odd encounter

Was just at an outdoor cafe. My server was obviously American. Turns out he plays pro football for the Belgrade Wolves, Vukoi maybe, in a league I did not know about. He played college ball for Arizona.

was it really a dense lecture

Well, maybe it was.

And by the way, I cannot find question marks on these Serbian keyboards. Or rather, I can see them, but they dont appear when I touch the key for them. That is why the question mark is missing from the title of this post.

if you have Prince of Networks

If you have Prince of Networks already, then you have it before I do. It may take a couple of weeks for the comp copies to reach Egypt from the UK, so I splurged on a load of FedExed copies from Amazon, but even those apparently aren`t in stock yet.

lovely evening in Belgrade

The light and air are perfect in the pedestrian zone, and I am coming off a round of plump red raspberries and a good round of Chinese dinner as well. Life is good tonight.

The view from the fortress in central Belgrade is quite inspiring. Both rivers are there far below, as is the swampy island preserve where no human apparently goes. To the west are both the Soviet style apartment blocks and the Habsburg area. The center of the city is on a ridge that descends sharply on both sides.

Of marvellous things found… here in Belgrade… a French copy of Houellebecq`s wonderful Lovecraft book, now my official bedtime reading for Serbia.

Buying quite a few clothes here, since it is not such an expensive city. My shoes fell apart while walking this afternoon, and luckily I was right in front of a shoe store when it happened. I walk a lot and thus beat up and break down shoes quickly.

Right after the shoes, I went and saw a row of government buildings severely damaged by the 1999 NATO strikes and still neither razed nor repaired, apparently pending a decision about what to do next. Despite all my travels, this is the first time I have been to a site of U.S. military action that occurred in my own living memory. Unless you count Kuwait City, where the US Marines entered in 1991… Not only cant I remember the moon landing, I cant even remember Vietnam, except for reading in the paper at age 7 that it was over.

Tomorrow I get a radio headquarters tour from the always generous Ksenija, and weather permitting I may walk to the Habsburg area, visible on afar from the fortress. The day after may be the day for a train trip to Novi Sad.

what could be worse…

than trolling and vampiring the troll and vampire posts. I ain`t biting.

Zagreb photos

Nice PHOTOS FROM ZAGREB by Tomislav Medak.

Unfortunately, I suppose you have to know what everyone looks like in advance to be able to identify the individual participants. If I had the net facilities I would pull off a few sample photos and give names, but for now I am stuck with net access in one of those noisy multiplayer videogame places and the keyboards are a bit beaten up.

Slept reasonably well on my first night in Belgrade. Barely any water pressure up there on the 3rd floor, but everything else about the flat is really nice. Sure beats a hotel.