We are now safely in Sofia, Bulgaria after the overnight train from hell. But, we're safe now...and only have one more of these overnight trains to go. Yay. And we have a sleeper. Anyway, back to Belgrade.
The problem with overnight trains is that for that day that you're in the city, you're stuck in a strange limbo where you can't quite do too much because you're not staying another night in the city. It's harder when you're not in a country that uses the Euro and have to try to use up as much of the remaining currency but not overspend so we have something to eat. Also, while the Eastern European cities that we've been to have been pretty cool, they're not as jam packed with things to do as other European cities are. I guess that's not so much of a problem in Budapest, but that's definitely what happened yesterday in Belgrade.
So, we woke up in the morning, only an hour or so after a crew of BeerFest attendees had stumbled into our hostel. We checked out and had our free breakfast and then made our trek our to the Nikola Tesla Museum. They do free tours of the museum on the hour and we got there around 10:30, so we sat around waiting for the tour. It's really not that big of a museum, but the tour was worth it. They have a lot of models of Tesla's inventions and they do demonstrations. They told stories of Tesla's life. We got electrocuted (kind of). At the end, we got to see Tesla's urn. It was a good museum and one of my favorite parts of our stop in Belgrade for sure. They don't have much of a gift shop though. It was just a set of magnets and books about Tesla. :(
We weren't really sure what to do after that. We wanted to see the St. Sava Cathedral, but we also thought about seeing Zemun, which is supposed to have a cute old town. We learned from someone working at the Tesla Museum that Zemun would have been a long trip that would require multiple transfers in both directions. Instead, we had pizza in the park for lunch, where Mia in the spirit of Nikola Tesla, befriended a pigeon. Then, we decided to watch another movie. This time it was subtitled so we opted for a comedy (Horrible Bosses) and avoided the hot Serbian sun. It was a pretty funny movie. Also, apparently movies in Serbia are like the equivalent of 3 euro. Not bad at all.
The movie let us out around 3 pm, so we walked over to St. Sava Cathedral. It was one of those walks similar to our Paris walk where we saw the Cathedral immediately, but it took us a while to actually make it there. It's huge and looked really cool on the outside, but they are still working on constructing it, so the inside was kind of empty. It was still very pretty on the outside.
Our next goal was to go to some big market. This didn't end too well. The tour industry in Serbia is still growing, so they only have street signs in crylic writing and have not yet added romanic writing. This would be fine, except all tourist maps have everything in romanic writing. Not helpful at all. Anyway by the time we realized we were going to wrong direction, it was after four, which was when the market ended. We then tried to go find the Bohemian alley again. Although this is a pretty big tourist destination, it was not on the map so we ended up not being able to find that either. A lot of fail.
We didn't have much money left and had a lot of time left. Belgrade is also known for its nightlife and we had seen most of the major sights for the day. We ate dinner and then tried to watch another movie, but did not have the money for that. Instead, we went back to our hostel and they let us hang out there for a couple of hours. We watched How to Train your Dragon with some other backpackers and surfed the net until deciding to make it over to thett train station.
The train station in Belgrade isn't really much of a train station. It's pretty much a giant open court yard. Nevertheless, we felt a lot safer there than we did at the Budapest train station, so we were fine. Also, our train was there a lot earlier, so we were able to board the train.
So this train. It wasn't fun. First of all, it smelled like urine. It was gross. Also, we looked into the train compartment that we had booked our seats for and saw the shadiest group of people, as well as a woman who looked like Professor Trelawney if she didn't have teeth. We immediately pretended like we were looking for another compartment and looked with jealousy at all of the other compartments full of backpackers who ended up bonding all night. Fortunately, we were on a train that didn't require reservations, so we ducked into another compartment that had less unsavory looking individuals. They were a bunch of locals who didn't speak any English, but they were all very nice. They spent most of the night talking to each other, but I think it was because they all were arriving at their destinations anywhere from 1-3 am so they had to keep each other awake. Once they were gone, there weren't many in the seated 6 person compartment, so we were able to sprawl out a little more.
Also had fights with the train conductors several time throughout the night. If you get the Eurail Global pass, you cannot train through Serbia. However, you can get a multi-country pass that lets you do so. Our ticket clearly says that we can travel through Serbia, but each time that the conductors made their rounds they insisted that our Eurail passes were invalid even after I spelled it out for them and pointed to where it said Serbia on our ticket. They eventually both relented, except the first one had a second go and insisted that our 2 Adult Eurail Saver Pass was only for one person. Seriously. They were the worst. Mind you, one of these arguments went on at 4 am, right after I had finally foudn a comfortable sleeping position.
When I finally was able to sleep a little, a new group of people joined us. I don't think they had tickets. When the conductor made his round, one of them handed him a few bills and he just nodded and walked away. In any case, between guarding our belongings, finding a comfortable sleeping position, sleeping through loud conversations and 4 am arguments with train conductors, i only got a few hours of sleep. Needless to say, I was pretty tired by the time that we made it to Sofia.
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