An encounter

Went for a walk on Saturday in Kalemegdan Park. I stopped to take a few photos from this vantage point overlooking New Belgrade in the distance and the confluence of the Danube and Sava Rivers when this young woman approached me and asked me to take her photo. I obliged, we got into a conversation, whereupon she complimented me on my English (smile) and was amused by the irony of running across the only person nearby who was a native speaker. Her name is Lixiu, and she's from China. Lixiu (LEE-hyoo) is here on a business trip, and loves to walk. She walked all the way over from New Belgrade from near the tower you can see in the distance. We walked on, and since she was so keen on seeing more of Belgrade, I promised to take her tomorrow to see the...Chinese Market! Stay tuned!

Sunday Bridges--

Another view of one of the bridges leading into the fortress at Kalemegdan, over what used to be a moat.

See more bridges at Louis La Vache's Sunday Bridges.

Reflections Weekend--no visits...

The things you notice when you look up. I never realized there was an embassy for the Most Serene Republic of San Marino here in Belgrade. San Marino is a tiny place, just about 61 square kilometers, with a population of about 30,000. Intrigued, I checked my Neocounter...nobody in San Marino has visited...hmmm...maybe I should pay the embassy a visit!

Those are some buildings on Knez Mihailova, Belgrade's pedestrian street, that you see reflected in the window.

Check out James' Reflections Weekend.

SKYWATCH ---going up

There may be an economic crisis, but new buildings are sprouting up all over Belgrade. In the background here you can see the rooftops of older buildings (plus, of course a satellite dish...) and the hook from a crane on an adjacent construction site. Office building, apartments? I'll wait and see.

Check out more skies on SKYWATCH.

Ow.

Yesterday I said you could tell a lot about a person by his or her hands. You can see here that my friend likes to bake, but who, like many of us rushed wives, is sometimes not careful. This blister is the result of a steam burn she got when removing a casserole dish from the oven....

She told me that she immediately ran cold water over the burn, then plunged her thumb into raw egg white and held it there (two eggs, I believe....) for 15 minutes, which soothed the pain. She says that if she had remembered to IMMEDIATELY plunge the thumb into the egg whites, she would have had NO blister....that's what Serbian folk medicine says...

ABC WEDNESDAY "H" is for "hands"

You can tell a lot about people by their hands. This hand belongs to my new daughter-in-law's father and I photographed it on the sly during a dinner party shortly after my son's recent wedding.

See other H's ABC WEDNESDAY.

Posterity

Have you ever carved your initials and maybe even those of your loved one on a tree or wall? If so, are they still there? I see '60' and '54' on this wall in Kalemegdan Park, so I'm assuming that's 1960 and 1954, which means some of these names and initials have been here for a while...for posterity.

Yankee, go home! (Who, me?)

No offense taken, of course, since the writer is undoubtedly a member of the Serbian Radical Party, a far-right, ultra-nationalistic party founded in 1991, whose leader, Vojislav Šešelj (name in Cyrillic painted on the left of the wall), has been under trial in The Hague for war crimes since 1993.

And besides, after 33 years here, I am home.

Sunday Bridges--before and after

One day fresh paint, next day (or almost) graffiti. This is the fate of many walls in big cities, like this one under a bridge over a highway in Belgrade.

Check out Louis La Vache's Sunday Bridges at his blog!

Reflections weekend-Tesla's ashes

A few weeks ago I visited the Nikola Tesla Museum in downtown Belgrade. A place worth visiting if you come; tours are scheduled in English.

The gold ball above, so they say, houses Nikola Tesla's ashes.

See Newtown Daily Photo for other reflections!

SKYWATCH--Sand martin nests

See the nests?

You won't if you're looking in the trees. These holes in the sandy soil of Deliblato Sands are sand martin nests. Sand martins are members of the swallow family. Deliblato Sands (Deliblatska Peščara) make up the largest sandy terrain in Europe, and were once part of a vast prehistoric desert. Part of the Sands is only about an hour out of Belgrade.

See other skies on SKYWATCH.