I arrived in Belgrade yesterday after a grueling 18 hour trip. These types of trips used to be difficult and unpleasant liminal experiences, but now they are nigh on impossible to withstand. The jetlag was intractable. But I’m back on my feet today, and I got out into the city to try to (re)gain my bearings.
I found a hipster coffee shop, a couple record stores, and got vegan gyros at a friend’s recommendation. The city has changed, the pace has quickened, the crowds are denser, the traffic is constant. It’s all more intense. The city is more diverse. There is more Russian being spoken. The flight I was on from Amsterdam was full of non-Serbian-speaking hipsters and business deals guys. There’s a kind of gentrification, but also an intensification of essence in all this activity, density, frenzy, busyness. All the gauche new construction, the unfinished construction, the argument wafting by in the air, waiting to coalesce all at once, as protest, as road rage, as demonic possession. The city is quickened, more alive. It looks like film shot in the Terazija in the ‘70s, crowds of pedestrians moving with purpose and without end.
Ćao Beograde. Jako si mi nedostajao.