Population: 1.7 million
From Zagreb, I decide that since I'm oh so close tot eh rest of the former Yugoslavia it'd be a shame not to profit from the proximity. Ideally I'd love to tag on Sarajevo and Belgrade to my voyage, but I realize the time would not be conducive to that plan, seeing as they are both a good ten hours from each other and Zagreb, so I decide to head further east instead of south to Sarajevo and buy a one-way ticket to Belgrade, Serbia. No expectations, no planned outings, no hostel arrangements. Great. Train from Zagreb to Belgrade- mostly farmland, brown occasionally green, occasional brush near the train tracks, but since the train left at 6 am I did get to see the sun rise, or more specifically just the cirrus clouds brighten and the sky slowly drift into a bright blue from the dark of nothingness. Towns passed: Ivanic Grad, Srinec, Kutina, Ilova, Banora Jaruga, Nova Gradiska, Nova Kapela-Batina, Slavorski-Brod, Andrijevci, Strizivojna-Vrpolje, Vinkovci, Ruma Pyma, Stara Pazova. Passed sheperds herding a flock of sheep, some pastures of horses and cattle, kids waiting at the track crossing with their backpacks, waving at the train as it passed, the countryside on this ride was more muted colors, faded greens and browns than the last ride. Lots more houses near the tracks, all of that clay/stucco like material and usually white, with a tile roof that was wavy and looked unstable, houses loked generally in worse shape than on previous rides, additions to houses or little shacks in the fields made out of wood and tin roofs, rotted wood, near the border there were all these random little towers like you'd see on the top of fortresses that looked half buried in the ground, maybe ten feet talll, but not demarcating anything at all...maybe every couple of miles. Once we hit Serbia the signs started being in the Roman alphabet and the Cyrillic one, which was cool to look at at first but once I actually got to Serbia it was really confusing and I can't see how they do it, I think they must just use the cyrillic alphabet and have some touristy signs in the roman because the street signs were cyrillic but my map had them marked in roman so I had no idea where I was on the map most of the time. Another good reason for me not planning this voyage. About halfway through the voyage the train stops...always disconcerting...and BCA starts. BCA = Border Crossing Anxiety. I'd read stories on the internet of the abruptly rude border crossing guards and people getting kicked off the train for not having the right papers and they'd be stranded in the middle of nowhere, one foot in Croatia and the other who knows where...and of all the countries for me to have this happen I didn't doubt Serbia would be most likely, but for all that it was fine. The guy asked me where I was going and for how long, he radioed in to HQ which was odd and said my full name over the walkie talkie, but then he gave me a stamp and kept going. Once we passed a little hut with a landing pad and helicopter on it, sometimes there were piles of trash, old mattresses near the tracks, the lady sitting across from me looked normal, stylish, got on at the first Serbian post, then I noticed that she was mising the top part of one of her middle fingers and the ring finger next to it had a really deformed nail..hmmm. When things were translated from Serbian they were always in French and German, no English. So the train rolls in to Belgrade after passing real shanty towns on the opposite sides of the tracks, where there were lots of people and the huts with tarp roofs with tires on them were packed together in a little valley, there were bunches of kids playing with sticks, get off the train at Belgrade and I definitely feel like this city is in need of some beautification planning and structure. Right as you step out of the train station you get harassed by guys saying 'Taxi, taxi" which is annoying, then they're literally no crosswalks anywhere and you have to cross this street with two tram tracks and five lanes for cars going everywhich way and that was scary, the whole city was very dirty and apart form the main shopping street the buildings were grungy, there weren't even street signs to help you find your way, and the buildings were all just constructions of rectangles and nothing much to look at. I'm not sure what kind of feel I was supposed to have of the city- more Eastern, Turkish, Middle Eastern, but in general I didn't have the sense of it being anything unique. Food also was not too pleasing, yes they had kebabs and falafel but so did Zagreb and now Budapest, and I got this thing called Burek which was a giant friend pie with layers of dough and some cheese stuffed in it and they cut you a big slice that is sooooooo greasy it's not funny, it was the closest thing to cheese pizza I happened to find. Also bought this brownie at a place that looked like Paul's in France, expecting it to be amazing, but it was not, very bland and dry. So what was cool in Serbia? The park with the fortress, obviously. Fortresses are always cool. This one beat out the one in Ljubljana by a long shot, it was a lot bigger and you could walk on top of the fortified walls and walk into the little crevices that were bulit for the cannons to peak out of and shoot (they're still there) and if you walked to the back of the fortress it overlooked where the two main rivers meet and the hillside view of the back of the city was beautiful, then there was this big statue of some guy, not sure who, that was at the peak and he was looking out at the junction of the rivers...that's the picture I got on my postcard of Belgrade to remember. There was also a little belltower and two stone gates that you walked through to get in....built in the 1700s but the fortress itself was built before then. They were actually rebricking part of the outer gate when I was walking through it. And in one part of the fortress near the western side there was an old Roman well that you'd take steps to go down and see but it was closed for research purposes for a while. The fortress was cool because it was clearly built into the earth, the different layer of wall just sort of sprung up as you walked up or down a slope and in the middle of the park that was inside the main walls you could tell that you were walking on top of rooms below you inside the fortress, you saw the windows into them when you looked at the terrain that sloped downwards and had a protecting wall. Part of it was turned into a military museum so there were lots of tanks and cannons at the entrance gate, most of which looked freshly painted but I think they were a little older, though who knows, they may have been in Kosovo a few years ago. (it's so weird to think I was in a warring country or a country that is still having civil unrest, just because I've been watching Kosovo in the news for so long). Then just outside the fortress was a nice park still overlooking the side of the river, with busts of famous people and a World War I statue and old men playing chess on tables and guys selling popcorn and ice cream (Jadzia you'd be in heaven with the amount of popcorn sold here, eveyone's eating a little baggy with Mickey Mouse on the front) :)
So then I just walked around the city a bunch, down the main shopping street with stnads selling traditional things and then big brand namestores, they had a cool cultural center/store where I got notebooks with art deco style covers and cyrillic sayings on them and a mug with the same retro designs, in the middle of the street there were guys with cages with little puppies in them and I think they were collecting money for animal shelters, you did on some non-main roads and in the park see random dogs just laying there, they ddint' look mangy or starving and there weren't that many they were rather cute but I think they must have a stray problem. I walked through the "Bohemian Quarter" which is just a street made of big stones (so it's uneven/hard to walk on) with lots of little cafes and there's one building that stretches half the length of the street that's painted to lok like another street with grassy patches and trees and it was okay, nothing too great on that street, and it wasn't packed or anything like the bustling business of Zagreb. The idea of a bohemian quarter was cooler than the reality. Everyone in the food stores I went in, like the bakery, once they found out I spoke english asked where I was from and were pleased/surprised to hear me say America, actually the three people who said that then said they'd been there or had a family member/friend there and asked what i was doing in Serbia, etc etc, so the restaurant business/bakery business employees were friendlier/more interesting than in the other cities, but that may have been because they don't really ever get American tourists. I saw this random church that was small/dark inside and really not in any particularly nice style, the main square was okay again nothing special/beautiful, there was a Student's park which was small but at least green with a few little statues, and another park that was okay with some flowers but I was too confused about where I was to fully appreciate the greenery, plus the distance between it and the extremely busy/loud/noisy street was not enough to change the ambience to pleasant without some serious mental concentration. I left my stuff at this sketchysketchy hostel right across fromt eh train station because I wasn't sure if I was going to stay overnight or not, but this hostel was tiny and on the sixth floor of this really weird building with an old elevator witht he double door system and the city wasn't too appealing so I decided to leave asap aka on the 10 pm train, regardless of the eerie stories i'd heard about overnight trains. Plus an overnight train is just cool to do once or twice in your life, saves ten bucks too. So I walked and walked and ended up having four hours to kill at the train station which was also connected to the bus station, which had more people so I decided to sit in a cafe and use up my last dinaras (85 to 1 euro) in this cafe which had great signs for banana splits and milk shakes (milk seik in serbian, een without the picture i got htat) and when i ordered a milk shake, after some serious communication issues trying to have a minute to decide what i wanted, i got a fervous head nod no to my polite request. Turns out they had NONE of the delicious looking desserts on their boards and really just had some cakes that were in the glass display and coffee, tea, apple juice, coke, and fanta, which were in a fridge in front of the counter. Apple juice instead then. But since I had nothing better to do and didn't want to look aimlessly out the window at the strange people walking by the bus station, I was actually super productive and read a lot of this french book I have to read for class, and drank some non-sweet apple juice (purer I guess, though I prefer the sugary stuff) and some tea that was also not good because I put too much lemon in it (and i realize that is a very inconsequential detail, from now on I'l leave out these lame food and drink descriptions)...there was a lot of stuff open 24 hours in belgrade which is always convenient and i appreciate a lot, so I'll give them a point for that...so four hours somehow passes and I go to the train station and hop on the train, which has those random six person cabins again and all have someone in it, and I'm trying to be safe so I see these two guys around my age with backpacks in one car and I'd heard them speaking English. Tap tap, excuse me can I sit with y'all? Yes, safety. (PS-additional detail I see in my notes, Nikolas Tesla the inventor/patentor/i think he made electricity or he was in that movie The Prestige is a demi-god and greatly revered in his birthplace of Belgrade, whereas I didn't see any squares named after modern heros again, though I'll admit the only modern leader I know is Milosevic (and tito) and there could have been squares that I missed in my short short, nine hour journey to Belgrade (aka Beograd aka whatever it is in cyrillic).
So the night train was infinitely better and safer than expected, I hung out with this Canadian guy and Israeli who had met up in Budapest, both were the go with the flow see the world say no to bosses type (the canadian was a cook out of high school, the israeli was a little older but he had his own computer company and never went to college either) and he had spent four years traveling around southeast asia, the first ten months he just slept outside in a tent and biked around japan on a bike he found in the garbage...ridic. They were both actually coming from Ukraine and told me great things so now I'd like to get to Lvov if possible (Odessa moreso but that's super far east). And the Israeli had GPS on his blackberry thing so we could track where we were on the train and all the places we'd been. They had this newly established 'tradition' of eating a Bueno bar every time they were waiting for a mode of transport or had a free minute of transition..Bueno bars are Kinder products they're like chocolate and wafers with hazelnut filling, delicious, so they shared their Bueno bars with me and we talked about traveling and life in our different corners of the world and such and such, how the world is slowly going to just become one big state and how cool southeast asia is and the cooking business and ukrainian hot women and how neither of them like western europe because it's too touristy and the same as where they're from (i disagree, but to each his own)...eventually around 2 am we got to the border and got out passports stamped, then after that we went to sleep on the chairs that pulled out to form a chaise/couch like thing and we were awoken at 5 am by someone knocking on our cabin shouting "Budapest!" and we were there-yay!! I have no idea what was out our window on the ride but I'm assuming more countryside. Rub my eyes awake, stretch, put on my shoes (which do not smell so hot by now, I'm walking like six miles a day), grab my purse and adidas bag (the boys said I didn't look like abackpacker because of the bag and not a backpack, locals carry those sports bags on train trips.....k) and hopped off the train, parted ways with my travel buddies, and walked into the rainy streets of Hungary!!
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