Serbia, Belgrade: Museum Night

Met up with my Spanish friend Alvar at the statue of the man with the horse, he bought his ticket to museum night, and we were off! Just kidding, massive downpour, let's grab coffee and discuss how impressed and positively surprised we are with Belgrade for an hour until it passes.

Ethnographical museum - showing the historical dress, types of housing, select tools or kitchen products, and general way of life of Serbian people. For example, most houses and furniture are made out of wood, except for those along the shore, made out of stone. Shore? Oh, what is now Croatia / Montenegro. I guess this is a bit of a broader people's history.... Serbia is apparently only an independant republic since 2006. There were the usual farming / typical early community displays, but one thing I did find cool was the mini display on olive growing and cultivating.

Theatre museum - fairly small, not very many cool costumes.

National bank of Serbia - beautiful interior, a station to get your photo taken and printed on a bill, a chart showing the crash of their economy (within 3 months in '93-'94 1 DEM (from Denmark, I think, but not important) went from being worth 1 million dinars to 13 trillion 374 billion dinars. Now I don't pretend to boast an economical understanding, but I'm preeeettttyyy sure that's inflation. Alvar tried to steal the big huge bar of gold on display, then decided against in so we could go downstairs and check out the vaults. Or hide in them since I'm small :)

Random kinda creepy bird museum - enough said.

Military museum - if there's one country with an extensive one of these, it's Serbia. A guy on the train said the Balkan countries were the cause of the 1st and 2md world wars. 1st very true, big tempers. 2nd true?! The display has every sort-of tool from spears that are so old they don't look like spears to swords to cannons all the way to the late 1900s with rifles and bullets as tall as me. They also had really great maps showing changes in territory, but neither map nor accompanying description was in any language even remotely comprehensible to either of us, so alas, less of a historical lesson in this post.

Observatory - as it sounds, but we got to observe the city and the citadel. Cool. Lots of lights. Not as high as Burj Dubai... Haha

Random museum I walked into on my way home - had the muppets! So fun!

Great night, bed time at quaint little cricket hostel came quickly...