The last escape

So this post was supposed to be up at the end of March, but I got stuck with a bunch of stuff to do, so with a little delay, here is my blog from the 25th of March.

Some people have a list in their minds what do they want to do before they die. I had something similar, but with a different deadline; until I turn 18.

Since I am not the type of person who likes to throw massive birthday parties, I thought that it would still be nice to make something memorable before I set foot in the (in my opinion) boring world of the adults.

The outcome was that my friend Annabella and I decided to make a jaunt to Belgrade, the capital of Serbia.

It was a beautiful spring day and I was so excited about the trip that I wasn’t paying enough attention what time it was so in the end I had to hurry up to make it on time. Naturally, I didn’t and Annabella was not happy. Given the circumstances, I don’t blame her. To make the situation  even worse, when we arrived to the station we bumped into an enormous crowd, with nervous people standing in the lines, all waiting to buy their tickets. That was 10 minutes before our train was supposed to leave. On top of that, we didn’t know how much money  to prepare so we lost two precious minutes on adding and recounting to pay for our tickets and ended up running like hell. In the end we managed to catch our train in the last thirty seconds before it was about to leave.

When we arrived to the capital we agreed to go to the Kalemegdan for a walk. We were even proud of ourselves that we managed to find a sterling way on Google maps that would lead us directly to the fortress.  We thought that from now on everything would go smoothly.  And of course we were wrong. 

During our forty minute walk we were lucky enough to go through some of the most suspicious parts of the city: a bunch of narrow streets with a lot of street art, with only trucks passing by, a Lebanese rugby team whose players were hard to get rid of and a gang whose members couldn’t stop looking at our phones. By the time we reached the quay we were traumatized for life.

  

After  finishing  our photo session at the fortress, we continued to the main street of Belgrade, Knez Mihailova. There we took a short break and drank some coffee/tea. Then we went to meet a friend of mine who showed us some hidden  parts of the city, including a photo gallery in a building that was in such bad shape that we’ve nearly mistaken it for an abandoned house.

Then came my favourite time of the day. Lunch! After saying goodbye to my friend we decided to go to a mexican restaurant and eat some burritos. This was my first time eating this kind of food and I must say that I was delighted! Except the part where I accidentally put some spicy toppings and spent the rest of the day drinking water like a camel, but at least  Annabella had fun laughing at my horrifying face expressions.

The next stop was meeting Ella, the girl whose parents are supercool yet, she is somehow always grounded. This time we was not different either. When we left the mexican restaurant she called us to  say that she will arrive to the center in half an hour, but fifteen minutes later she informed us that she had a fight with her parents and that she couldn’t cut loose for an hour at least. That left us with a major problem because is was getting colder and we were not up to walking around the block in the freezing sunset.

 

Just when we were about to give up on searching for a place to warm up, we bumped into  a girl on the street who was selling tickets to a Salvador Dali exhibition. The next thing I recall is that we were up in the gallery looking at Dali’s illustrations for Dante’s 'Divine Comedy'. Both Annabella and I were delighted and we were truly happy that things turned out this way.

We eventually managed to say hi to Ella, and while waiting for the train to a couple of friends of mine with who I have been hanging out in the summer for years now.

With this adventure I closed the official part of my childhood but at the end of the day I realized that years don’t define our maturity and that it impossible for me to  change anytime soon. I came to the conclusion that I will probably stay awkward for the rest of my life and I have made peace with that. And once for all I promised myself  never to join the (again, in my opinion) extremely boring, grey and, above all, complicated adult world.