zolireds.net » belgrade

Memories of War

Z! — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 09:24:01 +0000

It’s been 10 years since the NATO bombings of Belgrade, capital of Serbia (also Yugoslavia back then) and there are still a few buildings in the city centre that were left untouched to remind people of the horror of war. One of them is the Federal Police building that was hit during the night between the 29th and 30th of April in 1999.

Breakfast of the Kings

Z! — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 20:11:46 +0000

Breakfast is usually included in the price of a hotel room you book and most of the times you have a good selection of food to choose from, so it’s a nice way to start the day while you’re on a holiday. Belgrade’s own Hotel Royal is a little bit different in this on many counts. First of all, there’s no “Swedish table” to pick your food from but there’s a menu with a somewhat limited selection listed. There’s also a polite warning “choose one please” which rules out drinking coffee and orange juice at the same time. Since the menu (a photocopied piece of paper) wasn’t really informative I took the liberty of asking the waiter about some of the food in detail:

Me: What does “cheese and ham” stand for?
Waiter: That is cheese… and ham.
Me: Alright. And what’s a sandwich?
Waiter: That is a sandwich… and cheese and ham.

Since this latter sounded much more promising than “cheese, ham” we decided to go for it and were pleasantly surprised to see the additional bonus tomato that they came together with. Also one of us ordered a good old hot dog that we didn’t think it was necessary to inquire about. How wrong we were… hot dogs in Hotel Royal are really special. But let the pictures speak for themselves.

After finishing our meal the kind waiter approached us again for a friendly chat:

Waiter: You are from Romania, aren’t you?
Me: No. We’re from Hungary and Russia.
Waiter: Hungary? Hmm… (It sounded like he was trying to place this country on the map in his mind, but as it happened it was only a trick to gain some time to prepare with his next question.)
Waiter: Ponimaesh po-russki? (He sounded very confident of catching the lying Romanians.)
Nina: Da.
Me: A ti? (Guess that was too much for him because he gave up on us and left our table.)

It wasn’t for the quality of the breakfast this time but surely we had a nice start of the day that left a huge round smile on our faces for some time.

Travel plans

Z! — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 16:21:07 +0000

Due to reasons beyond my control this year appears to be the most difficult one of my life as far as finances. I don’t really want to get into details about the whys because that would lead me to an endless rant on my country and that’s not the purpose of this post. But no matter how many difficulties I come accross I still try to look ahead and make up plans. That might not help daily survival but at least helps keeping my spirit high. Over the last few years I really got used to travelling a lot – thanks to discount airlines and to my good friends all over Europe – but with all the recent financial issues I had to realize that I won’t be able to continue doing that this year. So what I did was basically put down some travel plans for destinations that might be more affordable for one reason or another. Here’s what I came up with:

Bratislava: I wanted to see Jon Lord with a classical orchestra there in early March but I had some health issues so I had to cancel it. Next weekend I’ll give the Slovak capital another try though as I’m going to attend a Deep Purple gig there. It’s gonna be an interesting trip for so many reasons…
Vienna: I had multiple plans for visiting Vienna in 2009 and luckily I could already pull off the most important one: seeing Pure Reason Revolution at B72. To make the trip more worthy I spent an entire weekend there with a Russian friend of mine with whom we had a blast walking around the city and taking a healthy dose of the Vienna spirit.
Eskilstuna: I remember almost ruling out a visit back to Sweden a month ago but luckily I found a relatively cheap flight to Arlanda and I booked it immediately. I’m really looking forward to see my friends there again and to attend another Pain of Salvation gig… not to mention my first ever Anna Ternheim concert. I’m so excited.
Belgrade: After doing a one day trip to see and pick up Pain of Salvation at the Legacy Festival in Belgrade last year I already knew that I ‘ll want to go back there one day to visit Kalemegdan again. It would be really nice to make that happen this summer.
Prague: Visiting the Czech capital is a long time dream of mine but I never really gave it a real thought so far. The travel itself is quite affordable by bus. It’s not the most comfortable way of travelling but the least pricey one.
Kiev/Chernobyl: The last time I looked into this it seemed rather impossible because of the expensive flights to the Ukrainian capital but in the meantime I figured out a much cheaper way to get there. Well, it would mean a 23 hour long train ride which I don’t really fancy but I’ll give this a second thought.
Moscow/St.Petersburg: Surely this would be one of the most exciting trips of my life but I can’t say that I’m really planning this at the moment. I already looked into the possibilities last year and figured that the flight and the visa alone would cost more than 2-3 trips within Europe.
Norway: I would love to go back to my second country as well but unfortunately I don’t think it’s gonna be possible this year… or maybe for the winter? Well, I’m not really sure about that though as -35 °C is not something I’d call fascinating.

Well, that’s basically it. The plans, the ideas… I wonder how many of these will actually come true. I really do hope at least a few and I’ll see about the rest in coming years.