For dinner, we found a very fashionable restaurant in the Durcol area with a lovely terrace. We sat down at a table underneath a fig tree and ordered burgers and a jug of mojito. The fight from earlier in the day was completely forgotten. The jokes rained like cats and dogs.

So yeah. There are definitely upsides to this traveling in a group too. A lot more laughing. A lot less checking things off a list.

After dinner, we went to a even more fashionable restaurant a couple of blocks away and had some drinks. The adjoining store had prices that were juicy even with Swedish standards, but the cocktails were good.

And they had wi-fi. This is what I looked like right after reading the e-mail from the Swedish universities admissions office: I had been accepted to the master’s program at Stockholm Resilience Centre. I was excited. Kirke didn’t understand resilience, despite my efforts in trying to explain. I guess a couple of cocktails will do that to you.

I’ve known Hanna since I was seven. We were in the same class in first grade, even though we didn’t really become friends then. Hanna has a talent for drawing people to her, and I was very shy back then. She intimidated me, she and all the girls around her. But still, we were in the same class, went to the same parties, the same field trips, shared Kirke – until seventh grade, when Hanna suddenly came to school in black-dyed hair and black eye-liner around her eyes. She wrote poetry and I wanted to become a writer. We started hanging out, maybe mostly because we listened to other bands and read other books than the other girls in our class. And we became extremely tight. She went on family holidays together with my family, I went on family holidays with hers. In a sense, she was my first really close friend.

Kirke started in our class in second grade. She made this instantaneous impression, making everyone fall for her. She has this natural presence, a way of being that just can’t be ignored. We became friends, in the way I guess most people are friends in elementary school, playing field hockey on school brakes, occasionally inviting each other over for sleepovers. Then, in seventh grade, we realized that we had a shared interest in singing, and we ended up audition for the same choir, being accepted to the same choir. So that meant us spending one afternoon a week together, doing homework and usually eating dinner at her mom’s, before going to choir practice.

Back in seventh grade, Hanna and Kirke did not really hang out that much. They had been besties in fourth, fifth grade, but now that Hanna was writing poetry and listening to Swedish independent pop, while Kirke was doing the whole girl-from-the-projects-thing, they didn’t hang out much. But by ninth grade, they had found back to each other again and we were the golden trio, always sitting next to each other in science class, going on walks after lunch, sharing the hotel room when we were on that last, intense class trip to Greece.

In high school, going to different schools, Hanna doing fashion design, Kirke media and me studying social sciences like a maniac, we still managed to sit hours upon hours in dark, smoky cafes (this was back when it was still legal to smoke inside), talking about politics, the patriarchal structures of our society, relationships and boys. They were the most important people in my life.

We’ve had our ups and downs since then. Hanna and I barely spoke at all for a couple of years after high school. Kirke is a serious workaholic, and a fully fledged professional assistant/producer/director in the Swedish media business, which is quite an achievement for someone who is only 25. But it also means that for months on end, I have no idea what’s happening with her. Both Kirke and Hanna have significant others, and I bury myself in school and student council duties. We’re older and our friends aren’t the most important things in our lives anymore.

But still, we stick together. Seventeen years, and there is still so much excitement. If I’d met any of them today, we probably wouldn’t have become friends. Heck, we probably wouldn’t even have met. But now, after becoming friends in elementary school due to us being the ones that were least dissimilar in the class, they’re the closest thing to non-blood related family I have. We meet up in Belgrade, and it just clicks. Just like in high school. We disagree and we fight and things are in no way perfect, but they’re there. Always. With a persistence that can only be achieved between people that have shared so many essential life events together, so many years.

And it’s funny. How you just know, even while a photo is being taken, that this, this is going to be a keeper. Something to take out in 30 years and laugh about, together with the other two. I can’t imagine life going any other way.

Mr. P, sitting in one of the awesome, artsy benches at the Kalemegdan Citadel.

Our second morning in Belgrade (12/7), I was reminded of the downsides with traveling with friends. We didn’t get started as planned in the morning, and low blood sugar levels, past unsolved disagreements and other stuff eventually led to Hanna and Kirke having a major fight in the middle of the central shopping street in Belgrade.

I mostly tried to stay out of the way, especially after trying to negotiate between them – instead, I was caught in the crossfire, harshly told off.

But luckily, by the time we reached the old Kalemegdan Citadel, the issue had been solved, Hanna and Kirke had hugged it out, and we could pose together by the wall overlooking the two Belgrade rivers meeting: the Sava and the Danube.

I bought two pairs of earrings at the fort, and Kirke bought some rakija and honey as gifts for her parents – but Hanna was the one spending the most time looking at the souvenirs, first the lamb skin slippers and then the small stones  with icons painted on them, sold by a man right in front of the fort gate. But in the end, she didn’t buy anything at all. She could not make up her mind.

I like the colors on that wall. It’s almost the Ducor Hotel Monrovia again. Again.

And just a couple of blocks down, the corner house had a tower. They do have some nice buildings in downtown Belgrade too, old Durcol. Despite it being kind of run down.

A moment in life: In the taxi, happy from rakija and the general atmosphere from the pre-party, I picked up my small compact camera and started taking photos of the three of us. This very self-indulgent practice of taking photos of oneself – we all did it in our teens and put them up on our Lunarstorm or Helgon or Bilddagboken or Facebook pages. There are many extraordinarily silly pictures taken of me, Hanna and Kirke in hallways at pre-parties, on tube stations and in club toilets, six, maybe eight years ago. It felt like the right thing to do, for nostalgia’s sake, to resume this self-portrait practice on this amazing night when we were all three in Belgrade together, on our way to a bachelorette party.

Pretty serious at first.

And then it deteriorated.

Ana is Hanna’s friend who was getting married, and the reason for Hanna going to Belgrade. I was doing my interrail thing and made sure to plan my trip so that I was there at the same time as her. Kirke just decided to tag along, a couple of days before Hanna was to leave Sweden. So, it ended up being a weekend in Belgrade for the three of us.

Ana lives in Stockholm, but she’s got her entire family in Belgrade, and so does her (then) fiancé, so obviously they would have their wedding in Belgrade. Ana’s parents live in Novi Beograd, so on Thursday night we took a taxi out there to go to her bachelorette party.

I’ve never been to a bachelorette party, so I didn’t really know what to expect. Turns out, though, that in this particular case the party consisted of a whole bunch of girls dancing and having fun together.

It started with cold meats, vegetables and rakija at Ana’s parent’s in Novi Beograd. Rakija is the traditional Serbian spirit, a distilled liquor usually made of plums, but sometimes also made of pears, apples or other fruit. It is strong, 40-70 percent alcohol, and I was told that mostly every family has one uncle or grandpa who makes it at home. And they can drink it any time of the day. One morning, Hanna, Kirke and I were offered a shot of rakija when we were having our breakfast at a café, because ”it is a great way to kick-start your digestive system”. We declined the offer for breakfast, but at the bachelorette party the rakija shots just kept on coming and they were just so easy to swallow.

The exhilarated atmosphere and the shots of rakija created a certain kind of high and it felt like everything was just glitter and laughs.

From Ana’s parent’s, we packed ourselves into taxis and rode down to the river (I think it was the Danube, but I am not sure, I wasn’t really in the right state of mind to ask about the geography of Belgrade). There, the quay was lined with club boats. According to Ana, this was the place to be if you wanted to experience the real Serbian club vibe. She had booked a table at one of the clubs, right next to the stage where a band was playing Serbian hits.

The party girls, consisting of Ana’s sister, her friends from Belgrade and her Serbian friends that live in Stockholm, two friends of her fiancé’s, and us. Luckily, most of them spoke either Swedish or English – and they all seemed to love dancing just as much as us.

Pretty early in the night, Ana climbed up on the bench by our table, and was instantly followed by a couple of her friends. Soon, we were all standing on the benches or the table, dancing and singing along to the live music. And it is a weird thing, how easy it is to sing along to songs that you’ve never heard, in a language that you don’t know, when you’ve had a couple of shots of rakija and are dancing on the table at a bachelorette party. There were men down on the floor, eyeing us, trying to get our attention – but why ruin something so perfect? This was a girls night out. The men eventually moved on without so much as a pat on the cheek as reward for all their efforts.

Ana the bride and Hanna, dancing on the table.

The golden trio, singing along, sweating and screaming.

The energy in that boat was intense, the heat almost suffocating, and it actually is possible to get too much of something good. At about one in the morning, Kirke and Hanna decided they wanted to leave, and I was fine with that. We kissed Ana good night and caught a taxi back to Nevenka’s apartment.

Back in Nevenka’s kitchen, I managed to find some salted cashew nuts left over from one of my train rides. So we ate those, chips and nectarines, drank water and just laughed, still too wound up to go to bed. Serbian bachelorette parties are wild things.

At six in the morning, I woke up and the room was spinning. I went to the get a glass of water, realizing that I was still drunk. Rakija is strong stuff. I rarely drink alcohol (except for when I’m traveling, for some reason) and I almost never get drunk, but the rakija, man, it gives a wonderful kind of intoxication. It’s like bottled happiness. At least when you drink it together with your best friends. At a bachelorette party. In a new and exotic city. Adventure and adrenaline. Life.

Novi Beograd, or New Belgrade, is a part of the city that was built during the late 1940s. The Tito era, when Belgrade was the capital of economically booming Jugoslavia. It is an example of a modernist city that actually succeded with its ideas (as opposed to many modernist neighborhoods in western European and North American cities), according to Milena, an architect that I met in Belgrade through the e-mail introduction by my awesome Seattle Couchsurfing host Miles. I didn’t spend enough time in Novi Beograd myself to confidently have an opinion about it, but I do know that the modernist neighborhoods in Stockholm generally are the poorest, most marginalized and with the biggest structural problems.

Be as it may with the socio-economic situation in Novi Beograd, the extreme urban landscape with enormous concrete buildings on rows upon rows, seemingly neverending, held a strange fascination on both me and Hanna. For Kirke too, in a purely aesthetic sense – but Hanna has a degree in urban planning and I’m a geographer. This was an example of what we’ve spent years of our lives studying at university: how people live. Here, it’s the concrete jungle

The house next to Ana’s – they all looked the same. So much grey. But I can’t say I think they’re ugly. There is a certain kind of harsh symmetry to them that I can’t help appreciating. They are not just big concrete boxes, built as fast and as cheap as possible. Someone has planned them, created these lines and the tiny colorful details. Yeah, there’s just something about them.

And then, in the middle of everything, someone has built this lovely little garden/fountain installation. Lovely, and such an odd thing to see, next to all these huge, tough, hard grey buildings.

There was a mall, too, a small one. They sold used books. I would have loved to browse through them, but they were all filled with cryllic letters. Somehow, that feels even more inaccessible than if the books were written in Croatian – both languages (linguistically actually the same) are completely alien to me, but Croatian at least uses the Latin alphabet. With Serbian, I can’t even spell out the words.

Our first morning in Belgrade (11/7), we were very slow to get started. Hanna had made friends with Nevenka, a Serbian girl visiting Stockholm, through common acquaintances a couple of weeks back and when Nevenka heard that Hanna was going to Belgrade with two friends, she offered us to stay her apartment. She and her room mate were going to the Exit festival in Novi Sad that weekend anyway, so their apartment would be empty. It was a lovely apartment pretty close to downtown Belgrade, and that first morning we spent saying goodbye to Nevenka and just slowly getting ready to leave.

Eventually we did get out, though, and found a café where we had sandwiches and pancakes and coffee and then just spent another hour relaxing.

Just by the breakfast café, this huge Orthodox temple was completely dominating the cityscape. Sveti Sava is what it’s called, and it’s supposed to be the largest Christian Orthodox temple in the world. And really, it is huge.

But not finished. Due to lack of funding, the work on the interior goes slowly (think decades), and right now it’s mostly a huge white shell of a temple. But still pretty cool, both figuratively and litterally. The massive concrete made the temperature inside several degrees lower – a very welcome change to the heat outside.

This first morning, we didn’t make it further than to the Sava temple. Then we had to walk back to the apartment and start getting ready for the bachelorette party (!!).

I’m on the bus to Belgrade. Driving out of Sarajevo, up into the mountains, was incredible. The narrow roads climbing up and down the steep slopes of the mountains. Luckily, the driver of this bus is a careful guy. I’ve seen some other busses drive past, I would not have wanted to sit in any of them.

And then, the plateau, with the flowering meadows and sheep. Listening to First Aid Kit and eating a Bosnian cherry jam pastry, I couldn’t have had a more enjoyable time.

[Here, I was supposed to insert photos of the mountains and the plateau meadows, but alas, my phone got stolen before I managed to transfer them onto my computer – so you’ll have to imagine them instead!]

Now, well into Serbia, the mountains are way behind us and the flat land is yet again covered in corn and sunflower fields, just like in Hungary. And just like in Hungary, the temperature has increased several degrees. The sun is shining and if this bus wasn’t air conditioned, I would be soaked in sweat. I have a new stamp in my passport and soon I’ll meet Hanna and Kirke. Amazingly enough, the bus even seems to be on time.

– – –

Later:

After some confusion and delays on their part, Hanna, Kirke and Hanna’s friend Ana picked me up at the bus station.

And our first night together in Belgrade was spent looking for dinner, finally buying some tasty Serbian fastfood. Meat in bread with hot sauce, salad and onions. Anything can taste great, as long as you’re eating it with your friends.

I have to pack, and tomorrow I have to find my way to the bus station. It is always stressful with things like that and I don’t know if I will be able to sleep very well. Even though I really need it. I’ve been taking it really easy today, but still I’m exhausted. Luckily, my stay in Belgrade will probably be different – spending time with Hanna and Kirke, and staying in one place for five nights.