Belgrade Continues

To breathe in Belgrade is to smoke. Most restaurants and cafes have no separate non smoking area. This is the thing that bothers me most about the city. I am now on day 4 however, and I am getting used to hiding my coat in a cupboard, or under someone else's coat, on entering a room, so that the smoke does not get into it. I have given up worrying about the smell of smoke in my hair. 

I must be one of the 3 people in the city who does not drink tea. On breaks from the workshop my policemen (I think of them as mine, because my project works for them) sniff at me, when they offer me coffee and I ask for tea. Each time this look of mild disgust and disbelief passes across their face on hearing that anyone could turn down coffee. The one thing they are most unhappy about at the workshop is that we have had to remove our coffee-filter machine thing and have replaced it with instant coffee and a kettle.

Three times now I have walked into what I think are department stores, because I like looking at shiny wrappers, and I want to know what Serbian groceries look like. Every time it has been a different chain selling cosmetics and hygiene stuff only. There are more kinds of hair dye than I have ever seen before. I studied a shampoo made with cow placenta for a while, but bought a body lotion made from goat's milk instead. I am not ready to wash my hair with the placenta of anything. I still don't know how stores are organised here. I need to investigate this further before I leave.

Yesterday a colleague of mine took me shopping with her. We ate Serbian Chinese food at a tiny restaurant in a corner of a very shiny mall. I had the spicy chicken with vegetables and wheat noodles. She had the hoisin chicken with rice. Both looked exactly the same, until the waitress covered my portion with toasted peanuts and hers with toasted cashew nuts. I got some 'chilli' sauce and mixed it with everything on my plate. It still looked and tasted exactly like her plate- which was alright. Whatever that one dish was that the restaurant made that day, and called five different things, it was good.

This afternoon's lunch at the police academy was bread, thin clear vegetable soup with an anaemic kind of noodles, cabbage salad, white beans in tomato cheese sauce, pasta with braised beef in a brown sauce, and chocolate cream cake- which I strongly suspect is the same cake that has been served for the last 3 days but covered with an extra batch of chocolate icing. There was also a choice between strawberry or sour cherry nectar. I had two glasses of sour cherry nectar and one apple. I am looking forward to dinner.

And here is a picture of the Assembly that I took myself. It is not as good as the one I posted yesterday. But at least I took this one myself.

Belgrade

I have been in Belgrade for 3 days now. I love the city. From about ten minutes into it I felt like I could live here and be happy (except for all the smoke, but we shall get to that later).

It has been cold and rainy since my arrival, and it fits every notion I had in my head of a the beautiful grey bleakness of Eastern Europe. I arrived at the Hotel Excelsior, which is where my ex-diplomat boss likes to stay, and found that it stands bang opposite the National Assembly which is in an ex-Palace and looks like this (but without the snow).

This part of town is full of hangovers from a greater Yugoslavic past, lots of imposing buildings with fountains in front and wide roads. I love the rain. It fees delightful to be sploshing across puddles, while not freezing away. It is May, so everyone from Belgrade that I have spoken to is peeved about it, but since I just escaped an unusually unpleasant summer in Bangalore, I'm not too unhappy.

Prices in Belgrade are a relief from the unrelenting ridiculousness of Switzerland. Everything seems reasonable, and I had the most wonderful dinner, with drinks and dessert, at a very lovely restaurant for the amount I spend on a general- bought on the go from a supermarket- lunch in Geneva. And the food- day 1: bacon wrapped chicken breast with a spicy cheese salad and chips. On my second day I returned to the same restaurant and asked the waitress for something light with vegetables. Looking thrilled she said, leave it to me and marched away, only to return with 5 bits of fried aubergine and an enormous piece of chicken schitzel covered with a mushroom and cream sauce. She scowled when I wasn't able to clean my plate, and went off in a huff when I told her I wasn't able to deal with Serbian portions. She was mollified later, when I ordered a glass of rakia (a sort of fruit brandy- that is usually 40-50 % alcohol), and stayed to chat with me about things I should do while in town. After three sips of the stuff I stopped, and this time she laughed at me, because i was beginning to drop thing. Even on a full stomach quince rakia is too much for me.

The workshop I am here to attend is held at the Police Academy. Like so many other college messes the food here is not so bad that it is inedible, nor good enough to inspire you to really want to eat it. There are 25 other people who go to lunch with me, and this is what most of then eat: 2 or 3 hunks of bread, a bowl of soup, a plate of leafy salad, a plate with sides- usually mashed potatoes or chips and boiled veg, two medium sized pieces of meat or one large piece stuffed with cheese, and a slice of cream filled cake for dessert. And this is just the average. Most of the men eat more. A few of the women eat less. There is also no way to tell the women at the counter to give me a small serving of anything. Even when I say this in Serbian they look at me blankly and then move on. So when I waste half or more of the food on my plate my worried hosts keep asking if they should get me something different, but the problem is not a lack of things to eat, it is the excess.

This evening I shall go to a restaurant inside a converted opera house. Will report on this tomorrow.

It has been exactly two months since the last time my grandfather picked up the phone and said "hello darling" to me. The last time he said it he had a coughing fit; he was taken to hospital later that night.

On most days I am ok. 84 year olds are more likely to die than others, I tell myself. Specially those with cancer. At least we had a good time when he was alive.

On some days the thought that I can never again pick up the phone and call my grandfather, or Skype with him on Sundays, or sit next to him at the dinner table and nick the food from his plate fills me up with so much grief and blankness that I am paralysed.

Hitting stuff

So today I went to a self-defense class. I learnt lots of useful things, like how to extract your wrist when someone is grabbing it really tight, and how to deal with someone who is trying to choke you. It was unnerving. Hitting people is harder than it seems. I found it difficult to muster up the aggression to deal with a pretend attacker. Then I came home and ate dinner. Which looked like this.

As you can see this is going to turn into an exercise and food blog. Because I really seem to think about very little else.

Fish

So on my last visit home my orthopaedist uncovered a pretty glaring vitamin D3 deficiency, and made me pledge to drink milk every day and eat fish at least twice a week. Yesterday I decided to conquer my fear of dealing with raw fish, and marched off to the supermarket with a friend in tow- she once fed me the most delicious baked salmon, I would count on her to guide me through this confusing shopping experience. We picked out some salmon, and this afternoon when I cooked it. Margo was at the library, so after some frantic texting I left her to her books, and got on to the fish prep on my own. With some olive oil, garlic, onion, fresh herbs, salt and a squeeze of lemon it turned out like this.

It turned out pretty well I think. Next time I shall be adding some ginger and a tiny bit of soy sauce.

everything hurts because of yesterday's yoga class. two hours of dance today will finish me off. tomorrow i must find a bicycle so that i can continue to torture my body.

13.3.2012

i'm at the airport trying to go through security check but my enormous hooded cape of a coat is not cooperating. my eyes hurt. i'm going home in a rush, trying to see my grandfather one last time before his lungs lose the battle they have been waging for the last 6 months. instead of being incapacitated by grief i have, instead made a list of everything i need to do in geneva before taking off for a month, and worked through them methodically. last night three of my friends gathered in my room to sit with me while i packed. it was no more grim than usual, just with more frequent morbid jokes. i found myself describing how we no longer cremate people on wooden pyres, using an electric facility instead. its not something i want to think about while my grandfather is still alive but i cannot stop myself from skipping ahead. as if by doing so i can avoid dealing with how painful the situation is right now.

i also feel silly. in an excess of nervous energy i have bought my sister a bright green watch from the swatch store at the airport. i have also been unable to stop myself from buying a boz of chocolate passion-fruit macaroons. my grandfather loved these the last time i took them. this time he is unconscious and unlikely to revive enough to recognise me; worrying us with his disregard for his diabetes by making enormous inroads into the stuff i bring back each time, so that he might eat little bits of the nicest things is no longer on his agenda. i have also bought an over priced cup of coffee from the kind of boutique bio faux-vegan restaurant that i despise. i don't drink coffee. i haven't done so for years. it is the price for not bursting into tears every 10 minutes. i cannot afford to do so, i have been dehydrated for the last 3 days as crying and mopping up do not leave enough time to rehydrate.

at security check the man says to me- do you have a laptop inside. yes i say. take it out please. boarding card please. smile please, you cannot go through my security check with a face like that.
it surprises me and makes me laugh. i tell him that i did not know smiles were required to go through security. next time i will take the train.
he laughs and lets me go through.

my flight is not boarding yet and i am losing patience. i want to get in and eat my sandwich.