Walking. Gossip. Travel.

Tag: Belgrade Trip

Belgrade Trip – Belgrade Zoo and Snakes

I don’t like snakes. It’s nothing personal and I don’t want them hurt (well, unless they’re attacking me) but they always look shifty to me. I’m quite content with their natural habitat being behind glass, so this whole zoo arrangement is perfect for me. I can look at them and they can’t attack me, or at least, as long as the zoo-keeper is competent. This is a boa constrictor and they can live for 30 years shuffling around in Central and Southern America. The zoo have a fun fact which is that these snakes have two lungs, one is a small nonfunctional one and the other is large and very functional, all designed by evolution to fit into their bodies.

A Burmese python and apparently (I’m just reading this from the zoo’s display boards, I don’t claim to be a snake expert and that isn’t something I’d want to be really as I’d have to look at them a lot) they can live for 20 years if they get lucky. They were once just in southeastern Asia, but some people in the United States decided they’d make a lovely snake and then some escaped and now they’ve an invasive species to Florida.

A reticulated python and the zoo notes that these are amongst the few snakes that prey on humans. It’s the world’s longest snake and the damn thing can swim, so they have been found some way out in the water.

A corn snake and these are one of the most commonly kept snakes as a pet. I have no idea why someone would want one of these in their house. But, each to their own, I suppose not everyone wants a furry pet they can cuddle.

My two loyal blog readers can pat themselves on the back if they guessed that this was an Honduran Milk Snake. As it looks like a coral snake, lots of predators stay away from it. Reading up on this, I’ve discovered you can keep one of these as a pet, but it must be kept alone otherwise it might eat the other snake.

This Californian Kingsnake is treating its water bowl as something it should sit underneath.

This horrible thing (yes, this is a verbal attack on snakes) is a black-headed Python. I mean, perhaps he’s lovely and I shouldn’t judge, but this one was on manoeuvres and he spent a lot of time eyeing me up as prey I thought.

See? Definitely didn’t like me. These snakes are from northern Australia and can be kept as a snake, but apparently it’s a premium priced one and they don’t come cheap. Personally, I think I’ll save my money for craft beer….

It was all nicely laid out in the zoo’s reptile enclosure, although that’s enough snakes for me for September….

September 10, 2024
Belgrade Trip – Belgrade Zoo and the Oldest Known Alligator in the World

This is Muju and he’s the oldest known alligator in the world, thought to have been hatched in a German zoo between 1925 and 1935. Unfortunately, the zoo records were lost during the Second World War, but it’s known that he came to Belgrade Zoo in 1937. He’s gone through the Second World War, the collapse of Yugoslavia, the NATO bombings of the city and I suspect he might well be getting a little bored now. Although that requires it to be possible for an alligator to be able to be bored, I have no idea whether that’s a thing for reptiles. He got gangrene in his front leg in 2012, so it was cut off in a bid to extend his life.

Apparently he doesn’t move much and his food is put in front of him, which sounds a convenient way to live a life, although not necessarily entirely fulfilling. But, alligators probably don’t feel the need to be fulfilled in their lives, so he just remains on display in his little pond. I was worried that I might drop my phone on him, so I was very careful, but I do wonder what has fallen into this pond over the years. Just in case he gets bored of sitting in this pond, they’ve built him a little cave area to lounge about in as well.

The BBC have even made a video of the alligator, just in case one of my two loyal blog readers wanted to find out even more….

September 10, 2024
Belgrade Trip – Stari Dvor (Old Palace, City Hall)

This was a rather attractive building and it’s located opposite my hotel (more of which later on during the week, but I’m very much liking it) and it is known as locally as Stari Dvor, meaning Old Palace. It’s currently used as the City Hall for Belgrade, but it was also used as the Royal residence of the Serbian royal family between 1884 and 1922. The history of this city is brutal, Wikipedia notes (and I have no reason to disbelieve it) that “the city was battled over in 115 wars and razed to the ground 44 times”. That’s sub-optimal for the residents of Belgrade if I’m being honest.

And that brutality was evident on the night of 10 June 1903, when a group of military officers entered the building next to this palace and assassinated King Aleksandar Obrenović. and Queen Draga. They then disembowelled the royal couple, mutilated their bodies and threw them out of the window into piles of manure. That building was demolished soon after and it’s now a park next to Stari Dvor. I can see the park from my hotel room and it’s a little odd to think all of this went on relatively recently in the city’s history. The current structure has been much amended since it was first built between 1882 and 1884, not least as it was damaged in the First World War and the Second World War. It was used briefly as the city’s Ethnographic Museum, but has served as the City Hall since 1961.

Also of interest (well, to me anyway), in 1919 and 1920, several meetings of the Provisional National Assembly of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes were held here. This was the formal name at the time for the new country known as the Kingdom of Yugoslavia that was established in 1918. The building feels like something of a microcosm of the wider city, it has certainly been through a lot.

September 10, 2024
Belgrade Trip – Belgrade Airport to the City Centre by Bus

Last week, I stayed up late one night pondering on how to get to the city centre of Belgrade from the airport. It’s the sort of thing that I like to get sorted out in my mind in advance (and these things usually concern me at night, which is the worse time in practical terms to have to think about such things), then I know I can sort everything else out when I’m there. The public transport system is chaotic, the city has switched to a new provider and it seems to have confused a lot of people. A new system was brought in where locals could text a number and that gave them a receipt for their journey and charged them accordingly. But, they rather forgot about visitors who didn’t have a Serbian SIM in their phone. They introduced an app instead which numerous people seem to hate judging from the on-line reviews, but it seemed to work OK for me when I downloaded it last week.

Well, I say seemed to work OK, but I was reliant on wi-fi (I have a lot of countries included in my roaming package, including the United States, but Serbia isn’t one of them) at the airport and so I bought a 90-minute Zone A ticket. This cost me 32p, which I thought was suitably cheap. After some faffing, I found where my ticket was stored on my phone and then went outside to look for the 600 bus. I had just missed one, but the next one was in 23 minutes and that was meant to take around 40 minutes to get to the city centre.

I then had around eight taxi drivers come and try and get to take me to the city centre. I think I have a generally confused look, but I tried to have an annoyed look to put anyone else coming over and that seemed to work nicely. It didn’t help I had to keep moving around to get the wi-fi connection from the airport terminal, so these eight or so taxi drivers probably thought I was desperately lost. I have a theory that you can tell about the development of a country by whether rogue taxi drivers are allowed at airports to try and get people into their vehicles at what are usually exorbitant prices. I have a lot of theories actually, but that’s besides the point here.

At this moment (and I must have forgotten to look generally annoyed), I seemed to become the new customer service point for the bus company with four people coming over to ask for help. It mystifies me why the airport hasn’t put any support, whether staff or signage, out here on how to buy tickets. Anyway, all I managed to do was pre-worry everyone because I was the only one with an app that had a ticket.

What happened next is that around 30 people boarded the bus and tried to buy a ticket using a combination of cash, card and phone, but the driver just waved them all on. None of them had a ticket to travel, so the bus company must be throwing some money away here. I had a front row seat to watch all this excitement. Then the bus drove off and the public transport app promptly crashed. I re-opened the app, which had my ticket on, but it now required an Internet signal and wouldn’t show the ticket off-line. Completely sub-optimal…. I had been pro-active here by trying to screenshot the ticket in advance, but the app prohibits that. So I was in the position of having a valid ticket but no easy way of displaying it. I had a plan, if a ticket inspector got on, although they would likely be distracted by the other passengers, but I had been able to screenshot the e-mail confirming the ticket order to show them. Fortunately (for nearly every passenger) there were no ticket inspectors.

We had to stop every three minutes for the driver to wipe down the condensation from the front window. Sometimes we didn’t stop whilst this was taking place which added a little jeopardy to the journey.

Then a little crisis happened. I had saved the maps of Belgrade to my phone and GPX works without roaming and I realised that the bus was hurtling off in the wrong direction. I thought my pre-planning had failed and the 600 bus might have two routes. The blue line is the route of the 600 bus service and the blue dot is where the bus was, which was not on the route. With only a small quiet sigh, I decided it might be useful to get my phone charger out as this might be a long night, but I was delighted to see that the bus reached the junction and then returned back the way it came. It was likely that there were just road works or the like, but it meant that soon enough we were back on track. I was relieved if I’m being honest, there’s a limit to how much adventure that I need in my life.

We arrived into Belgrade at pretty much what time I had hoped for. My 90 minute ticket meant that I could in theory get a connecting bus to the hotel, but there was no way I could access the ticket and since it was just a 30 minute walk I thought it’d be nice to see some of the city at night. In safe and sound, all rather lovely.

September 10, 2024
Belgrade Trip – Wizz Air (Luton Airport to Belgrade)

Finally, my ‘riveting’ series of posts about this trip starts to have some relevance to Belgrade….. I’ve never been to Serbia before, so this was a new experience for me. The boarding arrangement was smooth and well managed, I had a wait of only around five minutes in the boarding queue before going down the stairs to board the aircraft, I was suitably impressed. I am aware of the negativity that Wizz Air receives, but so far (and this might change at any time, I fully accept that) I’ve not had any problems with them.

There’s the aircraft, looking ready for action.

And boarding. I prefer not to board with an air bridge as it lets me get a photo of the aircraft and work out the registration number and not have to look it up later. Those with disabilities might have a different point of view on this though.

The aircraft is G-WUKO, which I don’t think I’ve been on, but I don’t always record them which limits how useful these sort of comments are. And I’m not sure if anyone is really too focused on whether I’ve been on a particular aircraft before if I’m being entirely honest to myself. The Wizz Air fleet is one of the newest and this aircraft is an Airbus A321 which was delivered to the airline in May 2021.

I didn’t pay for a seat reservation, so I went for a random one and was fortunate enough to get a window seat. There was no-one sitting next to me, so it was quite an agreeable flight. To put this into perspective as well, the flight cost me £10.49, so it would be hard to be too disappointed here. We arrived into Belgrade on time, the aircraft was clean and the cabin crew were professional and friendly. The aircraft was only around 75% full, so despite the low prices, this wasn’t the most popular of services. This is the sort of flight that I think the unlimited flights pass that Wizz Air are selling will be trying to fill up a bit.

Around 15% of customers bought something from the refreshments trolley, a couple seemed tempted by the perfumes that were being sold, it all made a bit of money for the airline. Unfortunately for Wizz Air, I didn’t much help their bottom line with this flight. I had a look at the air passenger duty that Wizz Air have to pay, and for the economy seat to Serbia, they have to pay £13 to the Government. Anyway, I was very pleased again with the airline, everything went smoothly and I received what I considered to be excellent value for money.

September 10, 2024
Belgrade Trip – Luton Airport and My Lounge

This is only a short post (with poor quality photos), as I didn’t really mean to visit My Lounge. I used to visit this lounge a few years ago, but it has been modernised and updated now with a new ground floor reception area. I had assumed that the lounge would be fully booked, but I went and asked if they usually allowed Priority Pass walk-ins. He said that it was normally fine and so I thought I might as well pop in and wait for my flight. You find your own table here, unless you’ve pre-booked, and there weren’t many left, but I found a quiet corner out of the way. Incidentally, note the healthy banana I acquired here. There really is no end to my healthy eating.

I’ve written before about the odd situation with lounges in the UK, and it is mostly the UK, where they are less business lounges and more ‘all you can drink before your flight’ rooms. This is why, I suspect, Priority Pass has had to come to an arrangement with some dining options at the airport, as otherwise there isn’t enough capacity. I can hardly comment on what other people drink (I mean, look at the state of https://untappd.com/user/julwhite…..) but I watched several customer groups here trying to get their value for money by constantly visiting the bar and I think they achieved their aims. I opted for just one beer, not least as it was Birra Moretti, which doesn’t surprise and delight me.

This is a bit hopeless as a photo, but I hadn’t intended to spend much time here, but I was trying to show that the surroundings are comfortable and tasteful in their decoration. I’m not sure that’s evident at all from the photo, but luckily I’ve just written it, so that’ll do instead. It did feel relaxing to be fair and there were plenty of charging points dotted around, with everything feeling clean. There were plenty of staff and so empty plates and glasses were being cleared promptly.

I did like their nachos, but the food offering was highly limited here. It was effectively jacket potatoes or nachos, which is sufficient as a snack, but the usual entrance price here is £32 and that’s a punchy price point. So we get into the situation where some customers will try and get their value from the alcohol, which means the lounge has cut back in other areas to facilitate that. For someone who doesn’t drink alcohol, I’d suggest that it’s probably better value to go to one of the restaurants at the airport rather than visit the lounge.

Although the staff member on the door said that Priority Pass customers are usually accepted, I’m not entirely convinced that’s anywhere near guaranteed judging from the reviews. But, I’ll pop in again if I get chance to try and get some better photos than the random rubbish I’ve managed to get here. I was going to get them during this visit, but then I noticed that the gate for my flight had been called.

September 10, 2024
Belgrade Trip – Luton Airport and Avalon

Following on from my visit to the Big Smoke Restaurant with my Priority Pass card, I walked the short distance Avalon for a dessert and coffee. It’s a relatively small unit with around ten tables and I’m slightly surprised they haven’t put some high tables around the outside to increase capacity. Anyway, the deal here was that I got a credit of £18 to spend on food and drinks.

My plan was to get a coffee and a slice of the Big Rock cake, as that seemed sufficiently filling.

The staff member said that I wasn’t spending anywhere near the allowance and she suggested a sandwich, before then adding other items to come to exactly £18. I wasn’t going to turn this down, so I then had more food than I really needed. However, I’m telling myself that this is an opportunity to try the various Priority Pass offerings, so it didn’t seem like a bad idea. The sandwich was slightly moist from the tomato, but the ham was quite decadent and gave the whole arrangement a pleasant taste. I’m not really a dessert person, but the cookie was chocolatey and the Big Rock cake was more than enough. I took the cereal bar to Belgrade with me for a late night snack.

The service here was always helpful, not least with helping me reach the maximum spend possible. I didn’t want to take a table up for too long and take other sales away from them, but it was a clean, comfortable and relaxed area. My latte was rich in taste and that might explain why I couldn’t sleep when I got to Belgrade, I try not to drink coffee after around 10:00….. The customers here looked rather middle class shall we say (although who am I to judge….), the whole thing feels a little more upmarket with its set-up than some of the other food options.

Incidentally, those on an unlimited lounge card can also go to Nolito for an Italian meal, but I decided that I really didn’t need any more food and I didn’t want to take excessive advantage of Priority Pass as otherwise they’ll end up withdrawing offers such as these. I will though pop into Nolito when I’m next at the airport, which is only in a few days, so my two loyal blog readers won’t have long to wait.

September 10, 2024
Belgrade Trip – Luton Airport and Big Smoke Restaurant

I mentioned in my last post about my new acquisition of an unlimited Priority Pass card, so my first usage of it was at Big Smoke Restaurant. The deal is that they give you £18 to spend as a dining credit at the restaurant on anything that you want. It’s not a huge amount, so it’s not going to get any traveller a three course meal and a smorgasbord of drinks, but it’s a decent snack. The service element was a bit fiddly, but it didn’t help that I asked to sit at the bar as there were power points and I didn’t want any of my devices low on battery. This meant that they didn’t have any waiter service to take my order, which might have made the process smoother. I tried to order at the bar and I was told they needed to find a staff member from the restaurant area to pre-scan my Priority Pass card, which they did.

I then tried again to order and this was going brilliantly until they realised that had left some breakfast menus out, and I needed to order from the lunchtime menu which started at 11:00. Again, it was sorted quickly enough and everyone was helpful, although this is a slightly fiddly arrangement all round. Here’s the main menu and it’s evident how far the £18 will go, or not go as the case may be.

I went for Smoky Chicken Wings and a pint of Electric Eye. The food took 12 minutes to arrive, it was neatly presented and the chicken was tender and fell off the bone easily. I decided I’d eat the celery for some variety in my life, which was particularly healthy of me. Would it have been worth the £17.20 that it would have normally cost? Probably not to be honest, I’d have likely gone to Boots next door and got three meal deals for less money. However, the dining environment was clean and comfortable, the service was polite and I was able to charge all my devices up which ensured that I wasn’t overly stressed for the rest of the day. I’ve got a new battery pack to avoid issues, but I try and remain fully charged when about to travel somewhere new, just in case something goes a bit wrong.

For an airport location, the prices aren’t unreasonable and I merrily listened in to other customers to see if they were happy. In general, they seemed to be and given the absence of a Wetherspoons here, it’s likely one of the better pre-flight options. As for the Priority Pass, it’s a handy option for those on unlimited passes, but it’s poor value for those on limited visit pass as it’d be cheaper to just pay at the restaurant.

September 10, 2024
Belgrade Trip – Priority Pass

This is nothing to do with Belgrade, but it will put the next few posts into some sort of context. A few years ago, before the days of acquiring status with BA (which I’ve since lost as I haven’t been anywhere) I had a Priority Pass lounge card. It worked well as I had an offer from Accor Hotels, but I heard too many stories of not being able to get into lounges and so I decided against renewing it. However, here we are again with Accor offering a lower price and also some Accor points, so I thought I’d treat myself. It has the advantage that it includes a spend at numerous airport restaurants, including at Luton Airport where I mostly travel from at the moment. After checking that I could use multiple visits in one day, I decided to go for it and just have to hope that they don’t change the arrangements any time soon. So my two loyal blog readers will now be seeing endless posts about random lounges that I’ve found, what a treat for us all.

September 10, 2024
Belgrade Trip – Luton Centre to Luton Airport

Before I start this, I accept that this post is, well, rather niche and a bit prosaic. But, I quite like reading back on the connecting parts of trips and since it’s my blog, I might as well write the stuff I want to remember. I’ve walked from the centre of Luton to the airport on numerous occasions and I have to say, it’s rarely an inspirational meandering through beautiful landscape and undulating hills. I’m quite proud of myself for this photo, which I think is the most beautiful spot along the route. Although, if truth be told, it’s actually in a traffic island (the underpass is visible at the rear of the photo), but it does show the little river that weaves its way through the town. It’s the River Lea, which becomes much bigger by the time it hits London and is also the origin of the town’s place name (Luton I mean, not London).

Last time I walked by here, the Luton DART hadn’t been completed. It’s a ludicrous fare of £4.90 to get to the airport from here, which is a minor walk (for me, I don’t speak for anyone else). When I get a train ticket that includes Luton Airport station, it does though include the DART ride. Not that I’ve had a situation where I’ve needed to buy such a ticket, but maybe one day.

I walked over these steps once before realising it was much less hassle just to cross the road. This is always my sign that I’ve reached Luton Airport. Other major airports have an old plane or something similar on display, but I like this little bridge. One point of this post is that if anyone does want to just walk to the airport, it’s only a thirty minute expedition from the town centre and so for anyone with a backpack and no walking issues, it’s some free exercise before the flight.

And here we are, London Luton Airport. Does travel get more decadent than this?

September 10, 2024