The next morning we stopped into a traditional little bakery that the guy at our hostel had told us about and went for more burek. We tried it with meat this time and if was bloody delicious, if a bit oily.
Once again, fog played a part in completely changing the feel of the place.
Over this ledge is a main road and the Danube. Apparently.
That night we guiltily returned for pizza after a few beers at The Black Turtle, a local microbrewery, followed by stumbling upon a hookah bar and settling in with cups of tea and cherry mint shishah.
The following morning began with more burek and Nicola's interpretation of the classic Serb breakfast. I headed off to get the burek and Nix the "drinking yoghurt", because she'd advised me that it's drinking yoghurt that you have burek with. I delivered on my part of the arrangement but Nix did not.
The classic Serb breakfast is actually with set yoghurt (there was no "drinking yoghurt" in the supermarket). So instead of not worrying about yoghurt Nix came back with two pots of 20% fat yoghurt and we had to fashion a spoon out of the aluminium lid. We ended up covered in yoghurt and received more than just one strange look from people walking past.
After cleaning ourselves off we headed to the zoo for a rare occasion where we actually paid to enter somewhere.
It was fun. Unfortunately it's a bit of a concrete jungle and some animals looked a bit sad but you can see they're doing all they can with the resources available to them. A quite successful breeding program indicates that they're doing a fairly good job.
Things of note were:
- the zoo had the greatest collection of albino and white animals, that you have ever seen. White lions, tigers, peacocks, wallabies, the list goes on
- Wednesday isn't hump day at Belgrade Zoo, it's Thursday. No lie, we saw more animal copulation here in a few hours than we'd seen over our lives. Everything was going at it
- They have some strange, mutant turkey/pigeon/dove thing that was so weird I couldn't bare to take a photo of it
- Way too many kids fed the animals chips. Although according to our hostel owner that's OK because kids in Eastern Europe kids don't have much to make themselves happy
- Between you and most animals is just a standard wire fence. It would take no effort for you to poke your hands through the wire and have them chomped off by a tiger, lion, cheetah etc etc. And we secretly hoped it would happen to more than a few people there!
A couple of funny little anecdotes that the hostel owner told us once he'd got over the fact that we'd gone to the zoo.
1. The city's favourite resident used to be a gorilla who on multiple occasions managed to escape from the zoo and at one point was being hidden away in the grounds of his school. Apparently all Belgrade residents were more than happy to keep his secret as one stint lasted three weeks.
2. A tiger also managed to escape at one point but was, fortunately, caught quickly.
3. And my favourite. The zoo is actually located in the grounds of the fortress and each year Belgrade's annual beer festival is held in a different part of the fortress. One year two guys got so wasted that they managed to climb one of the walls of the zoo and fell into the bear pit. Not much of them was left when they were discovered.
After an enjoyable few hours at the zoo we stopped by Sta Je Tu Je for lunch. We went for sarme (cabbage leaves stuffed with pork mince), smoked pork strip with potatoes and a side of pickled veggies, starting and finished with quince and plum rakija. The first shot prepares you for your meal and the second cleanses following the meal.
Lunch was followed by vanilla and gingerbread icecreams from Moritz Eis and Serb coffee from ? (that's actually the cafes name). All v good.
Given we didn't need dinner we had an earlyish night before we were up again at the crack of dawn to set off for Vampire country. Silver bullets, garlic, holy water, the Twilight Trilogy and stakes at hand.
50th post! WOO!
