Easter weekend a few of us – Steve, Adrian, Shobhit, and myself – from the Dunabogdány Cricket Club headed down to Belgrade to play in a Twenty20 (an abbreviated version of the game that I like, because it's shorter) tournament being held by our cricket-mad Serbian neighbors.
Serbia being on an Orthodox calendar, Easter is usually celebrated on a different weekend than it is in Hungary. This weekend, however, the holiday happened to coincide in both countries and so Monday would be a day off. This “Easter Monday” concept rather surprised me when I first moved to Europe, but then I crunched the numbers and realized that, yes indeed, if you sit in a tomb for three days after being crucified on a Friday, then it is indeed on a Monday that you rise from the dead, not Sunday. The US government must have hastened the Resurrection in the name of national productivity.
This was my second visit to Belgrade, having gone there for a few days with Moni last year. It’s really one of my favorite cities with a great party vibe. Of course, it was a bit sedate this holiday weekend, by Belgrade standards, but at least the air was better from the reduced traffic.
So, after a long train ride down – it’s less than 400 km, but the train runs as a local on both sides of the border, so it takes a while to get there – and paying the extortionate taxi charge from the Belgrade train station – just like in Jordan, these guys know they have you over a barrel – we found our hostel on one of the center’s historical streets.
I had never been in one of these backpacker’s hostels where you stay in a dorm room with other strangers, and felt a bit too old for it at first. We thought we might have the room to ourselves, but the remaining three beds were occupied – with friendly, er, young people from various countries. Anyway, the whole experience was tolerable enough but I think I prefer meeting people when they are awake. Probably a lot of fun if you are in your 20s and backpacking around, and very cheap. This was my first trip in a number of years that came in under budget.
The other guys not having been to Belgrade before and my being team Yugoslavia expert, I took them to look at the downtown and Kalemegdan Fortress, and they paid such careful attention to my history lesson that I bought them a beer afterwards. This is the dramatic centerpiece of the city, perched up on a hill at the confluence of the Sava and Danube, and made a favorable impression on my companions. Actually, we had originally thought that we would be playing in the sports fields underneath its ramparts, as this is what the Serbian cricket website said. But later it emerged that they had stopped playing there, because it was a crowded park and there was too much danger of plunking a kid or a dog with a cricket ball. Instead we would be playing on a soccer field in a large park on the outskirts of the city.
I found an old restaurant from my last visit that could accommodate Steve and my craving for cevapcici and pleszkavica, Adrian’s sudden craving for a wiener schnitzel which probably hit him the moment we crossed out of the former Habsburg Empire, and Shobhit’s constant craving for rabbit food. Then our Serb hosts showed up. These guys would proceed to take wonderful care of us over the weekend, showering us with legendary Serbian hospitality. We spent the latter part of the evening in one of their local pub before retiring to our bunks at a not-too-unreasonable hour.
The next morning, after a bit more wandering around Belgrade, it was off to our match. Steve had already left to umpire the first match. The tournament consisted of four teams. Two Serbian sides, a team that flew in all the way from Scotland, and although we had been joined by two other players from Hungary, we were still only half a team and would play together with another half-team from Slovenia. Steve thought we should call it the "Sluggery", which I thought was clever, even if no one else did.
The Scots had lost to one of the Serbian teams in the morning, and we then proceeded to take on the other Serbian team and get beaten quite badly. They plowed through the heart of our order fairly quickly, which meant that I got a bat, but as usual, I had to face the other team’s fastest bowler against whom I am invariably helpless and got out after a couple balls. The next day we would be playing the Scots for the wooden spoon and the two Serbs teams would duke it out afterwards for the championship.
But we regrouped at the evening social held at an Irish pub in the part of town where I had stayed on my last visit and got to know our Slovenian teammates a bit better. Also one of the Serb history students answered some questions I had been dying to know for years about the assassination of King Alexander Obrenovitch and Queen Draga. (Their bodies were thrown out of the window on the park side, not the street side, but it wasn’t the Old Palace that is there now. It was an Older Palace that had been demolished to make way for the Old Palace.)
Now that we were a properly lubricated organization, we thought we had a good chance with the Scots. Whereas both Serbian teams seemed to be made up of students, both locals and ex-pats, in the flower of youth, the average age and general physical fitness of the Scottish team was probably closer to our own. I didn’t do much in this match, batting too low in the order to get a bat and not having anyone hit anything my way in the field, so spent most of the time daydreaming. Shobhit was really the star of the show, if not a slightly overzealous one, with excellent batting, bowling, a beautiful one-handed catch up in the air right off the bat. Below we have Scots and Sluggery posing together after the match in the spirit of the brotherhood of cricket.
For lunch our new Serb friends served up an entire roast pig, fresh from the butcher and carved up in several boxes of delicious crispy succulent goodness.
A noble end: the beast can rest proudly. Some of the Serbs had been avoiding meat for several days before Easter, and now busily began making up for it. The Serbs are great meat lovers, even more than the Hungarians or other carnivorous neighbors in the region. Also, they take their Easter eggs seriously. We were offered these nicely painted eggs several times over the course of the day, once after buying a couple rolls at a bakery. One egg would pretty much decimate the profit margin on that, I think.
After lunch we settled down to watch the all-Serbia championship, cheering for the team that didn’t beat us the previous day. They got beat though, in an unusually low-scoring match. A family of English tourists or ex-pats out for an excursion wandered by during the match, asking whether they had stumbled on a mirage.
At the end, the Slovenians had to head home and many of the Serbs had family obligations to run home to for Easter, but the rest of us sat down for refreshments at a nearby café.
I was seated in a cluster of friendly Scots from Edinburgh, at the camera end of the table. At first I found it a bit difficult to understand them but with the help of the magic potion you see on the table, I could speak Scottish too. Since conversation seemed to revolve around sports, I got up the nerve to ask a question I had asked English sports fan before, but never a Scot: If countries like Belgium and Spain, which consider themselves to be composed of separate “nations” can field a single team for international soccer, wouldn’t the entire UK maximize its chances at success by abandoning the home nations approach and instead get all of its best players all on one team?
“Ooh Noo,” they answered, shaking their heads slowly, “That wouldn’t do at all. If we did that, then our best player would be fetching the water, the one from the Northern or Ireland would be giving the massages. It would be the end of Scottish football.”
So, basically, colonial resentment has hardened too much for attitudes to change anytime soon. Come to think of it, I wouldn’t want the English national football side playing for me either.
Goodbyes all around, it was back to the railroad station for the overnight train back home, where Adrian learned that Hungarian border guards do not accept crumpled tourist maps of Belgrade as identification valid for international travel and Steve showed all of us how to sleep with a half-full beer bottle in your hand without letting it fall. We, for our part, look forward to hosting everyone in Budapest soon.
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