Belgrade I

[fivemack]

Take up Vienna like a rug from its position in the European Plain. Shake it a little so most of the money falls out, and drape it across a rocky patch at the confluence of the Danube and the Seva. Add a thirty-hectare fortress, built by the Turks and now reduced to its foundations and used as a climbing-frame for the small children of the city; the maintainers clearly have a strong belief that the beauty of its many precipitous drops would be critically spoiled by fences or signage.

Arrange that the house-painters' and plasterers' unions have been on strike since 1987, that an alliance of the Lignite Power Station Corporation and the Large Diesel-Powered Truck Drivers' Filial Association has been responsible for traffic and environmental issues for the same period, and that the pothole-removing budget has been embezzled.

This is roughly Belgrade. The night-life is reported spectacular; this evening, I went off with a group of Germans to the cheek-by-jowl bars on the misnamed (an E is missing) Silicon Valley. The reports turned out to be wrong; perhaps Wednesday is the wrong time for night-life.

Comments

[randwolf.livejournal.com]

Giggle. I've been enjoying your trip reports.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

I remember Belgrade (from the early eighties, doubtless before that strike, or whatever) as being reminiscent of Paris.