10:00, we called Ivan and had good news. We could stay with his family. Usually his father rented the apartment in the basement of the house, but since no one was there at the moment, he said we could stay as long as we wanted until the end of March, when friends from Finland would be coming. So we biked through town, up to his neighborhood on the top of one of Belgrade’s many hills. The apartment was perfect – had a wood-burning stove, a toilet, and a shower. We bought wood, chopped it up, and stored it in the shed out back behind the house.

About the tall man in black. His name is Ivan, and he is a musician who currently plays in bars around town. He is the ex-drummer from the band “Katherine the Great,” Yugoslavia’s most popular rock band during the mid-80’s. He played with the group between 1984-87, after which time he went to work in England, then Holland, then spent several years studying in Iowa. He is the only surviving member of the band; all the others are dead from heroine or AIDS. Ivan is young at heart. Most of his friends are rock musicians who are 20 years younger than he is. We were shocked when his mother told us he was 45 years old; we had been convinced that he was no older than 35.

First Impressions of Belgrade:
As I already mentioned, our first impressions of Belgrade were of large potholes; bad roads with no shoulders; tremendous pollution and noxious exhaust coming from ancient cars; uninteresting and even ugly buildings; large blocks of apartment buildings in the suburbs and outer city; soldiers, soldiers, and more soldiers; add to that their brother policemen; and just a general impressions of everything being gray. The town, the streets, the buildings. The air, the river, the people. Gray. Drab.

As we rode to Ivan’s house, more impressions were added. First of all, innumerable kiosks that lined both sides of the road, adding some color and activity to the otherwise complete blanket of gray that seemed to smother the town. In addition, there was a very busy public transport system – constant buses and trams, which followed tracks alongside the main roads. The town has a general chaotic felling, as of little ants scurrying every which way. There doesn’t seem to be any feeling of direction or order. People cross the street at any time and whenever they feel like it, not worrying about if the light is green or if they’re crossing at a crosswalk or even at a corner. They run in front of traffic (which is okay because the drivers expect it). Trams go by on the tracks designated for them, and cars follow on the tracks, passing slower cars or parked cars on the right-hand side. Cars park temporarily on the street at any moment they like, which means that the two-lane street is in effect a one-lane road. The drivers come back to their cars and pull straightaway into traffic or follow on the tram tracks.

As a cyclist, you are confronted with cars that stop suddenly in front of you, without any warning, with drivers who open their car doors without looking, with buses who breathe down your neck, with tramcars who pass a hairbreadth’s away from you, and with pedestrians who don’t hesitate to step into the street just as you’re passing. It’s like a video game, and you’re not sure if you win more points by hitting or avoiding the obstacles. All this while sweating to make it up one of Belgrade’s steep, steep hills.

For the hills are another hallmark of this city. And steep ones, at that. It’s like you have to be a mountain goat to live here. Ivan says it’s the hills of Belgrade that make the people so crazy.

Another thing we saw was a big military building downtown with enormous holes blown in the side of it by the air strikes of ’99. Stephane said it made the bombings and destruction in Croatia look like child’s play in comparison. Then again, the Serbian bombing in Vukovar covered almost every building in the town, whereas the bombing in Belgrade was focused on the military buildings.

By the time we had reached Ivan’s neighborhood in the outer circle of Belgrade, we had noticed a few other things. The first and most obvious was the number of police officers and soldiers. They’re crawling everywhere, as if the country is under invasion. First thing you notice in the country, really. They can stop you at any time, for any reason, and demand to see ID or ask you where you’re going. Ivan says they harass innocent people because they’re too afraid to deal with the real criminals! We were stopped the first night, but let by without problem. Another thing was the residential streets lined with abandoned cars, which were left rusting and without tires to die a slow death. Even the stray cats and dogs disdained to use these sorry cars as shelter during the winter. Next to these ancient cars could be seen trash scattered about unceremoniously. It could be seen everywhere. In the alleyways, along main city streets, in parks – trash of all sorts left by people too lazy to throw it in a trashcan. Some of it floated in the wind. Lastly was the smell of burning garbage, the putrid smoke affronting your nostrils as it wafted down the street from the common trash receptacles which all neighbors shared. As you walked by, scavenging cats would often jump out of the bins and scurry off.