I was only in Belgrade overnight between trains, staying at pleasant place called the Star Hostel, fronting on a parking lot behind a bank downtown.

The Star Hostel has dreams of being a chain of hotels but at the moment they are somebody's house and it feels like that. The computer is in the living room and you sleep in bedrooms and talk to people who have much more time to spend traveling than you do. This is a feature of reasonable lodging. Only in five star places do you meet the jet-setters who are on their way to Beirut tonight for a conference after spending the afternoon in Moscow going to three UNESCO World Heritage Sites, a Robert Wilson opera, and a molecular restaurant. Hostel customers pride themselves on the languor of their schedule almost as much as on the number of email addresses of girls from their home town they have collected; all the while avoiding cathedrals, museums, or pretty much any other thing that they couldn't do in San Diego. And they always win. If you mention to some young guy in a hostel that you've been traveling for eight months, he will be like "rad, dude. i've been out for four generations. i met this lady from solano beach..."

His name is Dylan and he was staying at the Star Hostel. He has been traveling approximately since the Crusades.

The Kalemegdan fortress in Belgrade. These are bombs. There's a nervous martial air about the culture --- Clinton was only the latest brigand to assault them. There hasn't really been a time when the Balkans weren't under attack: from each other when invaders were short. Or nasty, or brutish. Even tourist photo albums are under attack (in case anyone could possibly wonder why there isn't a "comments" page on this website. I don't think I have the wit to defend myself against all at once the unanswerable yet mutually exclusive arguments of the Iron Guard, Christ, and the Kosovo Liberation Army.)

The weather was fally and gloomy when I got there. Let's skip these pictures.

These two gypsy kids were pretty hot. Dave unfortunately has the camera that records sounds.

The next day was sunnier. Here is the Knez Mihailova, the main mall of Belgrade.

Americans don't run all of these ads, or maybe I don't go to the right malls.

Everyone is the same size on television, or on hoardings. There were better examples of poster juxtapositions but maybe they weren't in the right light or something.

A weathered communist-era building.

The Saborna Church.

This is a decoration on the outside of the church. As usual, you can't take pictures inside. There is a sort of consistency to the Mosques in this regard; not only do they forbid the cameras of the unbelievers, they blow up your odd Buddhas of Bamiyan. Always in pairs. Not only the ACLU but the CIA should take the symmetrical destruction of art as a portent. "There where they burn books, they will burn people in the end," as Heine said. But Theodora went to all the trouble of deposing and flogging John Hylilas, and for what? The iconodules victorious forbid you to take photos of their stupid icons. Intellectual property lawyers take note — it's all happening again.

A gate to the Kalemegdan fortress.

There is a man playing guitar in this tunnel. I'm not sure I can coax his image out with Photoshop. You may just have to imagine him.

This camera crew was trying to embed itself with a couple of groundskeepers. I would.

This statue is a lady mourning the loss of her sons in war. If she were really unhappy she would try harder not to look like an outtake from . The bird is doing what birds always do.

This lad, on the other hand, looks straight out of "Rent Collection Courtyard". I tried to go see "Rent Collection Courtyard" in the outskirts of Chengdu in 1986, but the Deng government had already closed it to the public by then as being too embarrassing a recollection of the capitalist road that he was taking. If this had been a Red Guard sculpture, the fisherman would have been throttling a kulak. The Slavs are more symbolic than Maoists; I presume this is Satan or a stand-in for same. I can't determine from "Google" whether RCC has been re-opened to the public, whether two decades of tourist irony and dollars have stilled the comparative spirit in the Chinese artistic peasantry. I do know that the top two sponsored hits on my search were "Landlording Made Easy" and a Rent Recovery Service - Get Your Rent Collected Now!

A step up from being remembered solely by your hat, but the pedestal too closely resembles a pike, for modern tastes.

Serbian naked guys are more threatening than Slovenian naked guys, in this small sample.

More graffiti. He looks Indian.

The birds have also been here.

Fall sun.

Playing chess on the fortress grounds.

Love and newspapers in the air.

A row of souvenir stands.

Selling lace along the castle wall.

A view of the Danube. I don't know which of these bridges were destroyed by NATO bombs but they seem OK now.

There were certainly aesthetic reasons to oppose Milosevic. Nothing in any city should ever remind you of a product code. And especially nothing in a Nuremberg rally.

Sun and castle, resumed.

A row of luminaries.

The sun shines even on the decommissioned tanks.

On to Romania