10 - Arrived Alive!

The rest of our journey went much better. We had a nine hour flight to Zurich with a stop over of 6 hours and then we flew to Belgrade. We both slept well on the plane but were still very tired by the time we were flying to Belgrade.


Our impressions of Switzerland and Belgrade were as follows:


Hermie:
Switzerland is very beautiful (the little part a saw of it - the airport and its surroundings). But my main impression is that everything is extremely expensive! The Swiss-German language is actually very similar in a lot of its words to Afrikaans and with my little bit of German I actually found it quite easy to understand a lot of it. For Belgrade I didn't really know what to expect. In places it looked a lot like the Townships back home (except for the shacks). It is a odd mixture of buildings and areas that are extremely run down and brand new very modern buildings and then, of course the very old beautiful historic buildings. Very interesting. ;->

Adan:
Man! 10 hours in cattle class ain't nice - no matter how you slice it. ;-) The food on Swiss is also a bit ho-hum. Except the choccies!! They rock! We pulled into Zurich at 06:05 local time and it was dark, cold and wet. It brightened up quite a bit - surrounding hills a nice green. (When we left for Belgrade - I had a window seat - I was impressed with the town layout. Very nicely integrated with the greenery/nature. Everything seemed crisp and in its place.) For future reference, the best value meal at Zurich Airport is the Long Cheese Burger Meal at Burger King - CHF 12.00 for a 8" stretched burger, mayo, fries and a coke. Thats about R 140 for 2 burgers. Man, we even licked the paper towels to "optimize our investment"! ;-))

As for Belgrade... we saw blurry impressions of interesting bits, thanks to our Taxi driver, Bogie (Serbian for Bogart). The trip from the Nikola Tesla (famous physicist and magnet fundi) Airport to the Best Western "M" Hotel (18 Km) cost us 2000 Dinars per couple. Thats about R 230.00. But it was worth it. In the 10 minutes it took to cover the distance, we learned about the new Belgradska stadion, the bridge over the river Sava, the war and the bombs the americans dropped. We even know there are 2 million Belgrads. Or Belgradians. We are not sure what to call them yet. We do know, however to say Dobre Dan, when you see one. That means "Good Morning". Hlava means Thank you. As you can probably gather, we have thanked a couple of Belgradians for the Good Morning. ;-) The best for last: We have established, beyond any doubt, that passing in the emergency lane is not restricted to South Africa. Yes, good 'ol Bogie, spent many minutes there, pulling many really cool passing manouveres in his Champagne coloured 1990 Mercedes 2.3i (W124 series).