Belgrade

Today we are in Belgrade, Serbia. It is evident that we are entering the busy part of the River system as we are moored next to another River boat. Then another 2 boats are moored alongside us, meaning passengers have to walk through other boats to get to the shore….interesting. Then when we returned from the morning tour, we found that 4 more boats had tied up next to each other just behind us. I’m sure they have some sort of arrangement between the companies, but it is a little strange.

Our bus tour this morning took us all around the large, and busy, City of Belgrade. We first stopped at the 2^nd largest Greek Orthodox Church in the World.  This Church, St Sava, is very grand from the outside, but not even anywhere near finished on the inside. They are planning to finish the place off with white Marble and very ornate frescos, so it will take a long time yet.  The guide told us that Putin had promised the people some money to finish the Church off, but they haven’t seen a cent of that yet. From here we went to the Kalemegdan Fortress which sits high on the hill overlooking  the Sava and the Danube Rivers. Whilst there are still some outer walls of the Fortress etc standing, a lot of the inside is in ruins from the bombing in the 2^nd World War. Views from up here are lovely.  In the outer area of the City we passed a couple of housing buildings which show more ruins from the bombing. Apparently Hitler told his armies to kill 50 of the Serbian people for every German that was wounded and to kill 1,000 for every German killed!  Bit barbaric! The Serbs were consequently in danger of being wiped out.

The City centre is very nice with is 1 kilometre long pedestrian mall, some lovely fountains and of course, the usual statues. The shops did seem a bit strange to us, but they’d probably find ours strange too…plenty of café’s and eating places, as well as ice cream stalls. Yes, we had to taste some. The peanut butter ice cream wasn’t as good as we’ve had but the Lemone was very nice.

We returned to the boat for lunch and then various groups went off on tours.  We chose to walk back into the town, even though it meant climbing up 120 stairs to reach the main road. We walked around visiting parks etc and after about 2 hours started to return to the boat. Good timing because it started to rain yet again. Of course, walking back down the 120 stairs were easier coming down.