Mrs BeardedDave is possibly heading to Serbia in a couple of months time. She’s going there for two weeks and will be working on a project neutering cats and dogs (she’s a vet). I wondered if anyone has any experiences of the country, at all, as we really don’t have a clue what to expect!

Been there a few times on business and driven around the country a bit. Serbs are tough people and have a strong “former Soviet” mentality in the way things are conducted, i.e. kickbacks are still expected and business depends on good connections. I used to find Hungary different but now I find it relatively normal and Serbia different. Food is OK, Belgrade isn’t a bad place though a bit scruffy and raffish and there are still big Government office blocks with NATO scud missile holes through the middle because the Serbs haven’t got around to deciding what to do about them. My Serb agent is a decent guy (cyclist too) but he has a very short fuse and he tells me that 95% of the population are taking tranquillisers because of a collective mental crisis after the wars. Ordinary Serbs I have met in the countryside have been unfailingly polite and hospitable so I’m sure she will enjoy the place and will make some very good and fiercely loyal friends.

I don’t understand enough about the Former Yugoslav Republic and the very complex wars to be able to understand Serbia’s role but I believe they were mostly the aggressors; being a proud and patriotic people is not necessarily a bad thing though, as long as the political leadership is benign.

It would probably help to avoid gaffes if she could try to gain an understanding of the religious and ethnic reasons behind the two wars. Quite a lot was to do with Coptic Christianity and Islam, as I understand it.

If she has time to spare she ought to try to get to Budapest, which, by contrast to Belgrade, is a wonderful, beautiful clean tidy city with stunning architecture and some amazing thermal baths. It’s about 3 hours drive north from Belgrade on excellent motorways.

We went there for 10 days in 2011, had a great time.

Flew into Belgrade then drove south to the Tara national park, very undeveloped, roads pretty poor etc, little in the way of footpaths in the hills, or evidence of mountain biking.

There aren’t many opportunities to spend money and things are pretty cheap to buy (beer – Jelen Pivo was the nicest at about 50p a litre), food outside of anything like a decent town is very basic and rustic, potatoes, cabbage and tomatoes (paradise) with meat (kababs, balls, sausages), you can eat loads though for about £4 in the local restaurants. Huge watermelons are nice. Odd flavoured brandies are a bit of an aquired taste.

Language would have been an issue outside of Belgrade, but we had a pretty good speaker with us, in Belgrade lots of people speak english, although once you get your head around the serbian cyrillic alphabet it gets a bit easier to read signs and stuff.

I liked Belgrade, we rented a flat for a couple of nights right in the center, some of the soviet era architecture is quite good I thought, apparently there is only one bombed out building left and we couldn’t find it. Tesla museum was interesting and fun for the kids. Most of the floating restaurants on the Danube are overpriced and crap.

We had been warned that the streets would be covered in dog shit, but they weren’t, Belgrade was probably tidier than London, if full of half finished houses (like the rest of the country).

There isn’t a whole lot to do to be honest, which suited us just having a lazy holiday, great weather – countryside was 28 deg every day, Belgrade a bit warm at 34.

I quite fancy going to Guca sometime http://www.guca.rs/eng/

Rode through on a motorbike from the Macedonian border through to the Bosnian border at the Tara park, several years ago. Very rural region with people working in the fields with horses and carts etc (much like uk several decades ago, i’d imagine). People unfailingly helpful and polite and no-one appeared to resent a Brit visiting, quite the opposite in fact. I enjoyed it, basically.

They do some “interesting” interviews with their politicians on TV 😯

Been to Belgrade. It’s a great city if you have someone to show you around. The challenging thing without that is that a lot of the best restaurants, bars, etc, are almost invisible from the outside. Would happily go back.

Food’s pretty good if you’re a meat eater: It’s basic but fresh and clean and big portions of it.

It felt very safe walking around. However, traffic is a bit crazy – someone we met there said to me “the easiest way to get killed in Belgrade is to be run over”. Younger people were keen to practice their English, we found no hostility in conversations, although there was a strong nationalist streak to people’s opinions (we also heard some strongly homophobic stuff, but that was from football ultras). I found myself doing a lot of “erm-just-nod-and-smile-and-bite-tongue”. People are very patriotic for obvious reasons: spoke with a very bright engineering graduate who could by his own admission have worked anywhere, but wanted to stay “to build Serbia”.

In summary, find someone knowledgeable to show you around, and it’s great. Enjoy the cheap wholesome food, have a beer on top of the citadel looking over the Sava at 3am, enjoy.

(Watch out for a trick at restaurants/cafes where they bring you a bill with stuff you didn’t order. Dunno if it was just me but I saw that twice. Each time the “real” bill came so quickly after I complained, I could only suspect that the waiter had rung through the more “detailed” one, cancelled it, put through the real one, but brought over the cancelled one, to pocket the difference. Oh, and the airport taxis are often ripoff merchants, something pretty common to a number of Eastern European cities in my experience.

I’d keep away from political rallies/demos, and be wary around the big football clubs’ crowds. I was there to photograph the Belgrade derby. It was properly bonkers in a pretty thrilling way, inside the ground, but a huge battle outside – 50+ arrests, police hurt, etc.)

(although the football is worth a look, if only because it’s a stunning spectacle. Would recommend the side stands – they’re actually a bit of a mix of both teams’ ordinary joe-public supporters. It’s the two ends that are a hell of a sight: http://farm1.staticflickr.com/170/404388822_8858d1edf6_z.jpg )

Jealous. Would love to go.

Jealous. Would love to go.

Went to Novi Sad for Exit festival in the north a couple of years ago and it’s a lovely place. Friendly people and a lovely city to walk around. Lots of bars and restaurants. As others have said it is dirt cheap, a liter a beer was a quid or less. I’ve heard Belgrade is a nice place to go as well. Really good nightlife by all accounts.

Banja Luka (not in Serbia but the Serb cultural “capital”) has the most stunning girls I have ever seen in my life.

Nice place to drink a cold beer and watch the world go by.

Cheers for the input. It all sounds pretty promising. I’m pretty jealous about the trip myself to be honest. But I can’t take two weeks off my job to go with her – and not sure I’d be much use on the neutering project either!

She is going to be driving there (we live in the Netherlands which, while closer than the UK, is still a long old drive!), as she won’t fly. So that means that she won’t need taxis, but does mean she’ll be in the traffic with the locals, which sound like it could be interesting! But she’s a good driver with plenty of experience of driving in various countries.

She’s going to be staying just outside of Belgrade. She’s going with one of the vet nurses from the practice she works in, here in the NL, and should, I assume, be meeting up with locals who work on the project she’ll be helping with, so I would think they’ll be happy to act as a guide around the local area.

Don’t think the beer or the football will interest her, as she doesn’t drink and has no interest in football!

Ummm… one question: isn’t it cheaper to put stray cats and dogs down rather than neuter them if there’s a problem in the town?

One tip – make sure she has proof of ownership of the car. Have heard firsthand of people not being allowed to leave the EU into Eastern European countries – the other year my friends were turned back at the Ukranian border because they’d just bought a cheap car for a road trip, and didn’t have the DVLA paperwok yet.

The driving itself didn’t seem horrendously bad, it’s just not a great city for pedestrians. Although one cab we got into was a knackered old Yugo, and when I looked over the back parcel shelf, there was the most shonky LPG conversion you could ever imagine. That was nerve wracking!

I think she’ll really enjoy it. I’ve been to Serbia, Croatia and (briefly) Bosnia and the welcome and hospitality was really great in all three (nodding-and-smiling at political chat aside!). I’d love to do a longer tour.

I’m not sure that they’re all strays. I think it may just be a project offering free neutering for people’s pets and education for the owners, so that they don’t choose the cheaper option of not doing it and then causing a stray dog/cat problem. And vets generally don’t like to put otherwise healthy animals to sleep, if possible.

Good call on the car ownership paperwork, ormondroyd. Its little things like that that could end up catching us out, knowing that she has all the relevant paperwork to actually be allowed in and out of the country.

If your wife enjoys an excellent steak eaten outdoors with great views over the city, I strongly recommend this place:

http://www.kudazavikend.com/4-Na%20klopu/12717-Aleksandar%20klub/