Belgrade – An alternative guide to ‘Edge City’

The author, doing biznez in Belgrade

Here’s a quick example of how I’ve tried to not only push but post the envelope in my travel writing. With reviews such as the following, I wanted to convey not only useful information, but also a sense of place. Of course, when that place was Belgrade a few years back, the raw material lent itself to colour…

Belgrade Accommodation

Jugoslavia, Bulevar Nikole Tesle 3

If you like your hotel to have been bombed from above at least once in its lifetime than you’ll dig the atmosphere of the 1969 built and 1999 bombed Hotel Yugoslavia. Stealth planes hit this place because they thought they could get the gangster Arkan here. They were wrong. He of course was assassinated on a piazza in Montenegro. Regardless, Jugoslavia is dingy concrete suggestion of a beachfront hotel in Miami, where the carpet is curling up at the corners in the corridors and the walls are stained and straining, but where it has to be said the individual rooms and suites have nice views and the staff seemed attentive and friendly enough. Weird normality Belgrade-style strikes again.

Hotel Park, Njegoseva 4

This is seemingly the hotel of choice for second-tier ‘biznezmen’, and black market cigarette traders. Still, it’s handy to a strip of trendy cafés, and rooms are even air-conditioned, after a fashion. In high summer, the ventilator hums like an ocean liner, and entering your room is like stepping out of a sauna and into an icebox. The milk on the coffee tray in the breakfast buffet had congealed, and the coffee itself was an evil, viscous oil you could probably use to fuel an M4 battle tank.

Hyatt Regency Beograd, Milentija Popovica 5

This was the place from which to be seen watching the bombings in ‘99 – modern corporate imperialism at its peak. Just a few hundred yards away from a ravine by the railway track where families of Roma are living in makeshift cardboard shacks, the Hyatt is a vast world of grand hallways and faux marble, gift shops and salons, buffet breakfasts and junior suites. Back in 1992, the youthful Belgrade drug kingpin Aleksandar Knezevic was shot to death in his long-term-stay suite, room no. 813.

Belgrade Eating and Drinking

It’s all about the meat. Traditional Serbian dishes include kolenica (little piggy’s legs), cevapi (sweet minced meat rissoles ) and sarma (meat and rice wrapped inside cabbage leaves). It’s a bit of a stretch to call this a cuisine isn’t it? Try Burek (Turkish word) for breakfast or lunch in a café. It’s a flaky cheese (or meat, mushrooms, spinach, ham or potato) pie you drink with yoghurt and it really is quite surprising. Skadarlija, the bohemian quarter, has a row of upscale traditional restaurants. Fish from the Danube is said to have tasted better before the ‘99 bombing.

Blay Watch, Dunavski kej bb

The most seductive looking teenage girls you have ever seen in your life join young men laden with too much jewellery around the cobalt blue swimming pool on a barge moored on Ada, the Danube river island. Sitting by the pool gives you a bird’s eye view of the action usually only afforded by a sitting duck.

Kalemegdanska Terasa Mali Kalemegdan bb

The ‘terrace at Kalemegdan castle’ is probably the swankest restaurant in town, and not just because nobody’s been shot there recently. The location is dreamy, and the cuisine is… Serbian mixed grill. Sigh. If you have a good backward toss, you may even be able to throw your leftovers to the big cats of the Belgrade Zoo, located directly underneath the fortress walls. The ladies of the restaurant’s string quartet could inspire a sensitive type to mad passions.

Belgrade Dusk

Language

Serbian. According to a Government edict, all public notices, advertising and so on is meant to be written in both Cyrillic and Latin characters, but nobody seems to have gotten the memo and signs are generally in one or the other. Away from the centre of the centre, getting around Belgrade’s poorly lit streets can be a trial, with scant street signage and most of that in Cyrillic. Hail a taxi instead, and live a little. Many people, young and not-so-young, speak English. You will still be regarded with anything between curiosity and mild hostility when you do so in a public place. Americans might want to consider turning the spoken volume down a notch or two. And not just in Belgrade.