A good night's sleep, and now I am ready to tackle the remainder of my epic journey to Belgrade. Or at least the recounting of it.
The Zurich airport was much as I expected Switzerland to be. Very clean, quite formal, and extremely multilingual. Most things were in English with a significant amount of German mixed in, but I also heard quite a bit of French and !Russian as I wandered around. Saw a group of Russian teens looking at the departures board at one point and considered speaking to them but then decided that I would get plenty of practice with that in St. Petersburg. :D Since I had a four-hour layover, I decided to go out to the shopping area and wait there until it was closer to my flight time. I had to get my passport stamped in order to leave the gate area, which was not nearly as difficult as I feared it might be. Obviously I just haven't traveled enough. The stores in the shopping area revealed that the Swiss - or at least those of many nationalities who fly through the Zurich airport - are quite well-off. I tried my best to walk around with my eyes wider than my mouth, but I may not have completely succeeded in that regard ;] Most of the boutiques were filled with designer clothes and fine Swiss chocolates. I considered getting some Lindt truffles, but decided that they would probably taste the same as in America and cost a lot more :P I did, however, visit the souvenir shop, wide-eyed wanderer that I am. There were many chocolates again and T-shirts as well as less useful souvenirs like keychains and pens that tempted me greatly. Finally I decided against the $10 keychain, as diverting as it was, in favor of a $5 swiss army knife that could be attached to a keychain, reasoning that it would be the most useful way to spend my money. Fortunately the shop took American dollars, so that I didn't have to go through the hassle of exchanging currency into Swiss francs. The exchange rate is surprisingly good - something like 1.1 francs to the dollar. Of course, while I was deciding and purchasing my souvenir it failed to occur to me that I was, in fact, obtaining a weapon. Until the cashier asked me "Where are you flying to?" and I replied "Belgrade", at which she informed me that flying there I would be fine, but on the return journey I would have to make sure that the knife was in my checked luggage. At which point I wondered a few things: Why were they selling Swiss army knives in the airport, and why was it okay to fly to Belgrade with a knife in my carry-on? Self-defense? Are the Serbs not worried about a terrorist attack? Do they figure no one actually wants to attack Serbia anyway? I don't know. I'm just glad that I wasn't stopped and searched.
After obtaining my obligatory souvenir, I still had a couple of hours to wait, so I sat down on some chairs and determined to pass the time by reading. However, when I sat down I noticed a young woman sitting across from me and thought, "I should strike up a conversation with her. How sad will it be if I travel all the way to Belgrade and never talk to anyone until I get there?" After gathering my courage for a while, I moved over to the seat beside her and uttered a tentative "Hello." When I was answered in kind, I took heart and inquired, "Do you speak English?" Chuckling, she replied "Very poorly." Upon further questions I discovered that her name was Elvira and she was a young Russian, an operations engineer on her first international business trip, to Germany (her German was much better than her English, to my chagrin. I do believe that will turn out to be quite a useful language once I learn it.) Upon learning that I was studying Russian, she encouraged me to speak which I refused, insisting that her English must be better than my oral Russian. She maintained the opposite once I did dare to speak, remarking that my accent was good and that I spoke quickly and clearly for someone who had only been studying for one year. However, upon my insistence we carried on our conversation mostly in English - I do believe I am trying to put off the inevitable with communicating in a foreign language. It was my turn to be surprised when she informed me that she, too, had been studying English for only 9 months - and began speaking it only on this trip. Her accent was strong but not unintelligible and I could understand most of what she said. As it happened, her plane to Moscow left only a few minutes after mine from a gate very close by, so we went through security together (I got my passport stamped again :D) and sat together until it was time for me to board. We exchanged emails before parting ways and I hope to be able to keep in contact with her during the summer.
The journey had been up to this point rather uneventful, and it was too much to hope that my luck would hold out all the way to Belgrade. When I went up to the desk to check in for my flight, the German woman couldn't issue me my ticket because she couldn't find a return ticket for me in her system. There was a very simple explanation behind that - I had booked my ticket from Belgrade to St. Petersburg with Czech Airways and I was flying in on Swiss Airlines. However, it seems that without evidence that I would in fact be leaving the country within 90 days the airline was not allowed to let me into Serbia, as much as I assured them that I had no intentions of staying more than a week, much less three months :P. Finally I was cleared and made it onto the plane although not without some trepidation. The flight was once again uneventful and I tried napping again although it was less than 2 hours before we were touching down in Belgrade. The airport was small, bigger than the Portland Jetport but not as large as Newark or the Zurich airport, and it was relatively straightforward to find the Baggage Claim area. As I suspected, the signs were now primarily in Serbian (latin alphabet) although also in English. Despite all my fears that my luggage would have been lost in the several transfers, I spotted my suitcase almost immediately, although my party was less apparent. I went through the door marked "Nothing to declare" (and I hope that that was in fact true) and stepped out into the lobby where several dozen people were waiting for those who had just deplaned. I looked around in vain for a familiar face before a shorter, gray-haired man with a round, friendly face inquired, "Erin?" My eyes lit up and I uttered a hopeful "Yes?" though I cannot say that I recognized him. "Are you looking for someone?" he said with a grin and I decided that he must, indeed, be Mr. Stojanovic. My conjecture turned out to be correct and we promptly left the airport and began the drive into Belgrade Center, where the Stojanovic's apartment is located (the airport is about 10 km outside the city limits). The journey, however, gave me a good opportunity to see the greater part of Belgrade - the student apartments, hostels, embassies, and several crumbling and half-destroyed structures, bombed in 1999 when NATO overthrew the socialists in Belgrade, which were never repaired. It was a sad sight, destruction frozen in time, a constant reminder of the lost history and tumultuous past of this people. I didn't wonder that many Serbs, driving past these monuments every day, might harbor in their heart a hatred for the people who caused such destruction.
We at last arrived at the apartment and I was shown to my room - not the basement, as Nikola had asserted, but the bedroom of his little brother Aleksandar (Aca for short). Aca, 15, is a tan, smiling, willowy, unassuming youth of 15 whose dark brown eyes appear even larger behind his glasses. He insists that there is no problem with me sleeping in his room, but I still feel bad for displacing him. It must be hard for him to have a girl he doesn't even know invading his space on the first week of his summer vacation. He speaks English fairly well, though not quite as fluently as either of his parents, and he replies with a delighted "Aah!" and a broad grin to each exercise of my pitiful retinue of Serbian phrases. He tells Nikola, in Serbian, that he wants my laugh, which Nikola promptly translates with a roll of his eyes, eliciting another burst of giggles from me and a slight flush of pink on Aca's cheeks.
Around 15 minutes after my arrival, Nikola returned home. Apparently he had decided to visit the end-of-year party at his old high school instead of coming to the airport to meet me. Go figure. :P :D When he came in, he caught me up in a great bear hug and greeted me with the traditional Serbian kiss on the cheek. "I can't believe it's been almost a year," he said, smiling. Neither can I, I thought. It seems like only last week that I was staring through the glass at the Bangor International Airport watching him hand his boarding pass to the ticket agent before he walked through the doors to the jetway and I was almost convinced I had seen him for the last time. I suppose it adds truth to the saying that with our truest friends it is never goodbye, only "see you later."
While I was more than ready for a shower after almost 24 hours of traveling, Nikola had other ideas about my first acts in Serbia. After snacking on some ham and cheese pancakes (inspired by the maple syrup I had packed - with more than a little apprehension lest it should break open in transit) we set off on a walk around the city. The stated purpose of the walk was to accompany Nikola's friend and bass player Petar as he went to purchase a ticket to the Bob Dylan concert happening in Belgrade on Friday. (Nikola says "Look, you leave Belgrade and Bob Dylan comes, on the same day." Laughing, I tell him that Bob Dylan and I aren't exactly on the same plane [pun intended].) However, as with all things Nikola, it turned into more of an aimless ramble around the city as Nikola allowed me to experience his hometown firsthand. There are many small parks, playgrounds and green spaces in Belgrade - more than I remember encountering in New York City, the only city in my experience to which I feel I can compare Belgrade. The city is also mostly clean, the buildings are relatively short (most are 3-4 stories) and the streets are not as crowded as I expected them to be in a city of several million. Nikola also remarked on the lack of traffic, supposing that since it was a Friday afternoon and near the end of school many people had left the city for the weekend.
When we were once again returned to Nikola's apartment, he ordered spaghetti for supper (takeout spaghetti? :]) and I was at last allowed to take a shower. It felt so good to be clean and in fresh clothes, though Nikola insisted that I neither looked nor smelled as disgusting as I felt :D. After that it was nearly 9pm and Nikola allowed that I should go to bed, with which sentiment I was more than willing to agree. I climbed up into Aca's loft-bed, crawled underneath the blanket and so ended my first day in Belgrade.
No comments:
Post a Comment