BELGRADE: A look through the rear-view mirror

Whatever Belgrade presents to you, coming from a protected globalised society with options, experience, resources and unhindered believe in your freedom to experiment and build your future, is a mosaic of half-truths and mirrors designed to shield from you the core of its true identity. It is a city-soul, forgotten in self-imposed isolation, unique in experience and full of wonder, characters and raw life.

It would be inaccurate to say that it is in any way a deliberate construct of malicious intention, rather a mass-subconscious mechanism, half consciously supported but only truly understood by those who come with an open mind, privileged by acceptance and naively confident enough to demand the experience.

Times were when boarding at Heathrow would be the start of this tale, but gone now are the long schleps to the farthest, darkest gates of Heathrow’s hinterland, gone is the freedom to smoke en route and mostly gone are the sour-faced, uber-nanny 'hostesses' guarding the business toilets against economy class insurgency. Most impressively though, no more Jokes About Time, the unofficial description for the national airline's 70's style JAT monocle.

Flying into Belgrade airport, the indicators of the experience ahead begin and without forewarning, you will undoubtedly miss your chance to comprehend their significance. As you arc across the flat planes to the west of Belgrade on your final approach you can't help but take in the geometric nature of agricultural boundaries, transport routes, canals and thoroughfares and may be forgiven for thinking the Romans/Germans/Russians have been here - which in fact they have, along with over 400 other ambivalent regimes in the last 2000 years, but more about later.

Lost in idle speculation of the surrounding features is no protection however against the rude awakening you experience as a combination of low altitude approach and vicious Kosava cross-winds conspire to constrict anything about your person which is prone to such action. Statistically, the chances of running into Kosava during landing is 4 in 30 but practically, once in forever will suffice for the experience. A quick glance around at your obviously amused local flight companions however forces one to regain ones composure just in time to experience the smoothest touch-down you're ever likely to participate in.

Amidst the inevitable round of applause and somewhere two-thirds of the way through thinking "wow, what a smooth landing", drama returns by way of a thoroughly good seat belt test as the brakes are applied with a ferociousness that can only mean there's a problem. Welcome to your first introduction to the complex decisions taken through necessity to accommodate two factors you will come to understand in Belgrade: economic reality of the region and aesthetic rather than functional construction planning. Here's how it works: Belgrade runway is connected to the terminal gates by a series of taxi-ways that are laid out with minimalist brutality (nothing wrong there, it's an airport after all). Unfortunately the minimalist approach was extended to reduce the number of taxi- way options to rather fewer than needed. Therefore, it is common for pilots to choose the first taxi-way rather than continue to the end of the runway and take the next one - after all, aren’t aircraft brakes considerably cheaper to replace than aviation fuel?!

The airport is your inauguration to this city’s misdirection. The barely 80’s style arrival hall, the rubbery pimpled flooring, ghost-empty souvenir boutiques, the embedded aroma of stale cigarettes and bad coffee, mall-formed snaking queues moving at a snails pace through passport control, an assumption of your guilt written on the faces of spotty customs and border officials down to the one moving conveyor belt spilling out luggage (eventually) of all possible size variants including the obligatory plastic blue/red faux tartan laundry bags common to the laundromats of London’s inner-city high-rises – everything conspires to present your coddled western mind with one singular impression: what on earth possessed me to come here???

But something else begins to permeate through the mist which revitalises your interest and offers a hint at one of the apparent delights in store for you in this humming metropolis – the billboards describing modern mobile phone offerings, the hitherto unnoticed flight companions, even the airport attendants directing to you connecting flights to such exotic destinations as Bosnia & Macedonia – “wait a minute” I hear you say, “is it me, or is there a considerably higher-than-average proportion of babes in this city?”

For more of this tale, please visit my blog at: http://blog.myspace.com/shurford