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.