by On Wednesday morning I popped over to Mum and Dad’s apartment: they were about to vacate it. They packed their bags and went down the stairs, while I took most of their baggage with me in the lift. When I reached the bottom, or thought I had, the doors wouldn’t open. In fact I hadn’t reached the bottom. I was suspended two feet off the ground floor. None of the buttons did anything, with the exception of the alarm button, which made a noise but nothing else. Oh shit. I was talking to Mum and Dad, who were safely on the other side of the doors. I could see three phone numbers; I called the first of them. I got through at the second attempt. “Do you speak English?” Normally I positively refuse to speak English in Romania, but this situation was hardly normal. The lift rescue guy didn’t speak English though. “What’s it showing?” he asked me in Romanian. What’s what showing? “Er, 67?” The lift seemed to have a number. “No, on the screen.” When I explained that it was a big C, not a little C, he was able to do something from his end, and I got out alive. I’d only been in there a few minutes, not enough time for all the possible nightmare scenarios to play out in my head. I honestly expected that, at best, somebody would have had to physically extricate me, and I’d have been stuck for half an hour or more. Mum said I handled it well but was a bit “clammy”.
Excitement over. We then waited, and waited, for the door-to-door minibus to take us to Belgrade. We wondered whether it would come at all, but it did, an hour late. I enjoyed the bus ride, and crossing a frontier into uncharted territory is always exciting for me. We were stuck for 40-odd minutes at the border. Eventually, after passing some pleasant Serbian villages, we arrived in the bustling city. Our apartment was on a street called either Skadarska or Skadarlija, but finding it was another matter. No signage. Nobody there. No way into what we thought was the correct building. All our tempers were starting to fray. One of the residents arrived home; she let us in and pointed us in a general downstairs direction. In the basement we found two apartments. One would be ours; the other was owned by an elderly man who spoke little English. My phone didn’t work in Serbia, and Mum was out of credit on hers. This off-the-grid situation would later rear its ugly head in an even bigger way. The man kindly rang the owner of our apartment. She came over and finally we were in.
The apartment was pretty poky for three people, and lacked basic amenities like doors that shut properly and more than ten sheets of loo paper. The first evening we had dreadful pasta meals in a nearby bar; it seemed they hadn’t received a food order in over a month. We were staying in the bohemian quarter, but if it was really bohemian there wouldn’t have been signs everywhere to tell us. Instead it was just a street full of touristy restaurants. At the end of the street, however, was a wonderful market, even bigger, better and cheaper than the ones in Timișoara. We didn’t buy much – Mum, as always, was in charge of the money and reined us in whenever we tried to splash out on half a dozen apricots. We did however have some extremely strong cups of coffee there.
