*I have a hectic travel schedule in the upcoming weeks and
won't be seeing much of the Big Plum for a while.
*It's strange that one can blithely walk past real oddities for weeks, and then suddenly notice them when one is on the point of leaving.
The two flooding rivers of Belgrade have receded, leaving the occasional pond and some brimming ditches here and there.
That's the soccer field, now a semi-permanent soccer pond complete with ducks and fresh water weeds.
Old Man Danube there has rid himself of about eight
hundred tons of shoreside plastic bottles, which must be drifting in the Black Sea in dense plastic shoals.
Jules Verne is still moving product in Belgrade on the
centenary of his death.
I would definitely go see Orhan Pamuk, but I'll
be in London while he is in Belgrade. Typical.
This is a kind of ultimate signifier of Balkan culture
here: some honcho trying to make some kind of solid,
magisterial statement for the ages about what belongs
to who where, and then a party of another opinion comes
along, and not merely remove that, but violently and
industriously defaces every shred of it, by hand,
then leaves the wreckage to be further cracked by
what I take to be an earthquake. Or it could have been aerial
bombing. Around here, you never know.
