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Three Weeks in Belgrade

11 February 2020

Julia is in Belgrade, Serbia for her study abroad. Read on to find out about her experience.

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It is a strange experience arriving for the first time in the city that will be your home for a year, and knowing that your first impressions will affect your whole feeling towards the place, and that these buildings and streets and people which all seem so foreign will become your unnoticed everyday landscape – but still coloured by how you felt when you first saw them. Luckily my first impressions of Belgrade were extremely positive. And now that I am back in the UK for a week, the city has faded into a happy summer memory of sun and folk songs and rakia (the local drink) and funny meetings and misunderstandings.

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However, there were a few things which made the adjustment process slightly trickier. At the end of my three-week ‘Language, Literature and Culture’ course, we had to write an essay entitled ‘My Belgrade’. My limited vocabulary in Serbian made it a dull piece, but I did know the words for my main complaints about the city: the buses, the food and the student accommodation.

 

Belgrade – capital city, home to 1.4 million people, meeting point of two large European rivers (the Danube and the Sava), former frontier town between the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires – has no metro. And the buses often simply don’t come. One night I spent three hours waiting for buses. When you eventually do board a bus, it is hot and crowded. This is a shame, but I have solved this problem by finding a flat in the centre of town .

 

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The food situation, especially for an ever-less flexible vegetarian, is difficult. I had more cabbage and mashed potato in the last three weeks than in the preceding three years, and when you have the same food (cabbage and mashed potato) for three meals in a row, things do start to feel a little bleak. Even the slices of pizza you can buy on the street are not wholly meat-free (prompting the ‘if you don’t eat meat, we have chicken’ comment). However, I have solved this problem by finding a flat with a kitchen.

 

The student accommodation – three people to a room, one bathroom to a floor, wifi in limited ever-changing pockets of the building – was bracing. For two weeks, the students singing Serbian folksongs, drinking beer and engaging us foreigners in open, interested conversations, compensated for other privations. By week three, I longed for my own space, and a clean floor. I have solved this problem by finding a flat (see below).

 

As may by now be clear, I have found a flat to live in. I hope it doesn’t fall through, as it seems fairly important to my feeling about the city. Much of the last three weeks consisted of flat-hunting. This was a much easier experience than I imagine it would be for a foreigner in London: you simply tell everyone you meet that you are looking for a flat, and ask everyone you meet if you can live with them, and after a while you are heaven-sent an extremely inexpensive flat with two housemates in the centre of the city.

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A lot more happened in these three weeks – learning the language, going to smoky kafanas (traditional bars) and learning Serbian folk dances, visiting Novi Sad, dancing in a former slaughterhouse – but I should save something for the next few pieces.