Serbia

Our first experience with Serbians was a good one. We crossed the border pretty painlessly even though it was in the very early morning. Our border guard actually smiled at us. He asked us where we were going and we said that we were going to Novi Sad.

“Exit fest, yeah?”

“Yes.” After a pause, Amanda asks, “have you been there?”

Now imagine a clean-cut, middle-aged police officer, a little pudgy wearing a communist uniform. Now imagine him “getting crunk” and dancing to throbbing bass until the sun comes up, possibly a little drunkenly with no shirt on. This is essentially what Amanda was asking him.

“Yes, maybe 2 years ago I was at Exit,” he says with a big grin on his face. We decided that we liked Serbia already. When we got into Belgrade it didn’t look that much different from any other post-communist capital. There were your token stray dogs, your crumbling sidewalks and abandoned buildings that surrounded the bus/train station. We bought two bus tickets to Novi Sad where we would be staying with a Couchsurfer. We took a nice, air-conditioned bus that arrived on time out to Novi Sad, where the festival would take place.


Now, Amanda and I aren’t really into big festivals with lots of annoying and drunk crowds of people who ruin concert experiences for everyone. The only reason we chose to go to this festival is because my favorite band of all time was playing: The Chemical Brothers. These guys don’t tour the US so this was like a once-in-a-lifetime chance. They weren’t scheduled to play until the last day of the 4-day festival so we went to some of the various other shows with Dragan, our Couchsurfing host, until it was finally time on the last day for The Chemical Brothers.


What is really cool is that Exit festival is set in a medieval fortress on a big hill. There are like 12 stages with various styles of music playing. We got to see some big-name people play like Missy Elliot, David Guetta and Faith No More but we also had to put up with some retarded fans which were mostly made up of intoxicated, rich young Brits who came down to Serbia only because the prices are better and so they could get drunker without their parents knowing. Amanda got to see Mika who has been one of her favorites since he came out with one of her favorite songs. He put on a good show.

Our host, Dragan was really cool and so was his family. His family didn’t know any English so we got to learn some Serbian (which is the same thing as Croatian and Bosnian). It kind of felt like Peace Corps training all over again because we got fed and we were forced to start to learning the language. Serbian is a lot like Russian and it uses a bunch of Romanian words so it was easy to pick up, at least in the beginning. Now we can order coffee and say hi!


Novi Sad is also a pretty town. It is old and has nice buildings. Dragan showed us a radio center that got bombed during one of their Balkan wars and also the bridges that were bombed by NATO during the same wars. The house that we stayed in was right down the street from Darko Milicic’s house. Darko was an extremely highly hyped pro basketball player who was initially signed by the Detroit Pistons. He was supposed to have been the next Michael Jordan or at least the next Scottie Pippin but he almost never played and The Pistons got rid of him after about 3 seasons.

Despite all the second-hand smoke that we choked down, all the elbows, spilled beer and screaming, jumping Limeys, the Chemical Brothers put on an awesome show. We were only about 3 people behind the front of the main stage so we got to see everything up close and personal. I’m glad that we had the chance to go to the show despite the company.

We stayed with Dragan for about 5 days and then headed west to Croatia. We had some discussions with Dragan and his friends about their relation with the Croatians. They both said that they didn’t have any problems with anyone personally but there were a lot of small-minded people who liked to perpetuate age-old ethnic issues. Speaking of ethnicity, there is no difference between ethnicity or language in regard to Serbians and Croatians. The only difference is that after the schism of the Christian church, the Serbs chose to be Orthodox and the Croats chose to be Catholic. This division has been used politically to maintain conflict between the two groups. Both the Serbs and Croats have a very rich history which unfortunately is sometimes overshadowed by their many conflicts.

In any case, we had been told that if you go to certain parts of Croatia you may see a lot of anti-Serbian activities. Dragan’s family lived in Croatia and in fact Dragan was born in Croatia but they had to leave during the wars because it was not safe to live there anymore. In fact, the Croats in the village they lived in burned Dragan’s family’s house down to prevent them from returning.

All in all, Serbia was a very nice place with very nice people. We couldn’t have lucked out more. The transportation system is excellent, prices are low and the town was clean. We contacted our next Couchsurfer host in Croatia and bought our tickets to Zagreb. We planned to go right through Zagreb and straight to meet Nevena, who lived in a town right outside the town where many of my ancestors are from. Nevena would take us to one of my ancestral towns and help us find accommodation.

This is the second leg of the trip.

A Bribe and a Receipt

As some of you know, these past few weeks have been incredibly eventful for us. Unfortunately we haven’t been near a computer until now in order to document it. We finally came out of exile from Moldova and had the chance to continue setting up for our party in August in Brasov. We went to the hotel here in Brasov to see if we could work out a deal for our guests. We figured that since there were a whole bunch of people coming and they would be staying for an extended period of time then we would be able to get a good deal on the rooms.

We haggled with the guy a bit. Actually he did most of the haggling since he is one of those people who can’t stand a minute of silence. We organized a time to meet him and when we got there a middle-aged fast-talking guy with gold Nikes and a gold chain and bracelet to match, met us to discuss which rooms we wanted and when we wanted them. We saw all the rooms and they were pretty hooked-up. There were a number of rooms with stoves, a couple with Jacuzzis and the best part is that they are all in the center of the medieval part of town and all are equipped with free Wi-Fi.

My man with the gold shoes wouldn’t stand for us to be out in the rain so he told us to stay in one of the rooms until it stopped raining. He talked about how great the location is and tried to explain why his rooms didn’t need air conditioners. When he ran out of things to say, he lowered his prices. This was the pattern that we waited for. This is kind of what the conversation was like:

“And this room is very big. You have a microwave, a stove and you can make anything you want. If you want to cook in here or hang out outside, it’s ok!”

“… [nodding our heads with our “thinking faces” on]…”

“Well we can go as low as $50 for this one but the other ones must stay the same.”

“… [more nodding and not even Amanda is giving a polite smile]…”

“Well actually we can go as low as $42 dollars on these rooms”. He went on to explain that the other rooms could be rented out at any given minute so it was not worth it to him to reserve those at a reduced price. It was hot and he was sweating so I tried asking about other things in the hotel.

“I know that at other hotels they give a continental breakfast for free…”

“Yes, yes, we give great breakfasts here too. Usually it is toast and jam but for you we can establish a menu for a real breakfast every day and you can have omelets, fruit, whatever you want…”

This seemed like it was a good deal. We had checked out other places but really nothing could beat this guy’s prices and location. We let him talk his way down as far as he would go and after trying him for a little more we decided that we would maybe meet the next day since we were heading out for our vacation the day after tomorrow. We made our down payment and made sure that everything was in writing.

We also set up the menu and itinerary for our party on August 17 at our “secret location”. Most of this has to be kept a surprise but we can say that the food is bound to be off the chain. We have quite a schedule of events for the folks that will be able to make it. I hope that everybody is ready for it and we will be finding some “rain day” events in case of bad weather.

Anyways… So we went to Bucharest in order to go to our interview with Berlitz (the “teaching English” company we plan to work for). They seemed very pleased with us and scheduled us to start work on September 1^st. We met the “rest of the team” and they seemed like they were looking forward to us working with them in Bucharest. We will get back to this later. Now let me tell you about our adventure when we were trying to set up our hotel reservations in Bucharest.

I called up our guy (Vlad) who I know that has a hotel… ok, so it’s a big house with rooms that he rents out but they are good quality. He said that we could get to his house from the Gara de Nord [northern Bucharest train station] which is where we started out from. We waited almost an hour for the city bus and it never came. They were supposed to come every 30 minutes. We walked down the street and as we were walking the bus came by so we had to run to get on it.

Right after we got on two guys got on after us and sat in the back. The bus driver asked us where we were going and suggested that we get off the bus because he thought we made a mistake. In hindsight he was probably trying to help us. I was adamant that we found the right bus and explained to him that we didn’t need to go as far as the airport so it was ok that we got on the bus.

As I was trying to stamp our tickets in the ticket-stamper thing, the two men in the bus ordered me to stop trying to stamp my tickets. It was at this point that I realized that these guys were plain-clothes ticket-checker dudes who give people fines when they try to get a free ride. The more dominant one had a jaw that moved a little bit more than it should and kind of reminded me of Phil Hartman’s Frankenstein character on Saturday Night Live so we will refer to him as Frankenstein. The other guy was Frankenstein’s yes man and played a supporting role so he will be referred to as Stooly the Stool Pigeon.

Frankenstein showed me his “bus patrol” badge, and ordered me again to stop trying to stamp my ticket. Bewildered, I stopped and asked him a logical question. “Why?”

Frankenstein complemented me on my Romanian and asked me where I had learned it. Was I going to get out of whatever mysterious mess I was in by smiling and explaining my story to him? I tried. It didn’t work. Frankenstein asked us for our passports and only after we gave them to him did he explain the dire circumstances that we were in.

Looking at my passport, “Ok, Roberto,” I didn’t tell him that this was not my name. He didn’t even mess with my last name, “You bought tickets for the city bus. This is the express bus because it goes more than 20km from the center of the city.”

“Well I bought tickets for the bus. I told the ticket seller where I was going and he gave me these tickets.”

“These are not the right tickets, I am sorry.” Stooly was standing behind Frankenstein slowly shaking his head in support. “The tickets that you are supposed to have can be read by this new electronic ticket-reader and don’t need to be stamped.” This was starting to get irritating. “For your convenience, of course.”

“I don’t understand. Why would the ticket seller give me these tickets if they don’t work?”

“Well it’s possible that you didn’t specify which tickets you needed so he gave you the regular city bus tickets instead of these convenient electronic tickets that we have now.”

At this point, Stooly piped up and explained again that because this bus goes further than 20km from the city, the tickets are slightly more expensive and they come only in electronic form. “And it is clearly written on the front of the bus that it is an ‘express’ bus.”

“But I didn’t even see the front of the bus because we got on from the side of the bus and besides you saw that we were trying to pay with our tickets.”

“Unfortunately this is a 150 lei [~$50] fine for both of you,” says Frankenstein with his jaw dropping and closing in an even more exaggerated way. “Fortunately for you, you can pay us 50 lei [~$15] and this will suffice. It’s your choice.”

This sounded like a bribe to me. I don’t normally support this kind of practice but here are our circumstances: We are on our way to make a down-payment for 17 people which will take up an entire guest house and we are already late for the appointment. In 4 hours we have to catch a train to Belgrade to start our “vacation” and the tickets are already paid for. We can’t afford to start a war with a corrupt, barely-non-third-world system today. We paid the bribe.

This was the most official-looking bribe that I have ever seen. Frankenstein took out some little calculator machine and after logging some information, it printed out a nice receipt for us. You may be wondering if this receipt had an official stamp on it. It did. On top of this, Frankenstein “helped us out” by writing on the back of a card that we had paid the bribe and he explained to us that if we have any other problems from any other bribe-takers on the bus then all we had to do is show them that we already paid the bribe. This would save us from having to buy another ticket. How helpful and convenient! Frankenstein and Stooly flitted off the bus, wishing us a good day.

Amanda obviously wasn’t happy with this. On top of the bribe situation, the “express bus” was stopped for over 20 minutes and Amanda started to have a break-down. She was banging her ringed hand on the bar of the bus, willing it to start up again. Maybe if she banged louder the bus would start. I heroically kept the temper-tantrums at bay by pointing out that we had traveled on plenty of buses without paying anything and we never got caught. It was ironic that the first time we tried to pay that morning was the day we got caught by the bus patrol.

We thought that these guys were targeting tourists. In our case they were, but thankfully we saw that there were plenty Romanians who got busted and fined because they didn’t know how the system worked. I think they busted at least 4 other people on our trip to and from the hotel. These guys were making bank so no wonder there were so many of them everywhere.

In any case we made it to the hotel, had a nice chat with the owners and then we made it to our train that night. Yeah, we were $30 short but we counted our blessings. The train ride was nice and it cheered Amanda up a bit. We paid for regular tickets but our seats in the cabin were empty so we basically paid half-price for sleeping cars. This made up for our lost money. And we had receipts for everything.