Belgrade Day 3: The River & Other Things

This is the start of… something.

I’ve been thinking of getting rid of this journal on my site, as it’s been a long time since I’ve written anything I’ve felt good about publishing. I don’t blog consistently enough, and I haven’t for months. So much so that I often find myself wondering why I have one at all.

I started blogging in 1997 and haven’t stopped, because I enjoy blogging. At least, I did until it became all about branding, content strategy, and hits and that kind of stuff. Flemming and I run a website business, so this is a bit of work bleeding into pleasure.

I miss blogging being fun, and about writing. In a bid to bring that back, I’m going to try something different, and blog every day…. with try being the key operator. I love the manner in which Daniel Milnor does a daily journal post, with his characteristic, effortless acuity. It has been a long time since I’ve attempted to make coherent, the rubbish that bumbles around in my head, and I am unable to any longer.

It’s past time I got off my proverbial arse. With something as small as writing about one thing a day, with no other goal than to write. Freely.

Day 3 in Belgrade seems a fabulous time to start. It will be disjointed and make no sense, in keeping with just about anything I begin. What the hell.

We’re staying in a little apartment a street away from Kalemegdan Park, which is home to the impressive Belgrade Fortress. It, in turn, sits at the confluence of the Sava and Danube rivers. There are foot/cycle paths along the banks of the river that make it quite lovely to walk along when it’s sunny, like it was today. It was cold and rainy all of yesterday, and I was so tired on our first day here, I’m not sure if the warmth I remember was that of Copenhagen’s or Belgrade’s. Either way, after yesterday’s deluge, this day’s abrupt sunshine was welcome.

The building in the distance above, is a sports and recreation center. As far as we could tell from below, the suspended portion with the glass windows is a really big gym. You can hit the treadmill and watch spring sparkling off the Sava and Danube while you get buff.

I had a moment of holy-crap-I’m-here when we sat down with our one-buck ice cream cones on the bank of the Danube this afternoon. When I was growing up, Europe was always that fabled land of castles and magical names (like the Danube) that I’d never get to. It was a rich-people destination, you know, the kind of people who were clever, made squillions, went skiing, ate in fancy restaurants, wore designer clothes and bought fun stuff with money. The kind of people that weren’t me.

Yet here I am, eating a non-fancy ice cream, being cheap ass… on the banks of the Danube. Not so long ago, if you told me I’d be tripping around Europe / the world on a fraction of my living cost in Australia, I’d assume were smoking something eye watering.

But, here I am.