by Our first full day in Belgrade was Mum’s 69th birthday. We visited the impressive fortress, on the confluence of the Sava and the Danube. Outside, as part of the military museum, was an array of tanks and guns from various countries and eras. Given Belgrade’s recent bloody history, it seemed a fitting place to find things that go bang.
It soon became apparent what one of the major highlights of Belgrade would be for me: the Serbian language. As far as I know, all the countries of the former Yugoslavia speak very similar varieties of the same language, which I’ll call Serbian here, because Serbia is where I first encountered it. It has a little over 20 million native speakers, roughly the same number as Romanian. Serbian is written using both the Latin and Cyrillic scripts, although there are significant differences between Serbian Cyrillic and Russian Cyrillic. For one, the Serbian variant makes use of the Latin letter J. It also has two letters, Љ and Њ, that are romanised as LJ and NJ respectively, and are equivalent to ll and ñ in Spanish, or lh and nh in Portuguese, or gli and gn in Italian. I was quickly able to read Cyrillic street and shop signs reasonably well, although actually speaking and understanding the language, which is very different from anything I’ve studied before, would take a huge effort. For a start, it has seven grammatical cases, leaving Romanian firmly in the shade.
After much angst, we did in the end find a good restaurant for celebrating Mum’s birthday. We all had something filling and pork-sausagey. We were getting accustomed to terrible service by now, but our waiter (an older bloke) was excellent. The next day we visited the nearby automobile museum, which was brilliant. It had shining examples of makes such the Aero, a Czech-manufactured car that I’d never heard of. We could have done without the yapping, pooing dog that was allowed to roam free the whole time we were there. Later that day a black cloud descended on us, as we worried how we would get back to Romania without a working phone that the bus company could use to contact us. We bought a sim card from the Serbian equivalent of a dairy, but I had no luck getting it to work. I had all kinds of fun and games trying to use Google translate to figure out the Serbian instructions. After dinner, which consisted of pizza slices from a kiosk and a wonderful chocolate dessert, we caught the second half of the thrilling 3-3 draw between Spain and Portugal, the match of the tournament so far.
Dad said he didn’t sleep a wink that night. He was worried that without a phone we’d never get back to Timișoara. He had visions of being stuck on the side of the road in the pouring rain, with the stress levels unbearably high. The next day was Saturday, the phone shops shut in the early afternoon, so we urgently needed a connection, for our sanity as much as anything. The lady at the first phone shop was breathtakingly unhelpful, but we had much better luck at the second shop and were soon up and running at very little expense. Having breathed a huge sigh of relief, we walked through the city, with the intention of visiting the national museum to give us all a better handle on the region’s troubled history. But it was closed, as it has been since 2003. We changed course and reached St Sava’s Temple, which we thought would be spectacular. And old. Instead we found a post-WW2 edifice that had ridiculous amounts of interior scaffolding to keep it from falling to pieces. When we got back to our apartment, we met the old man who gave us a bottle of Serbian schnapps that I’m now working my way through. He made it very clear that he didn’t like Tony Blair.
