zolireds.net » belgrade http://zolireds.net/blog Mon, 14 May 2012 08:58:52 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 Memories of War http://zolireds.net/blog/2009/10/08/memories-of-war/ http://zolireds.net/blog/2009/10/08/memories-of-war/#comments Thu, 08 Oct 2009 09:24:01 +0000 Z! http://zolireds.net/blog/?p=1320 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.

Federal Police building in Belgrade Federal Police building in Belgrade Federal Police building in Belgrade Federal Police building in Belgrade Federal Police building in Belgrade Federal Police building in Belgrade

]]> http://zolireds.net/blog/2009/10/08/memories-of-war/feed/ 2 Breakfast of the Kings http://zolireds.net/blog/2009/06/01/breakfast-of-the-kings/ http://zolireds.net/blog/2009/06/01/breakfast-of-the-kings/#comments Mon, 01 Jun 2009 20:11:46 +0000 Z! http://zolireds.wordpress.com/?p=837 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.

Hot dogRoyal breakfast

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.

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