Serbia's Belgrade Beer Festival

The Belgrade Beer Festival is not a beer festival.

That's what every beer geek back in the USA would say.  Out of the 20 or so beers available at the festival, there's nothing that would excite any major beer tourist.  Unfortunately, once you go east of Germany and the Czech Republic all the European beers start tasting the same.  If you want to be the first to say you've drank Jelen, Laskov, Niksicko, and some Irish-Style Serbian Craft Beer, then go for bragging rights.  They're still better than your average Central American beer, but nothing that will make beer geeks have beergasms.

Maps Are Irrelevant When You're This Drunk

You don't go to Belgrade for beer tasting...you go there to party.  The Belgrade Beer Festival is certainly a great place to party.  There's one massive stage that has live bands playing until the early hours of the morning.  Beer, alcohol and Serbian barbeque flow freely.  Beautiful Balkan girls will dance with you and crazy Balkans guys will challenge your foreign ass to out-drink them (good luck.)

Unlike Serbia's far more popular Exit Festival, the Belgrade Beer Festival still feels authentically Serbian. Most of the bands are national or former Yugoslavian rock acts that don't play outside of the Balkans. Meanwhile the Exit Festival attracts Europeans from all over to see international bands and DJs such as Guns N' Roses, Snoop Dogg, Eric Prydz, Artic Monkeys and David Guetta.

During 2 days at the Beer Festival, I didn't run into a single 'foreigner.'  Note the contrast.

Good Balkan Company

The big headliners for the 2011 Belgrade Beer Festivals were Riblja Čorba, Atomsko Sklonište, Kiki Lesendrić i Piloti and Marky Ramone's Blitzkrieg (yes, from The Ramones.)  And if anyone remembers the 1980s, Simple Minds also headlined.  One group which has never headlined, but which has played every festival dating back to the first in 2003 is the Orthodox Celts.  They are actually a national group, but true to their name they play traditional Irish folk music.  They fucking rock.

Are any of these groups ringing a bell??

From a local perspective, Riblja Čorba is probably the most famous of all the groups.  These old guys have managed to stay rocking since 1978 with most of the original band still intact.  I'm told their lyrics are quite funny and often political....if only I understood Serbian.

In addition to solid rock 'n' roll groups, the festival offers more typical traditional Serbian groups for people who are into the Gypsy Balkan sound made popular by Goran Bregovic, Emir Kusterica and the like.  As cool as that music is, some Serbians will tell you that Goran and Imir 'sold out.'  Go to this festival if you want to hear some undiscovered sounds...

My personal recommendation: buy a few liters of Jelen Pivo outside the festival where it's a lot cheaper and get drunk before you go in.  Most of the Serbians will be doing the same and -as with me- they might ask you, "Why the fuck you here, and not Exit Fest?!"  Then they will hand you a beer and say, "Ziveli!" You'll be in good company.  I certainly was.

I ♥ Balkan Girls 

Bye-Bye Bosnian Baby...I'm Back To Belgrade Again

Sexual.

Sensual.

Selma.

I need a cold shower.  Quite frankly this is sexier than all that American booty dancing.

Selma Bajrami, my fantasy Turbo-Folk girlfriend

The Balkans were formerly part of the Turkish-Ottoman Empire and still has a lot of Turkish and Middle-Eastern influence.  I had a Serbian friend tell me that Bosnian and Albanian girls are the best dancers in the former Yugoslavia because of their Arabic origins.  If that is true then Turbo-Folk singer, Selma Bajrami, is a fine example of that kind of dancing.  By chance I met her in a club in Sarajevo, Bosnia in 2010.  I'm still smacking myself for not asking for her phone number that night.


My current Bosnian baby wasn't mad anymore.  She lay on top of me, moving her hips against mine and touching me under my shirt.  I likewise ran my hands under her clothes and quietly whispered in her ear.  She caught my eye from time to time as we moved together to some psychedelic hippie funk she had put on Youtube.  I lay down in anticipation while she continued her Arabic grinding.  My hands moved lower.

"Hey you American fucker. Get a room...but not here."

I have some great Serbian friends.  My friend told me there was Russian Couchsurfing couple in Nis who had a car and were heading for Belgrade within an hour.  I vaguely remembered meeting a Russian couple during the last 2 days of insanity in Nis.  Nis is always a blur.  My friend explained the deal succinctly, "Ride with them and pay only gas, or wait and pay more for a bus...Fucker."

I had friends I could stay with in Belgrade, and now I had a quick way to get there.

After my friend gave me a travel update, he left me alone again with my Bosnian baby.  We continued moving and grinding together for as long as time allowed.  I wanted her and - as with many others I had meet - I knew it wouldn't happen.  At the moment I needed to see her naked and bare and dancing in front of me.  We were kissing and touching out of urgency and raw emotion.  The chaos of the moment inappropriately made my mind conjure up images of NATO planes flying over Sarajevo.  This girl needs a rescue mission.

Those dreams evaporated in the incredible heat of the Southern Serbian summer.  Before I could reflect  further, I was in the back seat of the Russian couples' little car, staring out the window and cursing myself for desiring a wild life of women, drink and dance over a simple life with just one woman who I truly desired.  I am still thinking about this.

To avoid highway tolls, the Russians drove on the service roads that followed the main highway to Belgrade.  We were in no hurry and stopped in several small towns for sightseeing.  We took pictures in front of historical monuments and they recalled their previous visits to Serbia.  They were a happy couple...one of many Russian ex-pats who lived on the Southern Adriatic beaches of Montenegro so that they could escape the bitter cold of the country they were from.  Serbia was just a brief vacation for them to arrange their paperwork to continue their ex-pat life.


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The Russian and I spoke in English of our countries long love-hate relationship with each other while his girlfriend periodically snapped at him in Russian.  She couldn't speak English but was able to understand everything.  As we approached Belgrade, they checked the map frequently to make sure we were taking the right way to my friend's apartment in the city center.  They wanted to continue sightseeing so we choose a hilly backroad that followed the Sava River.  Although I could see the urban mess in the distance, the winding road we were driving on felt very provincial.  One side of the road dropped off into the glistening river below while the other side meandered away into several green farm plots.  The houses were small, quaint, terracotta constructions that looked of the era before Communism took hold.

The tranquil beauty disappeared as we entered the city limits.  Small rustic houses gave way to the typical clunky, multicolored Communist blocs I have seen in so many parts of Slavic Europe.  The hilly topography of the land contributes to Belgrade's disorder as it makes the city appear to be falling into itself.  Apartments awkwardly pile up and start to tumble head-over-heels into each other.  Trash collects in corners of the streets while the smell of cigarettes and coffee seeps from the cracks in the buildings. The single road we were driving on ceased to meander in one direction and splintered into a million little spiderwebs that got swallowed up in the urban decay.  

It's all so wonderfully, beautifully, ridiculously chaotic.  The 'White City' is falling apart all around me.  I want to fall apart with it.

Spomenik Neznanom Junaku

Nis Fortress Nightlife

Nis fortress walls. Disco to the left.

A day exploring Crveni Krst concentration camp and climbing Bubanj Hill to see a mass execution site can depress the average tourist.  Serbia has a simple, powerful solution to cure this depression: coffee.  Or if that's not strong enough: rakia.  The Balkans can easily convert a sworn coffee-hater into a coffee addict (and potential rakia addict.)

He's sad because the Mafia made him into a disco

Coffee and rakia are two likely reason you will visit Nis Fortress in Serbia.  Nis Fortress is not so much a historical site as it is an organic extension of the city center.  There is no charge to enter and it has been left open to the public to function as a decadent city park.  Local Mafia took advantage of the lenient rules and built a large disco-cafe, Klinika, directly on the fortress stones.

Some people would say it's a tacky, tasteless way to deface a historical monument, but it sure is a fun place to party.  If you don't care to join the beautiful people dancing in the open-air disco, just buy a few liters of Jelen beer at the nearby kiosk, grab your friends and dance on the fortress walls overlooking the disco until sunrise.  You can still hear the pounding music and watch the sun rise from the fortress walls.


I experienced Nis' nightlife for the first time in 2010 and loved it so much that I had to return in 2011 to do it again.  If it were possible I would return to Southern Serbia every summer for partying.  As I had mentioned in an earlier post, Balkan people's flair for living rivals any typical Latino's "vida loca" attitude.  Perhaps due to the Balkans proximity to Asia, there's also a magical Eastern mysticism there that Latin America lacks.  While the world changes, The Balkans seems trapped in a time bubble that remains the same every year.  This night I experienced could have been in 2010, 2011, 2012 or any year...you decide...

I was Couchsurfing with some friends I had met from the previous summer.  I had the good fortune that summer to surf with my friend when he had 2 nice Bosnian girls surfing with him at the same time.  When I meet the girls, they told me (teasingly) that they hated Americans.  Yeah right...  What started as teasing hate over dinner and drinks ended up as love (?) by the time we had arrived at Nis Fortress later that night.

My Serbian friend and I are sensitive modern men, so we cooked a lovely dinner for the Bosnian girls.  After much debate of USA-Balkan politics, foreign food, counterculture (and beer) one of the girls and I ended up kissing in the moonlight in Nis Fortress on that hot summer night.  She fascinated me for being what I wasn't.  She was a wild, dancing, free-spirited hippie who was an expert fire-thrower.  I had my guitar and watched her mesmerizing fire-dance as I sang on the top of the Nis Fortress walls.  The music from Klinika disco below us provided an odd trance accompaniment.

Unfortunately, there were many people partying in the park, including several other beautiful Balkan girls.  I became very distracted.  Dare I say Balkan girls are one of my weaknesses, and a Serbian medical student caught me that at that moment.  While the Bosnian girl was showing off her fire-throwing skills on the fortress stones, I began chatting with the student.  Many Southern Serbian girls get pretty excited when an American guy with a guitar shows up in their town.  I'm a complete liar if I said I don't take full advantage of the situation, and I love my Serbian friends for telling me this.  They are some of the few people I know who will tell me to my face what a complete 'American asshole/fucker/sonofabitch' I am sometimes.

...America, Fuck Yeah!

An "American Fucker" in Nis, Serbia

Rakia and beer flowed freely in the fortress park, and people drifted in and out of my memory.  We danced, drank, sang, reveled and eventually the Serbian and I left for a quieter place.  I didn't notice until the sun was rising what had happened.  The Bosnian girl wasn't happy to find out I had changed allegiances and was in a rage.  When I'm traveling, I can be the naughtiest American asshole.

The Bosnian and I returned to our shared Couchsurfer place in the early hours of the morning.  She was angry and refused to even touch me even though we had to share a bed that night.  Now what do I do?

I Missed Romania.

The Ukraine is behind me.  My last image of this country is this sleeping man behind the exchange counter.  I woke him from his slumber, got some new currency, then got on the old train to Romania.  My sleeping car was dark and had a strange odor inside.  There was one lone, strange man in the bunk above me.  He didn't look like anyone I wanted to be friends with. 

I could give you a detailed route on how to travel from Lviv, Ukraine to world-famous Brasov, Romania.  But that was before 2 Costa Rican convicts jumped off a motorcycle and robbed me at knife-point right outside Castle Tam hostel (more on the robbery later.)

The bag they took from me included a notebook with all of my train, plane, bus and hitchhiking routes that I used to get efficiently lost around Eastern Europe.  Oh well.  For now I rely on memory and what information I can find online.  The ticket from Lviv to Sofia was around $60 and it did not matter whether I took it all the way to Sofia or got off earlier.

I wanted to get off at Ploiesti, Romania.  From there I had a half-hour to catch a train transfer to Brasov where I would get to see Brasov Castle, the source of all of the Count Dracula vampire stories.  The train left Lviv 10 minutes late, and within 2 hours the slow-moving train was already 30 minutes behind schedule and still losing more time.  I quietly resigned to continue on to Sofia, Bulgaria and leave Transylvania for next year...

What I didn't see in Romania

It was a sad situation and the dark, dreary train added to the feeling.  I made my way up to the dining car while listening to the creaking wheels.  I expected a Western tourist or two but not once did I hear English, French, German nor other "Western" languages as I wandered the long aisle.  Every car I passed was filled with bedraggled, sweaty, frowning citizens from who knew what part of Eastern Europe.  Bad, tinny (but sexy) Romanian pop music drifted out of many of the small rooms.

The dining car complimented the depressing train.  Four small, yellowed tables were crammed into one side of the car.  One of the tables had two large, heaving men who were well into their forth glasses of vodka and showing it.  The waiter/cook looked annoyed by nothing in particular.  He tossed me a menu which was in Ukrainian and something that looked like English, but not enough so that I actually understood it.  After waving my hands and spluttering out random Slavic mongrol phrases at the cook, I procured some kind of Chicken Cordon Blue - with emphasis on the Blue.  Its most notable feature was its dryness.

There's a reason I always order alcohol when I eat on trains. 

On the plus side, skipping Romania meant I was not so rushed to fit a million things into a limited time schedule.  It also freed up my canceled credit card-strapped budget.  I choked down my Chicken Cordon Dry then returned to my cabin to sleep away the remainder of the trip.  I didn't miss anything.