I left Velania guest-house, bought two bananas and an apple at a neighborhood store and walked down to the city center through small area pathways. At the main intersection, not knowing which direction to proceed and not bother to look at the map, I grabbed a man and asked for Bill Clinton and Mother Teresa. “Bill Clinton is there, and Mother Teresa is this way.” He pointed to two different directions. “Is it far?” “Bill Clinton is further down that direction. Mother Teresa is right here. Where do you want to go?” “I want Mother Teresa.” “Come with me.” He said and directed me to cross the street.
I woke at 3.30, not able to sleep because of the light from the window. I sat up from the seat, lowered the window and looked outside to uninteresting countryside landscape. I woke up the Macedonian, my bunk-mate, an hour later to move his legs aside so I could get out and find a train conductor who was nowhere in sight. One thing about train conductors is they are everywhere when you don’t need them, interrupt you in your meditative state of being to check your train ticket and wake you up from your beauty sleep at night to do another ticket controlling. The Macedonian rose from his
I woke up at 10, had a quick wash and quietly walked downstairs. The friend was sleeping on the couch next to table-fill of beer bottles and cigarette butts. I circled the flat for a brief five minutes and came near him whispering ‘hello, hello.’ He didn’t hear and sat down on the chair on the other side of the table, waiting for him to wake up. I took out my guidebook and tried to read, if not it would look awkward when he opened his eyes and saw a stranger staring at his face praying for him to wake up. It wasn’t my fixation that rattled him up.
Belgrade was still deep in its sleep. Except for a handful convenient shops opened for the early birds and night workers, everything was kept shut behind closed doors. I spotted a few figures crossing empty streets hurrying off from out of nowhere to perhaps somewhere. It was a new feeling to arrive in strange city in the dark, in a stranger’s car and run off to another stranger’s home. “So Cindy, do you have a plan?” I hesitated unable to answer the question, not exactly because I had no plan.
Got a last-minute ride from www.mitfahrgelegenheit.de or rideshare.co.uk directly to Belgrade for €60. Otherwise it would be another planning hassle to figure out a way to get a cheap alternative to either Kosovo or Macedonia cheap. Buses to Budapest were all sold out. Direct train to Skopje costs 5800 ckz, too expensive for long-hour transportation.
A major accident on the highway only one hour leaving Prague delayed our trip for another 2 hours. By the time we got to Brno, it was 18.30. There, we made a stop for Branko, the driver, to meet up and had dinner with his friend. By the time we left Brno, it was already 20.00. No hope for getting to Belgrade by night now. I slept through most of the journey and woke up only once when we dropped off Sandor, the Hungarian, at Sezged, who came home for the Easter weekend. He was a Ph.D.
I’m using a mind ploy to keep myself motivated and focused in the next few months applying and getting a Czech trade license (Zivnostensky Lists). By calling this over mundane and administrative process ‘adventure,’ I hope that I won’t yank my hairs and scream murder in the next few months.
It will be almost another year before I can consider myself a permanent resident of this country I can not wait to leave. But for this to happen, I need to main a continuous legal presence of five years which is fine if I continue to work for the same company during this period. I want to have a backup just in case I get fired, lay-off or fed up and just quit (the last is more likely). By having a Czech trade license before my working visa from my current company terminates, I don’t breach the five-year requirement.
Through IAESTE, a large international group who sends student overseas on technical internship, I spent the summer of 2004 working in a software start-up in Gliwice, a small city in Silesia, Poland. I lived in a student dormitory with 30 other trainees mostly from Europe. We almost always visited other places in Poland during the weekend: former royal city of Krakow, Austwick Nazi concentration camp, Warsaw’s Jewish ghetto and the reconstructed Old Town, Zakopane, Gdansk…
Visit the museums is a must when you are in London. Most of them including the major ones are for FREE. The collections and paintings in some museums I visited are of absolute quality, worthwhile of your time. The only minor problem is that there are many museums worth seeing and scattered around in the city in addition to the size of each one.
Some open very late (until 10 or 11 p.m. on particular days); you might want to note down the hours to check them out after sight-seeing the city.
Somewhere while sauntering at the colorful vintage and antique Portobello Market and lazing on a comfortable couch in a basement teashop at Camden Stable Market, I came to a conclusion. To enjoy an unfamiliar place you are going to visit, you need to lower your expectation and stop looking at images of the destination.
Prior to the London trip, I’d been brooded for two months mainly because of my secret vow to never return to the same country, let alone the same city, before completing my Euromega–seeing every official country in Europe. I was in London six years ago during my first trip to Europe and didn’t like it at all (long story). The idea of returning to a city that bore no impression on me didn’t resonate with me. On top of that, people’s telling me how big and expensive the city was added to my woe. But I wanted to see an old friend who flew all the way from the US and picked something from her.
The first European country I visited is coincidentally where I live now. The year before at a summer camp in California, I met Danny, a Czech guy from Prague, who ‘marketed’ his city. Some guidebook even commented that “Prague is the Paris of the Eastern Europe.”I had an internship in Poland in summer 2004, exactly one year after I met Danny and remembered all the nice things he said about the city. Seeing that Poland was neighboring the Czech Republic, I booked a flight ticket from London to Prague for a quick sightseeing trip before taking a train to Poland.
My name is Cindy, also rhymes with travel junkie. A friend said I was probably a gipsy in my previous life. One of my many secret missions in life is to convert you to run off every once in awhile.
