i was in belgrade. with my family, in winter and snow. i’ve never seen belgrade before. seemed another typical eastern european sort of town. i don’t know why we were there. some sort of holiday. we got a nice hotel, huge. a little stuck in time but otherwise impeccable in service. we heard there was actually a good italian restaurant somewhere and decided to try and find it, hoping that some summery italian food would help with the cold. from the hotel we took a cab and then a train on a rather long journey, or perhaps it is just that everything moves very slowly in belgrade and so it was just the time that was long. we got to a shopping square of sorts, like a busy old cobblestone town with shophouses on both sides on the street. near the corner and a little further off was the italian place. lovely.
when we got back to our hotel i spent some time exploring it since it seemed endless. down in the basement area were the huge function rooms and service kitchens. there were many people coming and going, not just the hotel staff. i wonder where they went so i trailed the relative flow of people, past some rooms, through a service entrance, round a corner and out. curisouly i found myself in some place that seemed vaguely familiar. then i realised i was next to the italian restaurant. how peculiar, that a long journey we took to find it in avery different looking neighbourhood should also be no more than round a corner from inside the hotel. i retraced my route and find myself back in the function room basement. i went back up to the lobby and it was bustling as ever.
next meal, the folks wanted to just stay in the hotel and have the hotel’s dinner special for the day, which was an outdoor banquet feast of local fare, in the snowy weather. i wasn’t too keen but they were and they left me to my devices. almost nonchalantly. then i somehow knew that a friend of mine was also staying in the hotel. initally i followed my folks out into the billowing snow where benches had been set up with sturdy wooden tables. countless numbers of them for all the multitudes of people who wanted to eat. they seemed spread out on differing levels and slopes even and looking down i realised that a steep almost sheer ravine was below. some peole had ventured along the barely foot-wide narrowness of a slip that ran along all the way down in the windy snow. everyone seemed light and happy but i found the place to be rather disconcerting.
so i decided instead to look up my friend for dinner and was thinking of the shortcut to the italian place. after all my folks had seemed to morph into strangers and hardly seemed to notice me at all, as if they suddenly did not know me. even my friend seemed a bit odd, rather hyper and merrily scaling the ravine up and down. something odd was at work, i couldn’t quite get a fix on it, but it was certainly something about the place. and all the while the snow just billowed around us.
