Belgrade, Second Impressions
Walking around town, Belgrade seems like a strange mixture of Lima and Roma, with a bunch of blown up buildings added into the mix, and all set in the hills of Pittsburgh. It is really phenomenal to see the destroyed buidlings - and i should probably (carefully) verify with someone that those are from NATO bombings and not some other disaster (6 years seems a long time to not recover from such things, but it has taken Managua even longer to clean up their last big earthquake). I wonder how much of my taxes went towards destroying the city i am now visiting?
An interesting quote from the current wikipedia Belgrade entry:
The cars here are also very different - after my time in Rome i am used to seeing small European cars, but i do not recall seeing these small Eastern European cars. The most phenomenal one is the Lada Niva 4x4, which is like a miniaturized version of the Ford Bronco. It is awesome and might even fit nicely into the back of my (future) Toyota Tacoma. There are of course all models of Yugo and plenty of them, and some nice looking Skodas as well. Yugo is by far predominant, which isn't at all surprising.
Before i forget to mention it, local beer (pivo) in these parts is very good, though the Zagreb beer i had was a little better than the Serbian beer i've had so far.
I think i may have also forgotten to mention my amazement that the airplane food was vegan (i ordered vegetarian), even providing margarine and a vegan dressing - quite impressive. Since then i've had to eat bread and water if i wanted to have close to a guarantee of vegan food, though there was a restaurant close to the Cathedral in Zagreb that had a good selection of vegetarian dishes and was open late.
An interesting quote from the current wikipedia Belgrade entry:
Belgrade was under some form of attack some 54 times since AD 1, or every 37 years on average. This means that, statistically, every citizen of Belgrade has seen two attacks on the city in his/her life.
The cars here are also very different - after my time in Rome i am used to seeing small European cars, but i do not recall seeing these small Eastern European cars. The most phenomenal one is the Lada Niva 4x4, which is like a miniaturized version of the Ford Bronco. It is awesome and might even fit nicely into the back of my (future) Toyota Tacoma. There are of course all models of Yugo and plenty of them, and some nice looking Skodas as well. Yugo is by far predominant, which isn't at all surprising.
Before i forget to mention it, local beer (pivo) in these parts is very good, though the Zagreb beer i had was a little better than the Serbian beer i've had so far.
I think i may have also forgotten to mention my amazement that the airplane food was vegan (i ordered vegetarian), even providing margarine and a vegan dressing - quite impressive. Since then i've had to eat bread and water if i wanted to have close to a guarantee of vegan food, though there was a restaurant close to the Cathedral in Zagreb that had a good selection of vegetarian dishes and was open late.
posted by francisco at 6/30/2005 06:14:00 PM
6 Comments:
Hi francisco, I was going to check your site to see if you had been on any trips since Cambodia. I see that you are! Hope you have a good time, sounds like you are seeing interesting things for sure...
You probably don't remember but a year and a half ago you helped me quite a bit setting up software raid 1 on my web server...
Good luck and safe trip. Lincoln http://build.homeunix.net
Hah! That's some timing!
Hello!
I like your blog!
And I just wanted to say that you are right, the bombed out buildings that are still there are from the NATO airstrikes. I don't know exactly why they are still left in that condition though.
The reason the buildings are still bombed out, and left that way, is to act as a reminder of WHO did this, and WHY. I enjoyed your blog.
I don't know but I've been told Belgrade is very old!
Actually, it was explained to me that the bombed-out buildings are stll there because they were property of the government of old yugoslavia, so no one really wants to foot the bill for their demolition/repair.
Post a Comment
<< Home