Belgrade
My first experience with Serbia was good; I changed 100 euro and got 8,020 Serbian Dinars; I felt rich with a big wad of high denomination notes in my pocket. So they weren’t worth much…oh well, take the small pleasures were you can find them.
The hostel wasn’t bad, other than the outside of the dreary and dirty building that is. It was an apartment with three big rooms for beds, one bathroom (sans toilet), two tiny toilet/showers, a tiny common room, and a little kitchen. When I say toilet/shower, I mean exactly that—they are toilets with a hand held shower head next to them so you shower while sitting on the toilet. There was barely enough room in there to use the toilet let alone shower in there. At least using the washing machine, next to the dishwasher in the kitchen, was free. The two brothers running the place were happy to share the traditional Serbian plum brandy that they drank all night long. They didn’t like seeing people with empty glasses and were quick to refill for us. I calculated the rate of consumption with the time before I went to bed and decided that it was a major hangover in the making, and wisely switched to water. Besides, I kept losing at chess and I thought (mistakenly) that drinking less than my opponent would change the odds.
I wasn’t over impressed with the city in general. The rambling hilltop citadel was converted into an excellent park and is a great place to walk and relax. Not much to see though other than the military museum and it had a very unexpected effect on me. Now, I grew up wanting to be a ninja, played fighting games all my life, and have always had a manly fascination with weapons, but a few of things in the museum made me feel differently. There was one drawing of a guy with ropes around his ankles being pulled over a thick sharpen post, skewering him from the bottom through his neck, like a human shish kebab. The incredible human cruelty through the ages is disgusting. The big highlight of the museum are the bits of the American stealth fighter that was shot down by the Serbs. They are very proud of that. The other big thing is the bits of the cluster bomb that NATO dropped on them. They complain about how horrible the act was without ever mentioning why they were bombed. I'll get to that later.
The best thing in Belgrade is the Nikola Tesla museum (he was born there). Tesla was a frickin’ genius. He invented the AC motor among many other things. Much of the technology in our daily lives uses Tesla’s inventions. The museum had all sorts of cool machines like the one that has a brass egg (non-ferrous and thus non-magnetic) as a free rotor in an electric motor, causing it to spin like a top above a metal plate (you had to see it). The best part was the machine that generated half a million volts of electricity and made huge sparks. We all had a four foot fluorescent tube to hold and when the (deafening) machine came on, the tubes lit up like they were plugged in. Very cool and a little scary. Tesla had some wild ideas at a time when the world was not overly ready for them. As shown in the movie, The Prestige, Tesla transmitted electricity through the ground from Colorado Springs, lighting up a field of light bulbs 40 kilometers away. The only problem was the he was a genius in science, not business, and ended up dying poor even though other people made untold fortunes off his ideas. You can look up the Tesla Museum on the internet for more info.
