Serbia is my country no 38 (when the hell did that happen?) and so far I must say I’m really positively surprised. Already when my flight was descending towards Belgrade airport I could admire straight and colourful fields, sinuous rivers and finally the whole city below me (I was yet again with sitting on the right side of the plane ;)) and I really liked what I saw. After getting the stamp in my passport *yay* I finally was free to go and explore the city. But before I had to get here… Sadly the public transport between the airport and the city is really poor, there’s one bus and it goes every 40 minutes or so – of course I had to wait that long as I’ve missed the ealier bus by only 2 minutes… oh well, I could sit in the sun and look at people – something I really like in foreign countries. And I must say Serbians are a really good looking nation :)

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The journey by bus took a while as well, over 40 minutes. I always look forward to the journeys out of the airport when I’m in a new city so I can look around and prepare myself to what might happen next. This journey to the center of Belgrade was pretty boring to be honest… First there were just fields around (and they didn’t look that nice from the ground level;)) and then random blocks of flats, similar to these we have in Poland. Finally we crossed the Sava river and we were in the center. It was also the terminus of the airport bus. Here the scenery changed for more varied one! Art noveau buildings, mixed with baroque houses, mixed with soviet style buildings, mixed with destroyed during the Balkans war buildings…I really didn’t know where to look, everything was so interesting! But first I needed to get to the hostel I’ve booked for this one night here. And again my orientation won big time as with a really bad map I found my way around just like that :) So good I had the first Russian class yesterday, it reminded me of cyrylic letters and it’s such a great use here!

After I left the backpack I was ready to explore the city. But before I had to get the seat reservation for tomorrow’s train to Bar, Montenegro. I was prepared to deal with so many unreasonable problems but it all went really smoothly! I only had to change the counter 3 times, don’t really know why, but it wasn’t such a big deal, alltogether it took me 5 minutes! :) Again, the big help was the language – Polish and Serbian belong to the same group of languages and I didn’t know it’s gonna be that similar! I understand all the basics without much problem. And when I speak Polish (like numbers etc) people around are extremely happy that I can speak their language ;) I guess I’ll just leave English behind here and will use my mix of Polish and Czech instead ;)

So I finally could set off to see the city properly. Camera in my hand, the map in my pocket I only had around 3-4 hours of the daylight to explore Belgrade. I created a quick itinerary, focused on places I’d like to see the most, and that would be a bohemian street Skadarska, main pedestrain street Knez Mihailova and the Kalemegdan Fortress. All of these places were so interesting to wander around and so different from each other. I plan to write a seperate entry about each of them so don’t want to spoil the whole fun for you. To keep the long story short I enjoyed everything much more that I had ever expected! I really like how lively this city is, how many people are around, just strolling down the streets and parks, there’re really crowds! And all of that on Tuesday afternoon, that’s amazing! In Poland you’d find people in the shopping centers or in hipster locals and here they just meet each other in the parks and spend the time outside. It’s not the first time I see a similar phenomenon and each time I’m just jealous ;)

[irp posts=”19972″ name=”Uzice, Serbia – a surprisingly pleasant city”]

What I also really like here is that literally on every corner you can find bakeries selling delicious pasrties (borek!!!!) or just pizza slices. I got so full of these I didn’t need any dinner afterwards. And the price is an advantage too. And ice-creams, so good, so cheap and so easy to find!

Tomorrow morning I’m taking the train to the seaside of Montenegro. It’ll be a long journey, 11 hours, but since Belgrade-Bar is known as one of the most scenic railways routes in the world I’m sure I won’t bo bored! I’ll probably just spend my time looking aimlessly outside the window at the beautiful landscape. And it’s not like I haven’t taken any long train journeys before. Right now I’m just happy I’ll have few more hours in Belgrade at the end of my journey, to wander around a little bit more or just look at the new city and Sava and Danube rivers meeting…

If you think of visiting Serbia or just want to read more about the country take a look what else I wrote about it!

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