Belgrade. The White City. I stepped off the overnight train and looked up at the brown sign beaming against a peeling background of acrid yellow. Mysterious shapes, foreign and strange, gazed down on me. I certainly was not in Kansas anymore. Sliding into my backpack, I yanked hard on the straps, sealing it to my body with that oh-too-familiar sensation of a crunching spinal cord. Dirty, dusty, and smelling of three-day-old crisps that had gone soft on the train, I was in no state to explore the wonders of a burgeoning Eastern European city, ravaged, reshaped, and renewed through Nationalism and war, art nouveau architecture, vestiges of the Ottoman Empire, and gritty nightclubs floating along the Danube. Nope, I just wanted sleep and some food that wasn’t cheese-and-onion flavoured.
With a map in one hand and sheer determination in the other, I marched through the station doors with all the gusto of a girl saying: “World, I am here! Now please take me home.” I watched as a greying, mustachioed man in a flat cap took a deep drag of his cigarette. It was measured, rehearsed. He made sure it went all the way into his lungs. He glanced at me sideways and raised a whiskery brow. “Taxi?” No. No taxi. I will walk! For I am a traveller. Besides, how far can the hostel be? Ninety minutes later and I was ruing the day I ever set about thinking I could travel. The sun beat down on me with such strength I could hear my fat being turned into crackling. So far the journey to the hostel had been entirely uphill; the streets made up of shining cobbles, all uneven, all designed to make me angry. I looked around, trying to get a sense of where I was. I crossed the road to where a burly, elderly woman was sat.
“Ahh yeees,” replied the woman, “you need tram, very far!” My heart sank as I realized I had not had the foresight to withdraw any Serbian dinar. “Do you know how I can walk there?” She took in breath through her remaining teeth. Tsssk. Before I knew what was happening, several Serbians crowded around my map, chattering away, all patting me on the back and pointing in various directions to help me on my journey. With a newfound spring in my step, I turned around. Then I stopped. The sun shone down on a torn apart building. Bricks hung from a gaping hole next to the corpse of a graffiti-ridden car, gleaming violently. In a city of excessive juxtaposition, I should have been more prepared for the beautiful and the terrible side-by-side.
But I wasn't. I was speechless.
