aah... I'm getting annoyed at myself now. I'm not keeping up with this blog at all. But anyway, what happened after Belgrade? We went on to Budapest, via Romania (we had to clean the car due to the laws against dirty cars), and into Hungary!
Budapest wasn't so bad to go around. Our hostel was just outside the city, but we had to find the tram. And the stops were difficult, because we knew no word of Hungarian. It was also difficult to explain why we didn't have any tickets for the underground. We had no coins. There was no official around for us to buy tickets from, and so we lost 20 Euros (or the equivalent) each! But anyway, Budapest is a great city. Big, though... or maybe we just thought that from all the walking throughout the day! haha! Anyway... another interesting thing happened.
Outside the Parliament building, there is a big square (complete with the usual group of demonstrators), and at the edge of this square, there are three wooden crosses. They were separated from the square by a low chain fence thing. But anyway, no matter how careful I was trying to be not to trip over this chain, I tripped over! And to break my fall, I went to lean on one of these crosses and tilting it over. Luckily, it didn't fall and it was light enough to put back right again!
hm... what else happened? Nothing special, I guess. We just went all over the place! The next day, we went to Lake Balaton on the way to Bratislava. It is such an amazing lake. Massive, too! erm... I can't think of what to sat about it, really... but here are some photos, from Romania, Budapest and Balaton, and one out towards Bratislava. There is about 20 of them...
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.
June 2009? Pfft... it’s been a while, and where has the time gone? Well, if there are any readers anymore, I would like to apologise to you. Just been a bit busy in the past year and that was mostly uni. But now that’s finally over and done with, I can get back onto updating this dusty, forgotten crevice of the web!
But, before I go on to what I am up to these days, I thought I’d enlighten the uneducated on how the trip around Eastern Europe went, and I shall try to remember the events that unfolded! I think a consultation with last year’s humble diary is in order... and I’ll put on some Beethoven to get in the writing mood!
Let’s see... the last time I posted was about entering Serbia and making our way to Belgrade. It was Day 7 (still), and after the bureaucratic bother at the border, we could finally make good progress to the capital city of Serbia and also what used to be Yugoslavia.
The countryside of western Serbia was very much like that in Srpska: mountainous, sparsely populated and bad roads, though very much picturesque, and naturally I stopped a few times to take a few photographs.
And has anyone heard of a hitchhiker who doesn’t want to get picked up? Well, we found one about ten miles outside Belgrade. For a couple of miles, there was a car behind us, despite it being clapped out, rusty and just plain old, it was being driven a bit erratically and sometimes got a bit too close for comfort behind us. Anyway, as I was coming up to a garage on the opposite side of this wide road, I thought I’d call in for a bit. I pulled over onto the side of the road to wait for traffic to clear and suddenly, the frantic driver behind me skidded to a halt in front of me. The words ‘hijack’ and ‘Serbian Mafia’ came to mind. A passenger got out, walked towards my car and stopped. He just stood there as if he were waiting for something. Anyway, the old car drove off and I crossed the road to park in the garage opposite.
Soon we realised that he was waiting for a lift, and after some consideration, we decided to ask him where he was going and whether he wanted a lift into Belgrade. With his poor English, he went “no, thanks you. No speak English, I want Serbia speak.”
Fair enough, then. I think it’s one of few hitchhikers who had ever refused a lift, though I can understand the reasons being the language barrier. And maybe he wanted to take in the dusty, roadside environment for a bit longer.
And so, finally we arrived in the Serbian capital after a somewhat interesting drive, with crazy truck drivers who thought it normal and safe to overtake slower (or so they underestimated) vehicles, which were often in a similar or better physical condition, when going around bends, and in the countryside of Serbia, there are many narrow and bendy roads traversing along the sides of the winding valleys.
Hostel Centar will be the new home for the next two nights...
