- The downtown has been hollowed out to the point of being unrecognizable. This is in part due to less foot traffic — the middle of July is when people tend to leave Belgrade — but the empty, broken store fronts make it worse. I am sure everyone was at one of many shopping malls, which is sad.
- File this under “things that are different from when I was a student”: hardly any newspaper stand or store open past 10pm. I had to walk quite a few blocks to get a bottle of water. On the other hand, I may be misremembering how close by things were back then.
- In general, it also looked like more of a generic Central European city than I remembered, and a shoddy one at that. I guess that means quality of life for its citizens may be better (though I doubt it) but it is of less interest if you are a tourist in the Balkans. Granted, I may be used to some things you may find interesting not being from the area.
- At dinner, a waiter lectured me on what I did wrong when putting in my order. It has been a while since I experienced this and I do not miss it at all, though I also have two weeks in Montenegro to look forward to so I’d better be prepared.
- On the flip side, the Moskva hotel had superb service and is unlike any hotel you could visit in the US. Sure, there are Hyatts and Hiltons and whatnot in Belgrade now and I am sure they too are better than their American counterparts but I doubt any can match Moskva for the Murder on the Orient Express atmosphere.
- Things overall are not nearly as bad as they were in the 1990s, but one things that is most certainly worse and obviously so is the inequality which must be worse than even in the US. Branko Milanović who is the world’s expert on inequality and Serbian by origin had a few words to say about the topic.
- In support of this, the new Terminal 2 at Nikola Tesla Airport in Belgrade is more Asian than Western. There were perfumes on sale there for more than $500, which you will most certainly not see at Dulles.
- This is after a single night spent there and seeing the place mostly as a tourist.