My First Solo Trip! (Kind of)

This past weekend  I had the chance to hike in Serbia and explore a country I never would have even considered, had Hillary not invited me to come and join her on this adventure. And what an adventure it was! This was the first trip that either of us had been on completely solo. No parents, no supervision, no guides. It was pretty exciting. 

To begin our journey we took the night train from Budapest to Belgrade, Serbia.

Hillary


 It was a long relatively sleepless night full of border-control, passport stamping and people constantly knocking on the doors. That is to say, I didn't get much sleep. But at 6:30 am we had arrived to the city of Belgrade. We showed up at the 6th floor hostel (where we were originally going to stay Sunday) to drop off our bags and start checking out the area.



The Cyrillic Alphabet man, I don't even know how to start pronouncing that.



On our morning expedition, we found an open air market selling all sorts of produce.





Burek, Serbian cheese pie/pastry. It went on the list of must-try.

Cool street art


While waiting for the guided tour we were going to take, Hillary and I stopped at Boutique for breakfast.


We both got super yummy omelettes with tomatoes and fries. It was a fabulous breakfast, and for only 3.50$!



The restaurant had a cool mirror collection

Ready for food!

The restaurant had all these addicting cookies and we couldn't help but take a few :)


And while we killed time, we visited a nearby park that turned out to be quite a bit larger than I had expected.







Edge of the park overlooking the river



And what is a park without a playground? Never mind the fact that I was turning 19 in a matter of hours, of course it got played on.



I mean, is that even a question?

Selfies in the park.

I think the name of this piece was Zena Sunce

 And finally it was 11 o' clock and it was time to start the tour of Belgrade! Our guide, Zelko, took us all over the city center.

Zelko

We started with the statue of Mihailo an important prince in Serbian history. (Also, has anyone else picked up on the number of horse statues in Europe. I'm convinced people don't think it's a real city without a man on a horse in it).



Bohemian Quarter and location of the first brewery in Belgrade

Like Palinka, Rakija is the popular alcoholic drink of choice in Serbia. Popular flavors include honey, walnut, cherry and apricot. Our guide gave us taste of some homemade honey rakija in order to have a proper experience during our stay.




I think my face is  a pretty good indication of how I thought it tasted

The man who made the first brewery (Well, a statue of)



Due to huge hyperinflation, at one point Serbia had a 500 billion RSD bill

We visited the fortress that the city is famous for, This fortress spans over many centuries, starting construction with the Romans, the Turks, Serbians and other eastern European forces have all added to and destroyed this tower through the ages.












The "?" Kafana (restaurant)

I just thought this was cool

On our tour we met a couple students from the states who were also traveling and a guy named Mike from Australia. Turns out Mike is also a mechanical engineer and we both saw this exhibit we thought was showing off robots and we both got excited and had to check it out. But as it turns out it was a science expo for elementary school kids...Just goes to show how good our Serbian is.

This was the closest thing to a robot they had.

But I did get to learn about face-recognition software a couple of university graduates had created and I got a free Sprite out of it, so it was pretty interesting anyways. And then it started to rain and storm and lightning started flashing all over the place so we hiked ourselves back to the hostel where we got some much needed rest.


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