Months ago, Marcey asked me if I wanted to go to a friend's wedding in Belgrade in May. I said yes and promptly forgot the name of the place.
Each time it came up in conversation I referred to it by a different name.
Budapest, Bucharest, Bavaria, even Bulgaria, but never the same name twice.
I'm sure this drove her nuts, but I prefer to think of it as endearing. I was very excited to go and my feigned ignorance was not a reflection of disinterest. Eau contraire! (That's Spanish for "Hell ,No!") It was a reflection of how many times political boundaries and names have changed in the last twenty years.
When I was in fifth grade I did a report about Siam. Thirty years later I was traveling in Thailand and practically fell off my elephant when I heard that it used to be Siam. It was very disappointing to learn. So I'm a little hesitant when it comes to Eastern European countries. I remember the Austria-Hungary empire like it was yesterday and just recently got used to "Istanbul" in place of my sentimental favorite, Constantinople. So when I found out I would be visiting Belgrade, the capitol of the former Yugoslavia of the former Hungary of the former Ottoman Empire my brain went into denial.
It turns out that the Balkan Peninsula has more fighting factions than Lebanon. At least in the middle east there seems to be two sides, Jew and Muslim. Easy right? Yugoslavia seems to have been carved up into seven different countries according to ethnic and religious background. At the current rate, by 2010 there will be 586,000 countries so that each person gets a republic of himself. Belgrade is the capital of Serbia. Sometimes called Serbia and Montenegro. Montenegro is its own region, but hasn't quite gone autonomous yet. Serbs are Eastern Orthodox Christians. Bosnia and Herzegovina is another country, think Sarajevo. They're Muslim.
Croatia got the coastline and really is more like Italy than Yugoslavia.
They're a different KIND of Christian, Roman Catholic. Albanians are half Greek gypsies who nobody seems to like. None of them get along with the Slovenians who broke off years ago and even have their own language.
I got the whole scoop from one of the Serbian party guests at the wedding.
He was a great conversationalist and tolerated my dumb guy act long enough for me to get a real flavor of the conflict. Serbs have a bitter taste of the UN and the US in particular. In the spring of 1999 US planes bombed Belgrade. Destroyed some of the oldest and pristine architecture in Europe. They were after Milosevic, the self-appointed Serbian leader who was largely responsible for the civil war, particularly the genocide of thousands of Bosnians. He was a renegade leader of course, completely in control of the military and the people were powerless to stop him. But at least he didn't bomb them. A year and a half later UN forces were still unable to capture him, so a mob of thousands of college age kids stormed the capitol building and apprehended him themselves. It was a bloodless coup and the people at the wedding I talked to were upset about how the UN and US in particular, got all the credit.
Besides the political conversation, Belgrade was stunning. Many large, green parks surround huge cathedrals and red tiled roofed buildings. Lots of stone structure and cobblestoned pedestrian cafe areas. One specific area is known as the "Bohemian" quarter and has dozens of coffee houses, beer gardens and cafes. Beer was fifty cents a pint and for ten bucks you could gorge yourself on meat and potatoes. My favorite dish was a Weiner schnitzel stuffed with bruschetta ham and wrapped in bacon. Pork stuffed pork wrapped in pork. Are these people great or what? Just incase your lipids are getting a little low, they bread it, fry it and serve it with melted cheese. Do I need to even mention the sausage? One menu had twelve kinds.
We walked around the old fort and visited the zoo. It was small, but well kept and I didn't feel sorry for any of the animals. We saw Jersey cows, horses, pigs, goats, sheep and ducks. I was about to crack a joke that this was more like a farm than a zoo, when we approached the "Dog" exhibit. They looked like German Shepard/St Bernard type mutts. They even had a traditional doghouse in their enclosure. I was surprised they weren't on a leash. Now we really felt like we were on a farm instead of at the zoo. I fully expected to see a pickup truck on blocks with a barn cat sleeping on the hood. Finally we saw one elephant, one Bengal tiger, two polar bears and the monkey house.
Hotel rooms were scarce so we ended up at a tennis complex called Gemax.
The room was clean, but it was little more than a dorm room. Apparently it isn't used as a hotel, but it served as an overflow to the hotel Marcey's friend had booked for us. We started to feel a little gypped, but then learned that they had just hosted the Davis Cup tournament two weeks prior.
Pretty cool. I was always hoping that some famous tennis player had stayed behind and I would run into them in the hallway. No such luck. I marveled at the fact that had I watched the Davis Cup on TV I would have seen these same clay courts that lay beyond my window. It was the same feeling I had in Athens knowing that the Olympics had just been there.
We returned to Beirut with a suitcase full of greasy clothes, a wallet full of ATM receipts, and a digital camera full of memories. Now that I have friends in Serbia I can finally remember what to call it.