The weather in Belgrade was sweltering. Trickles of perspiration dripped down my back and beaded on my neck. My face was flushed by the time I returned to the bus station. The walk had been pleasant enough, and certainly more so than being ensconced at one of the non-air-conditioned 'restaurants' at the station -- if one must spend just two hours in Belgrade, one may as well spend them in one of the city's nicer areas. The bus ride would take seven hours, and the pleasantly long international air-conditioned journey was a nice prospect.
The bus left from Gate 20-something, on the other side of the station, and it was a bit difficult to find it. I paid the conductor 50 dinars (slightly less than a euro) to stow my bag under the bus (baggage is not always included in the price of the bus tickets, here), and then boarded.
The bus had a padded vinyl ceiling and walls. It was apparently an old German hand-me-down, and a sign at the front requested passengers to please not speak to the driver while he was driving. Other signs included numerous umlauts and an abundance of exclamation points. A solitary sticker affixed to the dashboard, just above the gear shift, depicted two clasped hands and proclaimed 'USAID'. Whether the USAID donation had been to give the bus to Germany as part of the Marshall Plan, or to bring it from a German junkyard to the Balkans, was unclear.
The conductor and driver solicitously directed me to sit in the first row of the bus, by the door. Neither spoke English. The only other passengers were three elderly ladies, who sat in the middle of the bus; when the bus stopped by the side of the road after leaving the station, a couple more people boarded. (Presumably it may be cheaper to board the bus after it leaves the station, rather than having to pay for the token to enter the boarding area at the station, but I'm not sure -- regardless, virtually every bus that leaves Belgrade seems to stop at that place, and passengers board and pay cash to the conductor directly.) The driver said something just as we pulled out of the station and gestured toward the ceiling. He only spoke Serbian and a little German, no English, and the word he used was not German for air-conditioning, but I inferred that the system was broken and quickly realized that they had seated me next to the door because there was air-flow there. The door stayed open for almost the entirety of the trip. At first, there was a good breeze coming through, but it quickly got very, very hot.
Looking to the bottom of the stairs, I watched as we crossed and recrossed white lines and tried to convince myself that the lines must be painted crookedly, even while recalling a problem with one of my family's cars such that it would not go straight if the driver did not turn the wheel. Then, shortly after leaving Belgrade, the driver exclaimed loudly to the conductor, lifted his hands in the air and demonstrated as the bus glided across two lanes to the shoulder of the highway. From then on, he would periodically remove his hands from the wheel, apparently just to see how far the bus would go if he was not steering.
We came to the border with Bosnia and waited for the guard to come check the handful of passengers on the bus. He was surprised by my American passport, studied the cover, looked just as intently at my face, and began to leaf through the passport and to examine and to comment to the driver about the stamps on each page; my Swiss visa was especially interesting to him. He then left to run a check on the passport. I opened my small bag of 'Bake Roll Crisps' and offered it to the driver, who enthusiastically took three and rolled his eyes at the border guard's retreating back.
We paused at Brcko. By then we had been on the bus for nearly five hours. I felt overheated and lightheaded. The driver motioned for me to come have coffee with him and the conductor, which we did at a hole-in-the-wall cafe by the side of the station. As we sat at this cafe, the driver pulled out two cell phones, and one of the passengers gave him a cell phone, and they began to swap SIM cards between the phones, and while he was struggling with the card mechanism under one phone's battery, he nudged my arm to ask for help, for me to extract the card, and gesticulated toward his hand. I dazedly removed the card and then realized that he had been indicating that the first halves of the first three fingers on his right hand were missing.
It was like something out of Hitchcock's 39 Steps, even though I have never watched the whole movie.
I got back onto the bus and realized that he was shifting gears with the mutilated hand.
A little while later, he closed the doors during a rainstorm and I could not breathe. That was even before we started driving past small industrial towns and places that smelled of burning garbage. He later opened the doors again and turned on a radio station that was playing wailing folk music. I recognized the beginnings of a tension headache, watched the so-many-diminishing-kilometres-to-Zenica signs, hoped that I wouldn't have to persuade the driver to stop so that I could expire on the roadside. When we finally arrived, I barely managed to get off and say goodbye to the driver and conductor and was just looking around for a quiet bench and a trashcan when I heard my name being called and turned to meet one of my Bosnian colleagues, who brought me to his friend's car; they were picking me up from the station to bring me to my apartment. Once there, it was two cold showers and several hours of pacing back and forth (it hurt my head to sit or lie down or otherwise remain stationary) before I was able to consider keeping down a buprofen. It was a very long night.
When I arrived at the office this morning, still feeling fragile, my colleagues greeted me happily. The colleague who met me had apparently been in contact with the head here and said that he had never seen anyone look so shaky getting off a bus. (He may have noticed that I rather rudely hastened him out of the apartment so that I could rush to the bathroom.)
The bus left from Gate 20-something, on the other side of the station, and it was a bit difficult to find it. I paid the conductor 50 dinars (slightly less than a euro) to stow my bag under the bus (baggage is not always included in the price of the bus tickets, here), and then boarded.
The bus had a padded vinyl ceiling and walls. It was apparently an old German hand-me-down, and a sign at the front requested passengers to please not speak to the driver while he was driving. Other signs included numerous umlauts and an abundance of exclamation points. A solitary sticker affixed to the dashboard, just above the gear shift, depicted two clasped hands and proclaimed 'USAID'. Whether the USAID donation had been to give the bus to Germany as part of the Marshall Plan, or to bring it from a German junkyard to the Balkans, was unclear.
The conductor and driver solicitously directed me to sit in the first row of the bus, by the door. Neither spoke English. The only other passengers were three elderly ladies, who sat in the middle of the bus; when the bus stopped by the side of the road after leaving the station, a couple more people boarded. (Presumably it may be cheaper to board the bus after it leaves the station, rather than having to pay for the token to enter the boarding area at the station, but I'm not sure -- regardless, virtually every bus that leaves Belgrade seems to stop at that place, and passengers board and pay cash to the conductor directly.) The driver said something just as we pulled out of the station and gestured toward the ceiling. He only spoke Serbian and a little German, no English, and the word he used was not German for air-conditioning, but I inferred that the system was broken and quickly realized that they had seated me next to the door because there was air-flow there. The door stayed open for almost the entirety of the trip. At first, there was a good breeze coming through, but it quickly got very, very hot.
Looking to the bottom of the stairs, I watched as we crossed and recrossed white lines and tried to convince myself that the lines must be painted crookedly, even while recalling a problem with one of my family's cars such that it would not go straight if the driver did not turn the wheel. Then, shortly after leaving Belgrade, the driver exclaimed loudly to the conductor, lifted his hands in the air and demonstrated as the bus glided across two lanes to the shoulder of the highway. From then on, he would periodically remove his hands from the wheel, apparently just to see how far the bus would go if he was not steering.
We came to the border with Bosnia and waited for the guard to come check the handful of passengers on the bus. He was surprised by my American passport, studied the cover, looked just as intently at my face, and began to leaf through the passport and to examine and to comment to the driver about the stamps on each page; my Swiss visa was especially interesting to him. He then left to run a check on the passport. I opened my small bag of 'Bake Roll Crisps' and offered it to the driver, who enthusiastically took three and rolled his eyes at the border guard's retreating back.
We paused at Brcko. By then we had been on the bus for nearly five hours. I felt overheated and lightheaded. The driver motioned for me to come have coffee with him and the conductor, which we did at a hole-in-the-wall cafe by the side of the station. As we sat at this cafe, the driver pulled out two cell phones, and one of the passengers gave him a cell phone, and they began to swap SIM cards between the phones, and while he was struggling with the card mechanism under one phone's battery, he nudged my arm to ask for help, for me to extract the card, and gesticulated toward his hand. I dazedly removed the card and then realized that he had been indicating that the first halves of the first three fingers on his right hand were missing.
It was like something out of Hitchcock's 39 Steps, even though I have never watched the whole movie.
I got back onto the bus and realized that he was shifting gears with the mutilated hand.
A little while later, he closed the doors during a rainstorm and I could not breathe. That was even before we started driving past small industrial towns and places that smelled of burning garbage. He later opened the doors again and turned on a radio station that was playing wailing folk music. I recognized the beginnings of a tension headache, watched the so-many-diminishing-kilometres-to-Zenica signs, hoped that I wouldn't have to persuade the driver to stop so that I could expire on the roadside. When we finally arrived, I barely managed to get off and say goodbye to the driver and conductor and was just looking around for a quiet bench and a trashcan when I heard my name being called and turned to meet one of my Bosnian colleagues, who brought me to his friend's car; they were picking me up from the station to bring me to my apartment. Once there, it was two cold showers and several hours of pacing back and forth (it hurt my head to sit or lie down or otherwise remain stationary) before I was able to consider keeping down a buprofen. It was a very long night.
When I arrived at the office this morning, still feeling fragile, my colleagues greeted me happily. The colleague who met me had apparently been in contact with the head here and said that he had never seen anyone look so shaky getting off a bus. (He may have noticed that I rather rudely hastened him out of the apartment so that I could rush to the bathroom.)
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