Belgrade, Serbia

Tuesday, May 27

After leaving Timisoara, it did not take long for us to reach the border and cross back into Serbia.  With the re-entry, we reclaimed the hour we'd lost when in Bulgaria and Romania, and reached Belgrade early enough to visit the close-in suburb of Zemun, where we took in the view from the hilltop tower at the Gardos fortress.
We were at our apartment in Belgrade by noon and had lunch there; we're on the top (13th) floor of one of those Soviet-era "workers' paradise" apartment blocks that are among the least attractive architectural features of this part of the world.  

Despite their unappealing exteriors, each of the apartments we've stayed in such buildings on this trip and a previous one has been bright, comfortable, updated, sometimes spacious, and a pleasant surprise.  Our apartment here was billed as a studio, but we've got a separate (very tiny) kitchen, a balcony overlooking the city, and even a washing machine and dishwasher.

We spent the afternoon walking, first up the nearby Knez Mihailova, which is a long pedestrian boulevard lined with cafes, restaurants, and shops housed in beautiful old buildings; it was lively and lovely.  When the pedestrian zone gave way to busy city streets, we continued walking, past the Art Nouveau Hotel Moskva, where a small crowd of people were gathered in groups of four or five playing some kind of game, or betting, that involved checking pages full of numbers against the information on packs of small cards. 

 We could make neither heads nor tails out of it, but that, after all, is another game!  We walked on past the city council building and the presidential palace, beautiful buildings separated by a fine park, and wound up at the massive St. Sava, the largest Orthodox church in the world.  The interior space is enormous, but almost completely bare.  Pillars, icons, arches (even in the high gallery of the huge dome), and walls are all sheathed in plastic, and the construction, begun in 1985, continues.

We walked back through the city to the Kalmegdan Citadel, the fortress commanding the bluff above the confluence of the Danube and Sava Rivers.  The fortification has been destroyed over 40 times since the Celts first fortified the area in pre-Roman times.  Now, the citadel complex is part of a large, leafy park at the end of  Knez Mihailova that now includes museums, the zoo, tennis courts and a soccer field (in the moat!) and lots of strollers and others taking in the  river views. 

The Belgrade that we've seen thus far has surprised us with an urban vibe that feels like Western European cities.  Lots of parks, impressive buildings, and people out and about; it looks good to us, from our bird's eye view, and at street level.