I'm in Serbia!

After flying from BWI to Cincy to Paris to Belgrade, I am finally in Serbia! As I flew into/out of the different airports, I was really surprised how similar the areas around Cincy, Paris, and Belgrade look for the air. It's pretty much all farm land. You usually don't think of farmland when you think of Paris, but the airport sits outside the city and seems to have quite a nice surrounding. I love the way farmland looks from the sky - it looks like a giant patchwork quilt with the different crops forming the different squares. The neat thing was that the "quilt" got more intricate as I traveled from Cincy to Paris to Belgrade. I guess this is because we have big industrial sized farms in the US where a single crop is grown on multiple acres. Once you reach Belgrade, the plots of land are much smaller and have more variety of crops and are probably farmed by many different people.

Seeing Belgrade from the air was really neat. It looked like any other Eastern European capital. The sun glittered off the roof tops of the buildings and the Danube wound its way through the heart of the city. As we got lower and lower, we neared the outskirts of town where you began to see more communist style block apartment buildings, landfills, and more run down properties.

I was greeted at the airport by my host Liljana and her husband Jano the pastor. They drove me through the center of Belgrade so I could see a bit of the city. I knew the city had been bombed about a decade ago, but it did not expect so much of the devastation to still be so visible. We drove past a large government building (maybe a police station?) that had been bombed in two locations. You could clearly see where the bomb had hit and blasted out a good portion of the building. The collapsed floors seemed frozen in time and there was still debris scattered throughout the building. We passed two or three more buildings that had been heavily bombed. The one looked like it could collapse at any second. Liljana said that two people were actually killed when trying to clean up the rubble. After that, the recovery efforts seemed to have stopped.

These buildings were all along a major street so those that live in Belgrade must pass them fairly often. I can't imagine what it must be like to have such an obvious reminder of war along your daily commute. I wonder if people still think about the violence and the bombings? Or maybe, they are so used to the buildings by now its just another part of the city's landscape. I really hope I will have the chance to explore Belgrade before I leave! I didn't take any pictures because I was in the car and there was a lot of traffic, but here is a picture of one of the buildings we passed: