But anyway... Belgrade. That’s where I left off!
So, two nights in Hostel Centar, situated on a busy main road going into the city centre. And the room? Well, it was a dorm (with internet access!) on the third floor of an old-looking building. We got there before everyone else arrived, and found these two beds (basically, they were only the mattresses) shoved on this balcony thing above the room, accessible by a ladder. It was a cosy place to stay; it was above the windows and in the ceiling area, where it was sloped due to the roof being there. During the night was warm, though... it was probably the position of the mattress beds, and when the morning came with the Sun beating down on the roof, it was surely becoming an oven!
But anyway, we weren’t going to stay there all day. We got a city to see. And getting there by foot wasn’t too bad. It took a good few minutes, but it was easy enough. We got to the Sava River, just before it joins the mighty Danube, and there, berthed on the banks, were the most rustic and poor conditioned boats I have ever seen. To be honest, I don’t know what they were. They were boats, but didn’t look as if they were. They were more like old buildings or abandoned warehouses that floated alongside the riverbank.
We made our way towards the fortress on top of the hill. The fortress, Kalemegdan, whose site has been occupied over thousands of years, stood on the hill overlooking the confluence of the two rivers running through Belgrade and overlooking to two main areas of the city, New Belgrade on the opposite side of the River Sava, where the banks and high-rise offices are based, and Old Belgrade, where the cultural and historical parts of the city lay.
The fortress was in between these areas, so all walks of life could be found passing through the fortress and the park within its walls. There are people sunbathing on the lower walls of the fortress, old men playing chess in the shade of the trees and kids asking people like us for a couple of Serbian Dinars to buy some ice cream and people on stalls selling Serbian stuff and Serbian fruit wine, which I still have a bottle of!
After a few hours wondering around the city centre, passing old concrete buildings with signs in Cyrillic, and old car with a Christmas greeting on the bonnet and lots of battered and rusty trolleybuses, we headed back to the hostel to change and ask the guy at reception about somewhere to eat. He suggested the ‘Mark of Question’. We were a bit confused about this, but when we got there, this place actually had no real name, but the place was actually called ?. But it looked nice enough... it was busy, too. The menu was also interesting. After asking the waiter what this dish was, he said it was basically bull testicles. Unfortunately, it wasn’t available that night, so I settled for simple goulash. Still good, though! But I couldn’t tell anybody that my food was a load of bollocks...
But soon after the food and a couple of glasses of local beer, we headed back. It was going to be a long day to Budapest the next day.
