Mar
10
There is a good amount of Nikola Tesla pride in Belgrade/Serbia. They have a Tesla museum, that is mostly under construction, which contains various Tesla related items such as some models (built by the museum peoples) showing some of Tesla’s inventions. Also, they go in depth at explaining some patents, like this fountain he was trying to commercialize. Tesla’s ashes are located at this museum!
More Tesla pride: Belgrade’s airport is the Nikola Tesla Airport and the man on the 100 dinar note is Nikola Tesla.
Mar
09
I went to the Sarajevo bus station with the Portuguese girls who were also heading to Serbia. By now my suitcase handle has broken and I am looking really silly dragging it around without no handle. There are a bunch of young kids at the bus station and it seems like they are laughing and looking at me. They must be talking about me — right — or am I just being self-centered? The girls sent me off on an overnight bus and then around 5 a.m. I arrived in Belgrade. I immediately decided to get in a cab — I was tired, my suitcase was broken and I wanted to get to rest. When the cab arrived at the address of my hostel, he wanted to charge me something like 50 euros for going under 2 kilometers. Yeah fuckin’ right! I gave him 10 euros while demanding “this is ALL i’m going to give you, you can’t rip me off by that much.”
Kralja Milana 17 is the address of my hostel. I saw a sign for “Hostel Belgrade” and walked through the main door. There are a bunch of doorbells with different names on them, but I didn’t see one for “Hostel Belgrade.” I was really confused and lost at this point. There is another door straight passed the main one leading to a sort of backyard/garden area of the building, with a bunch of houses back there. There is none that says “Hostel Belgrade” though. I walked ahead to some of the doors but am really confused and not sure what to do. I walked back to the main street and look at the doorbells again and am just kind of wishing for somebody to walk by and see how lost and frustrated I am and then tell me how the hell to find my hostel. Where are you, my guardian angel? I walked back through the two sets of doors, to the back of the building and there is some guy walking out of one of the doors. I asked him if he knows where the hostel is. He pointed to the second door down on the left, in this courtyard of houses-behind-building. I walked up to the door and I saw in the doorway there is this broken green-n-orange sign that looks like the same one posted out on the main street, but this one is on the floor, being of no help to the person that does not yet know how to find her way to this destination. But there it is and now I will remember.
So yeah, I’m in Belgrade now… just wanderin’ around a little.
Mar
08
My last night in Sarajevo, I met two sweet Portuguese girls that are studying in Novi Sad, Belgrade. We had some dinner and went out for drinks at some cheesy places because we couldn’t find anything cool. The next day we all explored the city together. We took a short hike up one of the cities many hills, admired the town from some high altitude, and then trekked back down around the 12 o’clock call-to-prayer. When your body is at a level that is above most of the mosques loud-speakers, you could hear all of them at once, overlapping. The sounds made everything seem somewhat surreal at that particular moment.
Back in the center, we had some drinks at a nice cafe that is part of some hotel there. There totally was a guy playing piano. Then we went to National Museum. We wanted to visit the history museum for the “Sarajevo Under Siege” exhibit but it was closed early since it was Sunday. Sucks. The National Museum was nice though, they have like 4 buildings. We rushed through two of them in 20 minutes. Good collection of like butterflies, rocks, and old carved things.
Mar
07
After sleeping in until at least noon, I peeked out my window and noticed snow on the roof. Very nice to see the city sprinkled with this magical white. Also today Rhea goes to Croatia so alone again I am.
Mar
06
Me and Rhea ventured out to the very edge of Sarajevo and got very lost looking for what was left of the Sarajevo Tunnel. It started raining and everyone we asked where the Tunnel Museum was, they’d say oh it’s 1 km that way, 500 meters that way. Finally these two girls led us there and there was just like 10 minutes until the museum closed and the guy working there was laughing at us the whole time, I guess since we came so late in the day (it was just 4pm!) It’s a really small and random museum in the middle of nowhere. It was interesting to see the 20 m of remaining tunnel. The guy working there was nice enough to give us a ride back to the tram. Score!
Mar
05
At last, we are in Sarajevo. This nice guy on the bus helped us with getting around town in the first hour, showed us to the tram. He was really nice and cute, I almost asked for his phone number. Ha. So I have been updating this blog all day with backlogged posts, and now I bring you to the present day with me in Sarajevo. I haven’t taken too many pictures yet… But yeah there are a lot of graveyards here. We are staying at this chill hostel with our own room with a lock. They have a vegetarian restaurant here with like a daily menu where you eat pretty well for 5 euros, or 3 euros in the last hour (“happy hour”). An awesome deal! The picture below is from that restaurant, Vegehana. Right now I am at this Mexican cantina called Hacienda. Me and Rhea shared some nachos and a burrito. It was good, but not like Californian Mexican food though. The dudes working the bar here really seem to like me, I just got some free blueberry juice right now and they keep smiling at me.
Mar
02
So yeah, we were only in Herceg Novi for a few hours before catching the overnight bus to Sarajevo. We ate some more pizza. We used internet at an internet cafe. We walked around in the rain. It’s pretty here, I liked it better than Ulcinj but couldn’t take many pictures.
Mar
01
We met a nice Austrian couple in Shkodër and we all shared a cab to Ulcinj. They have traveled around the Balkans a lot and were offering us all sorts of advice. They even spoke Serbian so it helped us get around Montenegro a bit. We were only in Ulcinj for a couple of hours as well. We rode a bus to Bar, and stayed overnight there. The next day the weather was shitty, so we decided to start to make our way to Sarajevo. Montenegro’s coast is really fucking beautiful! But more of a summer place to be. I would like to come back at some point in my life when the weather is nice.
Mar
01
Me and Rhea took a cheap bus from Tirana to Shkodër, Albania. We were here just for about an hour before taking a cheap cab to Montenegro. It was really difficult to find a decent meal here, so we just had like a sandwich. Any “bar cafe” we walked into only served drinks. And then we went somewhere and it looked like people were eating food like salads and stuff and when we asked the guy working for a menu he said there was no menu and all they had was like meat & rice! Pssh.
Feb
28
So this one dude pictured first below saw me taking pictures and then he asked me to photograph him and his friends, who are selling fruit. And then the kid wanted to take pictures of me, with his cell phone camera so I let him. We even took some pictures together with his cell phone camera, while I was holding onto some fruit. I scored one of those yellow things and an orange for free, as a result. The dude wanted to get some coffee with me but I declined. I think he’s like 15!
