Arrival in Belgrade

By the time I reached Belgrade, I was rattled and claustrophobic. Things would have been even worse if I hadn’t had Deyan Enev’s excellent short stories in Circus Bulgaria, a couple of Sick Nicks and some salty snacks.

Hotel Slavija was about a kilometre from the station, uphill on Nemanjina, and overlooking Slavija Square. I had to take a couple of stabs navigating on account of the darkness and lack of signs, and where signs did exist, the lack of consistency between alphabets used on said signs and the map in my guidebook (signage frustration first surfaced due to their total absence in Bar, and got worse and more difficult the further south and east I travelled).

I’d reckoned on hitting Communist kitsch gold through my rather contrived Sofia hotel booking, but Slavija screamed Cold War, from the bombastic, empty reception, my over-Spartan 15th floor room and the heavy nod to hierarchies, which saw me staying in the lowest of four or five grades of rooms in the original hotel building which itself stood opposite a newer annexe, Slavija Luxury, which - who knows - probably had its own decadent sliding tariffs. In the daytime, this odd East/West ambiguity was played even more dramatically in the form of a huge billboard bikini clad H&M model stretched up one of the hotel’s twenty floor aspects.

My 15th floor budget Gulag accommodation featured some hard-to-find and some trusty mainstays of cheap hotel rooms, including tiny pillows, an already-wet wet room with ill-fitting non-waterproof curtains, a graffitied headboard, screens across my restrictor-fitted window (which turned out not to be the enourmo H&M bikini-clad lovely), loose power sockets, unfinished skirting, one comically squeaky bed which yelped from the tiny vibrations of me opening the door, let alone going near the damned thing, and blankets made from hair and sawdust.

Still, hotels - even The Slavija - have some benefits over hostels. In hotels, and particularly in cheap hotels, it’s easier to ponder failure. There’s also a welcome absence of backpackers, many of whom would otherwise think nothing of telling you their itineraries at deafening volume. Hotels are geared for more businessy travellers happy at being contained between different offices with as many conveniences laid on as their expense accounts can afford. Hence, the breakfast I enjoyed in an over-sized dining room, which was easily the best thing about the Slavija.

Links
Hotel Slavija website. There's a video on it, bearing no resemblance to the grimy reality of my stay, more of which in tomorrow's post.