DATELINE: Belgrade, Serbia    

Author: Natalie      

TUESDAY AUGUST 24 Today I wandered around Belgrade - it�s very, um, urban, and not all that charming. But the people are friendly and helpful. After several tries, I found an adaptor for my computer charger. I told the guy, �You just made my day. Now I can write to my dad again.� He seemed to appreciate that. I also bought a few snacks. Everything in this country costs 50 cents: cup of coffee, pastry, slice of pizza. And I used the free map provided by my hostel to explore a bit. The Nikola Tesla museum was indeed aces, as Andy promised. It�s full of model machines he made, operated/demonstrated by the English-speaking guide. Tesla made extraordinary and uncalculable conributions to modern technology, and after wandering through his museum I still don�t understand them one bit. But I saw his ashes; they�re in a spherical urn in a spookily-lit room. I managed to find a few streets that are for pedestrians only, lined with cafes. And at the end of one of them I reached the ethnographic museum, which contained a very charming and thorough display of 19th century Serbian costumes and artifacts from home life. They had the implements needed for several of the major farming industries: corn, grapes, fishing, tobacco, and olives. In the late afternoon I walked up to the park. It was lovely and I�ll return there tomorrow to see the old fortress. I was pretty worn out by the end of the day, I think partly because of the walking and mostly because my brain is tired from reading the language. I absolutely love this language; it is so fun to pronounce. I�ve developed an utter compulsion to read aloud every word I see (Sam spent several days in Sarajevo listening to �Zel-ya-NEET-sa: Spinach pastry. Krom-pee-ROO-sa: Potato pastry. Doh-vih-JEN-ya: goodbye. Mlee-YEH-com: milk. SEER: cheese. VEESH-na: cherry. Bo-ro-NEET-sa: blueberry. Bee-YELL-ee: white. Blash-chee-CHAR-na: Old Town. GAV-ree-lo PRINT-sip: dude who shot Franz Ferdinand and kicked off World War I. ZHEN-ska: woman.�) Here in Belgrade, the word-pronouncing continues, but now it�s more challenging because the words are often written in cyrillic. nEKAPA is pronounced PEKARA and means �bakery�. And that�s just one of the easy ones. I think if you say it out loud, �pekara� does in fact sound like �bakery,� but maybe I�ve just been here too long. The baked goods in this country, by the way, are total crap, and I should know because I eat about five of them every day. If you�d like to read about the best loaf of bread in the entire world, go to http://balkanbonanza.blogspot.com for Sam�s rhapsodic description. I can�t do it justice. On a final note, I saw a picture of Gavrilo Princip - aforementioned initiator of World War I - and, is it wrong of me to say, homeboy was kind of hot?