Road Trip Part 3 - More Serbia, Bulgaria & Turkey

(Haven't really had a chance to upload the previous post, so check the previous post below for part 2 of our road trip adventure)

We had heard from friends that the University town of Novi Sad was worth a few days to check out. We left Belgrade after an extended stay and drove north west. Along the way we stopped at a small village called Sremski Karlovci for lunch. Someone heard us talking English and before long a bloke sat down with us, we thought he might be there to interpret the menu for us. Instead he introduced himself as Dragan (scary name, nice bloke) and proceeded to tell us all about the local area, what to see, where to go and lots about the history. It turned out that he had lived in London with his English wife Karen and after having 2 kids they decided to move back to Serbia. Why? Because Serbia is a safer environment than London to bring up kids. It might sound crazy but it's true, the area feels like its still stuck in the 1950's in some ways, the kids just roaming around being kids and no one worried about it at all. Dragan and I got on pretty well after we found out we both shared hobbies in making bbq's and smoking meat, hopefully I can learn something, he showed me the attic where he keeps the cured hams, it was awesome - reminded me of the tapas bars in Spain. After a tour of the village Dragan even took the time to show us around the town of Novi Sad and the citadel a little bit, which was great for us as we might have missed some cool things otherwise. Novi Sad was a nice little town, it had a beautiful central area full of old shops that had been restored, and there were some markets in the north of the town that were huge. Heidi is a market addict, so we stopped by on multiple occasions and she managed to buy a leather jacket for abut AUS$10. There was everything in the market and I figured if I was so inclined, and I had the time and money I could probably build myself some flying machine from parts purchased only from the markets ( I saw a set of helicopter rotors in one stall - bizarre)


Our next destination after Serbia was Bulgaria, we had planned to stay with the family of a friend who lived in a small town of Karlovo which is just about smack in the middle of Bulgaria. Driving from Novi Sad in Serbia, we decided that the capital city of Bulgaria, Sofia, would be a good first stop. Again, it was a bit of a challenge as maps were not so good, but we made our way eventually to the hostel. The staff were a bit shocked that we had decided to drive as they later told us that Sofia was the home of car crime in Eastern Europe, and cars with foreign number plates go especially quickly. 'No problems' I thought ' we have all the insurance'. The next day we went out and walked and walked and walked all over the city, there are lots of things to see, and some of the sights are great but generally I got the feeling that the city had run out of cash in the last few years because some of the parks and sights were looking pretty tired and trashed unfortunately. We went out that night and again got a lecture from a girl behind the bar, she couldn't believe that we were planning on walking home at midnight through the city. If I believed everything the locals said, I'd have thought it was a bloody war zone worse than Belgrade and Sarajevo, but honestly we didn't have any trouble at all - our car was fine and we didn't get mugged, or even a sideways glance really. Anyway, a couple of days were enough in Sofia, its an OK place, with some nice shopping, markets and bars but it needs a coat of paint.


Our main objective was to get to Karlovo anyway, so we were keen to get going. We again navigated our way through the 'streets' of Sofia. I thought we might disappear through some of the larger potholes, but we emerged from the city unscathed - I swear that our car has been blessed by some divine spirit, it's miraculous that we've made it this far without so much as a scratch. The drive to Karlovo took us through some nice farmland and the weather was great so we enjoyed the trip and listened to a few golden oldies on the only radio station we could stand. Listening to classics like 'Bad to the Bone', some 'Rolling Stones' and 'The Who' with the volume cranked all the way up was fun, but I pined for my Mustang that I had in Tulsa, it's pretty hard to look cool in a little car that looks like a Kinder Egg on wheels. We got the Karlovo and meet up with the George's Grandparents, who run the local English school. They showed us around quickly, and let us drop our stuff in their holiday house. The house deserves a mention - its a perfectly renovated old place, wood carvings everywhere, whitewashed walls, 2 stories of low rooms, and full of old carpets and tapestries and even some antique swords and muskets over the fire place mantle. It's like stepping back 200 years as you walk through the door, such a fantastic place to stay, it took the family 4 years to renovate and they have spared no expense or trouble to make it as authentic as possible. So after getting the grand tour of the old house we went back to the English school and helped out a bit by talking to some of the younger kids - apparently it helps them to hear people speak English with different accents, but I'm not sure how much they could learn from me, their English was already better than mine. After a couple of hours of chatting to the kids we left and had dinner at the local restaurant which gave us some of the best food we had had since Slovenia. They made everything themselves, from bread through to pasta, sausages and smoked fish, so of course we went a little crazy and tried a bit of everything. Certainly won't starve on this trip.


The next day we were excited to go walking though the hills around Karlovo, its such pristine environment and the weather was getting warmer and warmer as Spring started to take over from winter. Heids and I set off and we thought we knew where we were going, there were a few walking tracks around the waterfalls. After a short distance the track started getting pretty difficult to navigate, very steep in places and so narrow in some spots we had to hug the cliff face to get around. In some places we found ourselves having to use metal hand cables anchored into the cliffs to aid our progress. Eventually the narrow path gave way to foot pegs hammered in to the wall, and the metal hand cables started to lead us further and further up. It was pretty obvious that this wasn't the walk we had intended to do, but it was fun, probably more fun than the walk anyway. It was only when we were about an hour in to the walk that we looked back and realised we were scaling the sheer cliffs of the waterfall and were about 50m above the valley floor. We went further and further, and it only got harder and harder - in a couple of places the metal hand cables had worn away completely and we had to use the bare anchor points to climb up. After another half an hour or so we reached a small clearing and the trail stopped, so after a picnic lunch we turned around and went back - going down was much harder. Later on we learned that we had just completed the 'extreme cables course' and that usually you need a guide and climbing equipment to finish it. Instead of a guide and climbing equipment we had a satchel full of sandwiches and were wearing jeans and sneakers. I wonder if I can get some sort of certificate...


After a short but really relaxing visit to Karlovo, we thought we'd visit Turkey for a while, so we got an overnight train. At some points I thought the train would fly off the tracks, it seemed like it was going way way too fast. But we got to Istanbul in one piece and spent a couple of days exploring the sights and the Grand Bazaar. In my mind I had pictured Istanbul like a larger, and busier Morocco, but I was surprised to find out it's more like Melbourne then Morocco. We organised a tour down the coast to Troy and Gallipoli and caught a bus down to Canakkale the next day. From Canakkale we took a tour to Troy in the morning which I really liked, being the history nerd I am. A lot of people complain that there is not much to see at Troy, maybe hey were expecting to see something like Pompeii or Ephesus. I don't think they realise that the ruins of Troy were ruins about 3000 years ago, even Alexander the Great and later the Romans were tourists to see the ruins - so the fact that there is anything at all to see is interesting. We had a really good guide who took us and another couple around the site and spent ages explaining everything. I'd read the Iliad so I knew about a lot of the story told from the Greek side of the war, it was interesting to hear about the Trojan side and the re-discovery of the ruins in the 19th century. There were actually 9 cities on the Troy site spanning thousands of years, each city was built on the ruins of the old city after it was destroyed by war or nature. The walls of Troy 6, the famous city, were still huge even by today's standards. When the city was rediscovered by German archaeologists in the 18-somethings they found huge caches of treasure sealed in to the walls, and they claimed they had found Priams lost treasure. I'm sure there is enough material here for a decent Indiana Jones script, it beats the hell out of "Aliens-and-the-end-of-the-world-bollocks".


After we had finished Troy we drove down the Gallipoli coast a bit further. The group was much larger this time, but we still had a good guide which I thin is the single most important thing when you visit somewhere like this. We started our tour from the beaches the ANZAC's were supposed to land, then drove up to ANZAC cove (where they actually landed), then u the winding hills to the area called 'no mans land' (ie. between the Turkish and ANZAC trenches).


Looking down from the top to the cliffs an beaches below, it was so hard to imagine anyone climbing let alone fighting their way up. The guide showed us a picture taken from the same spot in April 1915 and then it was easier to imagine the thousands of people on the beach making their way up to the trenches at the top, there were so many people crammed in to such a small area. Walking around the trenches was a bit spooky, at some points the distance between the Turkish and ANZAC trenches was as little as 8 metres, and this was where some of the heaviest fighting took place. It's a bit surreal really, we know that everything happened here but it's hard to accept that just 8 metres separated both armies. It's still easy to find bits of shrapnel lying around in the dirt, and after a minute or two of looking around the ANZAC trenches I found an empty bullet casing and dug it out. Even though it had been sitting in the dirt for almost 100 years it looked fine. As I looked at it I thought 'the last time someone picked this up, they put it in their gun and tried to shoot someone just over there' and that made it seem a bit more real.


I'd learnt a fair bit about the ANZAC story before I came, so a lot of what the guide told us wasn't new, but it was interesting to hear the stories of the Turkish. When the ANZACs first landed there were only 160 Turkish soldiers defending the coast. After finishing their ammunition on the thousands of advancing ANZAC troops they decided to run away (as you would) only to be stopped and questioned by their commander Ataturk who wanted to know what was going on (Ataturk later became the famous leader of the Turkish state). Ataturk quickly told his German boss what the story was, but the German was hesitant to send more men to defend the coast because he thought it was a trick, and maybe there would be a larger invasion elsewhere. Ataturk realised that this wasn't some feint invasion, and got all the men he could gather and sent them to defend the coast. The commander of the 57th regiment told his troops "I'm not ordering you to attack, I'm ordering you to die in defence of you're country" and there was not one survivor from the Turkish 57th regiment. Over the next 8 months the Turks tried desperately to hold on to the high ground, and suffered huge losses - on 1 night alone they lost over 10,000 guys in one attack, most of them all about 20 years old.


Even though the Turkish army lost more men and suffered more casualties than the allies, I found it really funny to learn that they didn't really even hold a grudge against the ANZAC's, and they even had a kind of friendship. There are lots of stories of how ANZAC's and Turks used to throw each other tobacco, smoking papers, tinned meat, newspapers etc. They even had singing competitions. After a particularly bad day of fighting both sides agreed to a ceasefire to bury their dead, and just like that everyone jumped out of the trenches, shook hands with their enemies and had a cigarette. Then, the next morning they were back to trying to kill them. It all seems so bizarre. One Turkish soldier even risked his own life to carry a badly wounded English guy from the Turkish trenches, over no mans land to the ANZAC trenches. All in all the Gallipoli tour was good, but sobering.


That night we caught the overnight bus to a town called Selcuk which is near the old ruins of Ephesus. Ephesus was the 'Istanbul' of its day, it was the capital and also the biggest city in Asia minor with a population of over 30,000 people (which is huge for an ancient city). The ruins are really well preserved because the city was abandoned when the water retreated a few kilometers turning the harbour into a marshland infested with malaria (kind if like global warming in reverse). They had a huge stadium which could sit 25,000 people (almost the whole population) and from here the locals saw plays and gladiators.


We also had a look at the spot that Mary, mother of Jesus, was supposed to have lived out her last days. The story goes that after Jesus was crucified and a couple of other apostles were martyred, the remaining apostles decided to get out of town for a while. They divided up the known world and each decided to preach their religion in different parts. Mary followed Saint Paul (I think?) to Ephesus where she went in to hiding in a tiny little house in the hills. Sometime in the 19th century a bed-ridden German nun started having visions abut the last days of Mary and wrote down what she saw in a diary. In the 20th century some archaeologists, using this diary, found some old Roman baths in the hills. Under the floor of the baths they found what looked like a small bath or pool, similar to the ones used in the past for baptisms. Then they discovered a couple of bodies next to the baptism pool which were buried in a Christian manner (i.e not Muslim, Jewish or Roman), and were pointing towards a small hill. Under the small hill, they excavated the remains of a house which matched the description in the diary almost perfectly. Adding to this, the first church built in the nearby Ephesus was the Basilica of Mary and based on the early tradition of naming a church after a local religious person, many people believe that this house in the hills is where Mary lived and later died. Sounds like a pretty good Indie plot here as well, what what where those over paid fools in Hollywood thinking?


So, after another interesting day we caught another bus back to Istanbul, the ride was about 11hrs but felt like a lifetime. I think you could use this as a legitimate form of torture - torture by prolonged bus seat. It would scare the hell out of me. So now we're in Istanbul, waiting for yet another overnight bus to take us back to Bulgaria, where we will get another bus to Karlovo. There we will be able to finally pick up our car again (awesome!) and drive up to Romania and explore Transylvania...muhahahaha

Road Trip Part 2 - Slovenia, Venice & Serbia

We left Zagreb in the morning and drove towards Slovenia, not really knowing what to expect. Heidi had never seen any of her family there, and we didn't really know if we could even find them. Our GPS that we bought in Spain had maps for Western Europe, so after driving in to Croatia the first thing I did was update the maps. Unfortunately there just aren't maps available for lots of Eastern Europe. Try looking up Belgrade or Sarajevo on Google Maps, I can assure you there are more than 2 roads in each of these large cities. Anyway, we were driving to Trzic in Slovenia, and lets just say the maps were not exactly up to scratch. The country side was pretty cool and the weather was really nice so the drive was enjoyable.


If I was playing God and had a chance at designing a country from scratch I like to flatter myself that I could do a pretty good job. I reckon I've seen enough places recently that I could tell what would work and what wouldn't. After rolling up my robe sleeves and getting ready for some serious work, this is how it would go:

-The location is probably the first thing I'd decide, I'd like my country to be close to the other places I like to visit: Austria for skiing, hiking and beer, Croatia for its amazing coastlines, beaches and cheap holidays, Italy on another side for the wine, food and history.

- Once the location was set I'd decide on what type of land my country would have. I love the snow, so obviously there would be some huge mountains. I'd want snow capped peaks everywhere to ski in the winter with enough places to go hiking and walking in the summer. But I also like the beach, so I'd have a little of that too. And some fertile plains in the middle for farmers would balance everything out.

-I'd also try to keep the country as compact as possible to make sure I could go skiing in the morning and then swimming on the coast after lunch. Plus smaller countries are easier to manage and travel across.

-Once crafting of the land was finished, I'd start to make some cities for people to live. I'd put the capital roughly in the middle of the country, then sprinkle a few hundred thousand people over it. Not too many, just enough to keeping things interesting. And no jerks, I'd only populate my country with the friendliest of people. I'd stick the jerks in Naples or Tangier or someplace.
So in the end I'd have a pretty cool country, and the result of all my divine hard work would be fairly close to what Slovenia is today. Its pretty much perfection.

After a few wrong turns and knocking on a couple of wrong doors we managed to find the right place and received a really warm welcome from Heidi's family. The first thing we did was to sit down and have a welcome drink of the home made schnapps made from pears. The schnapps was strong - it burnt a path down my throat and I fully expected to see a smoking hole in the couch when I stood up. Strong stuff indeed, but apparently it helps to digest the food which we were about to consume in copious amounts for lunch. Within 15 mins of arriving we were seated and eating a huge delicious home cooked lunch, and the food didn't really stop coming, ever. Every meal was started with a schnapps, followed by a huge helping of Slovenian fare, washed down with local wine and finished with a beer and then another schnapps...or two.


When we arrived in Trzic, we had fully expected to meet Heidi's family, say hello, maybe have a nice lunch or something, then be on our way again. So we were pretty surprised when over lunch Aloyze and Barbara basically planned out our next week, filling in each day with trips to the local sights and skiing. Over the next few days we drove to lake Bled and had a look around castle Bled, took went for a walk through the mountains, had a day trip to the coast and had great seafood pizza, saw the old Baron's castle and grounds where Heidi's grandfather was born and raised, visited the beautiful capital of Ljubljana, and of course went skiing a couple of times. The first place we went skiing was just over the border in Austria because the local slopes were closed due to too much snow (!!) and high winds. The next day we tried again for the Trzic slopes and we weren't disappointed. The previous day had added to the already huge 5-6 metre base and in some spots the lifts had to be dug out. We actually passed through a kind of snow valley or tunnel on the lifts to the top. I have never seen so much snow, and it made me so excited to see so much that I must have looked like a 4 year old on Christmas morning when he knows that Santa brought him Transformers. Blue skies, low winds and a couple of beers at lunch made the day one to remember.

In a small gesture of thanks we offered to cook dinner one night and promised we would try and make some Australian food. We tried really hard to find some lamb so we could do a proper Sunday roast, but we couldn't find any suitable meat. Nevertheless we still had a pretty good line up of Vegemite and cheese toasted squares for entree, handmade pasta and pasta sauce for main course and pavlovas topped with fruit to round it out. In the end over 13 people turned up and it was just as well we made a mountain of food, everyone seemed to enjoy the night and the pavlovas went down a treat. Slovenian - Australian relations have never been as good, I should be a diplomat.


So the week we spent in Slovenia seemed to pass like a whirlwind, we were kept busy every day, ate ourselves to death, drank loads of home made schnapps and played lots of cards with Heidi's grand-aunt Peppi. But all good things have to end, and eventually we had to reluctantly peel ourselves away from our holiday within a holiday. We had decided that we'd like to visit Venice while we in the general area, so we drove to the coast, dumped the car and jumped on a train. We arrived in Venice pretty late in the night and got off a bit of a poor start when the person we were supposed to meet to take us to our apartment was over an hour late. Still, there are worse places to have to kill and hour. Eventually we checked in, dumped our bags and went for a stroll.
Obviously I don't need to explain a lot about how beautiful Venice is, I'll try to keep it brief. At night the water sparkled and lapped at the edges of the streets and during the day the waterways were busy and packed with all kinds of watercraft. The streets were already full of tourists even at this early time in the season so I'd hate to see what it would be like in peak summer season. We were staying in a great location, only 100m to the cultural centre of Venice, St Marks Square. Every morning (actually every single hour of the day and night) the bells from St Mark would toll, we would throw the shutters open and get some sun. The weather held out until the last day and we tried to make the most of it, we walked around just about every island and tried to visit all the cultural spots. We had a gondola ride through the tight twisting canals and got serenaded by a bunch of old ladies who just happened to be on a bridge looking down. Another highlight was lunch on the last full day when we managed to find a restaurant that wasn't crowded near the Arsenal area - it was really peaceful and we sat in the sun while we ate pizzas, drank good wine and played some cards while we watched all kinds of boats, large and small, navigating through the canals.

4 days was enough in Venice. I'm sure we could have stayed for a few more, but it was really hurting my wallet, and we needed to head back east to more reasonable and budget friendly places. We bought a train ticket and jumped on the first train to Trieste,only to get booted off half way because we had accidentally boarded the super 5 star, all signing, all dancing luxury high speed train. I was wondering why the tickets were so cheap. Anyway, we had to wait a while and then got the packed, cramped and smelly normal train. But it got us to our destination just fine. A bus took us back to our car, and we settled in for a 6 hour drive to Zagreb.
Our only real hitch on the long day of travel was a small run in with the Slovenian customs. We had set our GPS to avoid the toll roads, as we didn't want to buy a toll sticker which costs about AUS $70, and didn't want to chance a 300 Euro fine. So we wound our way all around the countryside. Our GPS has Yoda's voice, so we were being guided by the Jedi master himself. A couple of times he took us via dirt tracks through national parks, again due to poor map coverage of the areas, which I thought was particularly hilarious. Heids was not at all impressed at the time, but laughed about it later. Once or twice we had to do some pretty serious off roading as once we had started down a certain track there was no hope of reversing back up. On multiple occasions we came across huge gaping holes in the tracks, deep mud, large rocks and drop offs that I thought would definitely shipwreck us in the middle of no where. I never would have expected a tiny little 2 wheel drive diesel to make it, but somehow we did, clearly the force was with us. I kept telling Heidi that it was Yoda giving us Jedi training, but my smart quips fell on deaf ears - she hasn't even seen 'Return of the Jedi'.


Anyway, we took a lot of detours and went to excessive effort to avoid toll roads, a 3 or 4 hour drive through Slovenia blew out to about 6. Finally we neared the border and stopped at the immigration checkpoint. The guy took one look at our passports and told us that we couldn't cross here, and we needed to pass through the checkpoint just a few hundred metres away up the road a bit. We thought it was odd, but did as we were told, and drove to the other booth - only to be told that we had just used the freeway, all 400 metres of it, and as we didn't have a toll ticket we were liable for a 300 Euro fine. Suckers! We'd been conned. We were both pretty angry and arguing with the customs bloke, he kept yelling back at us that he couldn't change the rules, and that we didn't have a ticket and were on the highway. I kept telling him to call his buddy from down the road and sort it out with him, but he just shook his head, like its so hard to make a call. After a while we had reached a bit of a stalemate - it seemed pretty clear we weren't going to pay any fine, and he knew that we knew it was a bit of a trap, so he told us in his friendliest "It's not me, its the system" voice to just buy a toll ticket, quickly slap it on the window and he'd let us drive through. So after summing up the choices (pay the 300 Euro fine, buy a 30 Euro ticket, get locked up or make a break for it) we eventually bought the ticket (it was tempting to make a break for it) and made our way over the border 30 Euros lighter. Still, I guess it could have been worse. They could have discovered the 40kg of drugs we were smuggling in the boot (I'M KIDDING MUM!)


Finally we arrived back in Zagreb, thus completing one huge loop through Croatia, Slovenia and Italy. It was a really long day of travelling and we crashed in Zagreb, which is a city I like more and more each time we visit. we will probably stay again on the way back west in several weeks.
Our destination for the next day of travelling was Belgrade, in Serbia. I always get a bit of a funny feeling the first time I see the names of cities in this area on road signs. We've passed through Sarajevo and Mostar in Bosnia and now Belgrade. For 20 odd years I've always had the media in the background informing me about some rebels, or ex-Yugoslavian, Serbian, Bosnian or Montenegrin fighters waging war on each other. I hardly paid any attention at all, it just seemed to be as normal as the sport and weather on TV, but now that we're driving thorough these places that were being torn apart, I wish I had paid a bit more attention. The one thing that we've started to learn is that there is no group of people without some blame. One group would strike another, then the injured party would retaliate with even worse violence, and it just escalated as the fighting went on and on, and got worse and worse, eventually culminating with the NATO airstrikes against Belgrade in 1999.


And now we were driving through the city of Belgrade, and seeing the damage caused by the air strikes first hand. Even though it was 10 years ago, there are still loads of scars and buildings with gaping holes where you can see the path the bomb took as it tore through each floor then blew the walls out leaving a skeleton.

Being exposed to these vivid signs of the recent history I was curious to earn a bit more about the history of the region, luckily there are some great museums that don't try to sugar coat anything. It turns out that Belgrade and the surrounding regions have been in and out of wars for thousands of years. From the founding of the area by Greeks and Romans, to the invasion by the Celts and Barbarians before Atilla and his gang had a go, and then of course the on going saga of the Austrian-Hungarian and Turkish wars over a 600 year period, there has scarcely been a few decades of peace. Some of this can be explained by the position of the of the city, many people believe its the border between East and West so I guess its always on the frontier and the first place to get conquered every time some bloke with half a mind to conquer the world has a crack. Unfortunately when you look back in time, the last 10 years since the fall of the very unpopular government has really only been like a blink of an eye, and if history is a guide to anything, this area will probably again be the site of more fighting. Hopefully the people here can change the history though and write a more positive future because there is a lot to like about Belgrade and its people, and it would be a huge loss to again have it reduced to rubble like it was in 1999.


We didn't have any maps to guide us through the city, and Yoda was silent - testing us again - fortunately the force was strong with us that day and we found our place quickly. The first thing that we noticed about the city was the colour grey. Everything is a different tone of grey, and it's the perfect stereotypical Soviet-era industrial town that you would see on TV or movies. The streets are worn and pot holed, the buildings are in a terrible state and the sky is grey, the cars and buses are grey. Even the water was a little bit grey. It sounds depressing, but we had a fantastic time. There is a spirit about the city that fills everything with energy. There is lots of development going on and the city feels busy and vibrant. There are some great shopping places (Heidi can attest to that), loads of museums, and the parks and gardens are beautiful. I suppose in a city that had been bombed to bits the locals would take pride in their parks as a refuge from the grey concrete and smog. We stayed in one of the best hostels we been in so far and everyone we meet was interested to talk to us and genuinely friendly. There were loads of markets full or just about everything from second hand clothes stalls, to gadgets, to fruit and meat. The food was fantastic, we ate at some real Serbian local places that were full of blokes with big 'staches, who looked like Asterix characters and would join in and sing loudly with the musical trio consisting of 2 fiddles (or is that fiddlers?? It just sounds wrong) and a guitarist who would walk around playing music. The places where we ate were only small, but packed all the time and as busy as any place I've seen.


(Nerd warning, skip this paragraph if you're not interested in aeroplanes) - One day Heidi really wanted to check out one of the markets for a second time, so I took a bus the air museum. It was a bit of nerd paradise, there were aircraft from both the East and West on static display. They had an exhibit from the 1999 war and had pieces of the F117 Stealth Fighter that was shot down, a canopy and other wreckage from an F16 Falcon that crashed and some drones that were shot down among other things. I thought it was funny that I had seen and walked through the production line in Ft Worth which produced that F16 - I might have even talked to the people that worked on that very plane. Another interesting piece of history: In the early days of WW2 Yugoslavia didn't know which way it would lean. A huge protest organised by students and university staff against the Axis powers drew so much attention from the government that it tipped the balance and they sided with the Allies. The UK, seeing Yugoslavia in Hitlers sights, shipped hundreds of aircraft to help out the small Yugoslavian air force. Among them were Hurricanes and Spitfires which means that these British aircraft flew along side Mescherschmits and Junkers aircraft from Germany that Yugoslavia had purchased before the war. Very strange mix. In the end though, even with the best aircraft from both sides, the Yugoslavian air force didn't stand a chance and the rest is history. Since the end of WW2, the Yugoslavian air force has relied heavily on the Soviet/Russian built aircraft, and there are a lot on display (outside around the back of the museum there is a jet graveyard). There really are examples of just about every type and nationality of aeroplanes on display. In the afternoon it became very very windy, and even walking around the aircraft that were on display outside was an effort. There was an jet on a pole out the front of the museum to greet people and I really expected it to tear off its mount and get carried away, it was swinging back and forth and generally wobbling all around (that's a technical term) and looked really unsafe.

On St Patricks day we thought we'd do something a little bit Irish so we bought some tickets to a local band called 'The Orthodox Celts'. We didn't know anything abut them, but through talking to different people we learned that they were a very popular local band that played to a crowd of 20,000 just a few months ago. So that night we set off and we got the venue, we saw that everyone was dressed up in Irish tshirts, Irish flags, and general Irish stuff. No big deal, it was St Patricks day after all. We went in, staked out the best spots we could find, grabbed a few beers and got ready to be blown away by some awesome Serbian rock band. The lights dimmed down a bit, someone said something over the PA and the band came out. They all looked a bit strange, but hey, its Serbia right? The lead singer looked like a mean old geezer and was dressed in jeans, black singlet, long black hair, piercings etc etc- we were thinking 'This guy loves his metal, this is going to be loud!'. Then the next bloke came out on stage with a fiddle...and then another guy came out with a kind of bag pipes thing. One of the guys who was already on stage pulled a flute out of a case. I was thinking this was all very odd for a Serbian hard rock band, but I was interested to see where this was going. The crowd by this stage was going nuts, really crazy. The vocals guy said something in the mic, everyone cheered a bit more, some girls behind us started to cry with happiness, then the band opened up with a sizzling version of some Irish folk...Irish folk? What the hell? Maybe it was just a gimmick, seeing as it was St Paddys day? Nope. The next 2 hours were packed to the brim of good old fashioned Irish folk songs, sung in English with Irish accents by Serbains dressed as metal-heads. The people around us were going insane, there was crowd surfing, a deep mosh pit, and lighters galore for the slow songs. I couldn't help but think maybe these people were confused, surely any group of people this excited about Irish folk songs should be wearing knitted cardigans and sandals with socks. I asked around after the gig and people kept telling us the same thing 'These guys are famous here, we love them, they rock'. What a strange night. That night kind of sums up Belgrade - Not at all what you expect, but loads of fun all the same.