I am now adding "confirming ticket prices before handing over money" to my list of important travel lessons learned this trip. I just dished out a whole 20€ for a ticket from Beograd to Zagreb when I really only wanted to pay as far as Sid, the Serbian border town, since my rail pass is good in Croatia. Oh well, I'm just glad I made that mistake in Eastern Europe, since in most countries it'd be disastrously expensive.
So Beograd, or Belgrade as I've just discovered its English name to be, is a place of great contrasts. In fact, all of Serbia I've seen so far could be described that way. For example, Beograd is the first "real" city I saw over the course of a two-hour train ride through the countryside, where the vast majority of the inhabitants are sunflowers.
Beograd itself is anything but agrarian though. The dingy, highrise apartment buildings scattered throughout the city can be seen jutting out of the cityscape from miles away alongside green-roofed domed cathedrals.
The far edge of the city is of course highly industrialiyed, with lumber and metal yards dotting the landscape and bulldoyers either clearing the land or moving large piles of dirt and rocks back and forth.
Just past this is where the interesting part starts. At one point the train tracks run alongside a shanty town on one side, with a long row of shoddily constructed shacks covered in piles of garbage along at least a mile of wall.. On top of the hill on the other side of the tracks however are the ruins of a huge castle, most likely a tourist destination, and just below that the richly decorated steeple of a cathedral can be seen, sun glinting off its gold adornments.
The train is starting to move now, so I'll pay more attention to what's out the windows. I'll just say that for all everyone says, Serbia's just another country (albeit an incredibly poor one) and Beograd is just another city, despite what everyone says. I will admit I had some doubts as I was on my way into the country this morning because of what most everyone said about Serbia, but in the end I decided to believe what Anna, the Serbian girl I met in Bremen, told me, and she turned out to be right.
Oh, and if I ever do an exclusively Eastern European excursion I am not getting a rail pass, since it would definitely not be worth it. And I am thinking of doing such an excursion....
