I am a Beograđanka that means I am a girl from belgrade. Not only was I born in Belgrade but I lived here all my life. Let me tell you a bit about my city.

Gray is the new white

Our city is very grey. Part of the rulings from former Yugoslavia must have been to build everything out of concrete and to build it massively (a lot of buildings also come with their own secure basement/bunker). Being a poor country means that people are not investing into renovating and polishing the housefronts. Everything just keeps looking the same way and people are investing it into more necessary things like food. It has its own inner kind of beauty to it. But then again it is also depressing to be here at times - particularry autumn and winter.

Bombs raining on Belgrade

Spending all life in belgrade usually also means that you experienced your city being bombed by the Nato forces during the Kosovo war. This was a very disturbing experience and I still get shivers when hearing the air siren even if it is just a ringtone on a mobile phone. But I dont wan't to focus on the plain negative sides. What Wikipedia won't tell you about that time is that the national TV was showing a lot of movies from the US that just released in cinemas. Some of them actually had the branding of torrent/download portals embedded into the movie. I remember this part of the time quite positively because we kids didn't go outside and were watching TV all day. Maybe it was our little counter attack on the west.. :)

Building a palace into the ghetto

I don't want to refer to part of belgrade or the whole city as a ghetto. But people are fairly poor here. What you see above is a project called Belgrade Waterfront. Supposed to cost a couple billion and look very fancy. A company called Eagle Hills known for a couple of scams throughout their history started to build this here against the will of every sane serb. The government even demolished a couple houses one night with a bulldozer because they needed the space to build a parking lot. There is not much to see yet of course but I guess time does not matter if you take tax payers money for projects like this. It is a shame that our people are not able to stand up and build a revolt against the government. Sometimes people just gave up... on the country. But seeing this fancy palace being built here is a big shame for everyone that has barely enough money to make it over the month.

More about serbia in the next post.. I promise it will have a more positive touch to it, eventually there is a lot of beautiful sides to the country as well.