Novi Sad part II

May 10

On account of not getting home until after 1am and my roommate being quite the creeper, I had a very late start to my day. I was also talking to the hostel owner about a guide for the underground part of the fortress as Milos had said he knew a guy. Jarkof (the owner of the hostel) said that I needed to have more than one person to go on the tour so apparently it was not meant to be. Damn traveling by myself. While it may seem strange to a lot of the travelers that I meet that I stay in cities more than 2 or 3 days, but I like not having to feel rushed so I’m quite enjoying it. On my way out of the hostel around 1pm I ran into Milos and we exchanged contact info as he will also be in Belgrade this weekend so we might meet up. Milos and Vlad come to Belgrade about once a month to visit friends/family and to go on the walking tours here so that they can learn new things and improve the one in Novi Sad. I’m having a very one-sided love affair with Milos right now lol not really, he’s just a super nice, smart and interesting guy who, as it turns out, is fun to hang out with outside of a walking tour. I hope we can hang out in Belgrade, but we’ll see.

After chatting with Milos, I headed to get lunch and found myself back at the café where I’d gotten the salad a couple days ago. I know I should be trying places, but the salad was so good and it’s hard to find a good, reliable salad around this part of the continent. But this time I asked for it without tomatoes so the olives were really the only thing I didn’t eat and I didn’t feel like such a jerk. Of course as I was eating it started to rain so I slowly enjoyed 2 cups of tea to see if it would stop. It wouldn’t of course so I just decided to brave it. I also decided I wanted to buy a Serbian SIM card as I was going to be in the country a while longer and they are relatively cheap here.

After purchasing the SIM card I decided to walk to the fortress even though it was still drizzling. I hadn’t taken many pictures from the tour as I thought for sure I’d be back, but wasn’t expecting it to be raining, so the pictures weren’t that great. There was pretty much no one else at the fortress so that was cool.

After the fortress I headed back to the hostel to dry off before dinner. Then a new roommate, Mary, showed up! Mary is from London and is travelling on holiday for 3 weeks around the Balkans. She asked if I had had dinner and when I said no, she asked if I wanted to join her and of course I said yes! We were walking down the pedestrian street when we decided to look at her guidebook for recommendations. It recommended us to Arhiv, a Mediterranean influenced restaurant. We decided to share a bottle of local Italian Riesling wine and a salad and we each got an Ombolo which is either chicken or pork with your choice of toppings wrapped in pastry dough and baked. It comes out looking almost like a doughy calzone but is 1000 times better! It was a great night! Mary is really nice and is crazy smart, particularly about the history and politics from this region of the world. I told her about the underground tour that she should try to go on and she convinced me that I should do it with her tomorrow and just go to Belgrade later in the day. Obviously I was all for this as I really wanted to do the tour!

When we got back to the hostel we had two new male roommates, Peter from the Netherlands and Sam from the UK. We told them about the underground tour and they seemed interested as well so hopefully we can make this happen!