Signing-in from Serbia

Our family arrived in Belgrade last week for our next post overseas. They say first impressions are everything, and so far this promises to be a great place to call home for the next few years. We arrived on a sunny summer day and were eagerly eyeing the city from the airplane as it landed. Our sponsor helped us to our new home and had even cooked some spaghetti for us. Our family took a collective: wow! when we saw our house for the first time as it is superb. It has five bedrooms, five bathrooms, a gorgeous gigantic yard that fully envelopes the house with evergreen trees and play area for our children. Our sponsors and neighbors have told us this neighborhood is very much like ours was back in Florida where children can go out to play on the street and visit each other. Needless to say, day one in Belgrade started great.

We were a little wiser with this move. After all, this now being our second post with the Foreign Service, we have now learned a few lessons from older and wiser career diplomats. First of all, we bought a car from a departing diplomatic family so we would have a car ready for use on day one while we wait for our minivan to make the long trip across the Indian and Mediterranean Oceans from Dhaka to Belgium and then to Belgrade. The seller even threw-in his GPS with the price which has been God-sent for a newcomer family. Belgrade has a very good transportation infrastructure, so taking the bus to work is no problem, but it is always nice to have a car for daily shopping and sightseeing.

Within the first few days, we have been to two barbecues by other embassy families and to various shopping and entertainment areas in this town. The food promises to be very tasty and the variety of vegetable and fruits is great as well. They tell us that meat products are big in this land, and indeed the pates and cured meats have been wonderful. The local Balkan wines and Rakijas (local spirit made from various fruits) are excellent and I look forward to visiting some wineries in the future.

We love taking walks, and there is a huge forest-like part near our home called Kosutnjak, where we love to take strolls and explore the neighborhood. This park has a small ski hill for winter, but also multiple outdoor pools, tennis courts, basketball courts and restaurants nestled within this large 300 hectares (800 acres!) urban park.

As we don’t like to stay idle, we also visited Ada Ciganlija. This is an urban island-park at the heart of Belgrade. What a great idea! This park offers a bathing escape for the locals along the Sava river and has multiple restaurants and bars where to order a drink while you watch your kids swim on the artificial beach. You can rent bikes or roller blades to go around the park, bungee jump or takes water-ski lessons. I can see this will be a place we’ll return multiple times over our post here.

Belgrade promises to be a city full of history. It sits at the confluence of the Sava and the Danube rivers and has historically been an important transition between East and West. We already visited Kalemegdan Fort, which is an ancient fort initially built by the Romans and destroyed and rebuilt multiple times over the centuries. This fort has been visited by empires such as the Roman, Byzantine, and Ottoman as well as going through two World Wars and many other fights in between. It offers a magnificent view of the Sava and Danube rivers from the top of the hill and it has a military museum with interesting armored relics from the 1930-1940s era.

 

 

 

The people of Belgrade are very welcoming, and my staff at the clinic are particularly helpful in every step of the way. Since we still not know hardly any Serbian (we hope to start our classes soon), the younger generation here appears to know enough English to help us at the mall or at the local grocery market. 

Finally, the kids started school this week. Austin is now in kindergarten, but his transition was rather easy as he had already attended pre-K last year at the same school as his siblings while in Dhaka. All three are eager to meet their teachers and classmates. We hope they have a great school year.

So, we start our discovery of this region and particularly of Serbia. From our initial exposure this promises to be a great gem not yet fully discovered by many in the West.