Our Final Day in Belgrade, Serbia

31-5-11

Hotel Royal, Belgrade

This morning we were finally able to go visit the Cathedral of Saint Sava.  The Cathedral will be a spectacular sight once it is finished.  Even in the state it is in UNESCO has already declared it a European Cultural Heritage site.  UNESCO, and other groups, have offered to help pay many of the expenses to finish the process of building the Cathedral, but the Serbian Orthodox Church keeps refusing – and I entirely respect their reasoning.  They want the church to be the people’s church.  Not UNESCO’s.  Not some corporation’s.  The people’s church.  As such, they only accept donations from members and visitors to the church.

After the visit to Saint Sava’s, we set out to find the Mali Prinz Pekara (Small Prince Bakery).  During The Nastasijevića Code, Sam had been served some vanilla cookies she absolutely adored.  I still owed her cookies and Dijana had recommended Mali Prinz as the best in town…though she may be slightly biased, it’s her sister’s shop.

After some issues finding the bakery, came to understand that there were multiple locations – we had been getting directions to two different places!  Anyways, our struggle paid off and we found the bakery, the cookies, and we spilt some wonderfully delicious sweets – one of which I need to learn how to make.  They called “The Wheat”.  It was basically water, mashed wheat, and a bit of sugar.  A dollop of whipped cream on top and you had a quite healthy, but delicious, desert.

We then when back to the market one final time before we left.  I ended up finding a Zippo with an Eagle embossed on it.  The man originally wanted 500 Dinar, but talked himself down to 150 as I kept trying to walk away.  I’ll need to polish it and purchase a new wick, but the piece is otherwise in great condition.  A fantastic buy, if you ask me.

That evening we saw Crossing the Line at Theatre DAH before going back to the bar with most of the members of the troupe.  The owner had prepared us a wonderful homemade stew complete with homemade bread that was still warm from the oven…it was awesome!  After the meal, a bunch of us ducked out…which is a shame, but I wanted to go back to Kalemegdan to do some night photography.

We got back to the Hotel and I grabbed my camera and some beer.  A group of five or six of us went to the park, but I was left quickly behind taking photos…which I was okay with.   At one point, while I was taking photos near the church, a security guard came over and began talking to me.  His English was poor, but he mentioned something about needing papers to shoot photos…which is bullshit according to Katie because Kalemegdan is public property.  Anyways, decided to just keep moving.  When I got to the base of the fortress, I took a couple more photos before noticing another security guard honing in on me…I kept moving.  Only once did I stop to briefly pantomime setting up a photo – at which point the guard sped up in his approach – so I packed up and walked back up to the top of the Fortress and toward Hotel Royal.