Good Morning Belgrade

Waking up at 6:45 am was a bit of a surprise, but I wasn't too tired, so I got up and started thinking about breakfast. My parents (who I am sharing the Serbia/Montenegro stage of my trip with) were also up and we put it down to jetlag and decided to go for a walk into the city and find somewhere for breakfast.

Our apartment is close enough to the town center of Old Belgrade to walk there within 10 minutes, so it was a great way to check out the local area as well as the town. There were bakeries and little cafes everywhere, but I wanted a hot cooked breakfast of eggs and bacon, so we kept moving. Eventually we found a nice restaurant in town called Biblioteka (Library). After realising that people were smoking, we asked if there was a non-smoking area and were told that it was upstairs. Now this sounds fine until you realise that upstairs is not closed off and is directly above the smokers, but it wasn't too bad as we sat down and took a look at the menu.

Now if I was expecting Eggs Benedict or Florentine, I had to readjust my expectations. Poached eggs were not on the menu anywhere, only scrambled of fried. There was an omelet also, but I quickly found something that grabbed my attention: Bibloteka Dorucak (Library Breakfast) which was their version of a big breakfast. This consisted of a fried egg, vienna sausage, ham, cheese, fried potato chips, tomato chutney and mustard. Now I have to apologise for not taking any photos but I was hungry and didn't think to grab the camera before I was already well into it. My mum ordered the bacon and eggs, which was 3 fried eggs with bacon, dad ordered the omelet. Both came with the potato chips and sauces. This wasn't the best breakfast I've ever had, but it was very nice. The ham and cheese both seemed a little flat and after tasting the bacon, I would have gladly substituted the ham and cheese and had bacon instead. We all had juices and coffees. The total if this meal was about 1650 dinars for three of us, about $AUD33. At these prices, I'm gonna love this town.

Deciding to do some more walking to compensate to some extent for breakfast, we continued our walk through the old city and headed for the fort in Belgrade, Kalemegdan.

This is a huge sprawling fort set on a very high hill in Belgrade, overlooking the meeting of the Danube and Sava Rivers.



The views from here are spectacular and it is surrounded by parks and gardens full of people from teens to senior citizens. Some just enjoying the view and the day and others gathered around chess boards, playing and chatting away.

Walking back through town we saw some poets from all over Europe sharing poems about Belgrade and their impressions in several different languages. We would have stayed and listened to this longer if we weren't already fairly tired and we also had to head over to my cousin's place for a late lunch at about 3pm.

Now I don't think I've walked this much in a long time and I was very tired when we got back to the apartment, but we soon headed out for lunch and had a great afternoon with several members of my dad's side of the family and got home around 7pm. Being as tired as I was, I decided to take a nap before figuring out what to do for the rest of Saturday night. I'm sure you can guess what's coming, but I didn't get out of bed until about 11 hours later.

Let's put it down to jet lag and see if we can make up for it today (Sunday).