Wilting in Beograd

Yesterday I hit a wall; in fact, if it hadn't been for the kind painter, the cafe waiter, and Ratko, I think I might have had a complete meltdown. It's been very hot here in Beograd, Serbia--close to a 100 with humidity. Yesterday I had two appointments scheduled, and the first lady was supposed to drop me off at my next appointment. We were supposed to meet each other in front of a massive hotel; so, I walked around this hotel about three times looking for her.

I was baking in the heat, drenched in sweat, and feeling extremely miserable because there was no pay phone around and I was in a completely different part of Belgrade than I was used to. I had a map, but having a map is not exactly helpful in Belgrade. Why? Because even though Serbian is almost the same as Croatian and Bosnian, they write it with the Cyrillic alphabet. In other words, when you look at the map, you might see a street that looks like this: Lbjinka. When you look up at a street sign, you might see something like this: #@%#L*$. Well, not exactly, but the characters are about as foreign as that.

I finally tried to communicate with some painters that I needed a phone. After much wild hand gesticulating, a painter took me around the hotel again and took me down to a little cafe on the river. Talking animatedly, he seemed convinced that I would begin to understand him. I tried to smile and nod a lot, hoping I was agreeing at the right places in the conversation. He took me up above the cafe to the manager's office and the manager let me use his cell phone. When I found out that the lady had left the hotel at 12:15 after waiting for 15 minutes(because it was so hot). I felt the weight of a whole lot of factors pressing down on me: I did not have much sleep the night before because certain people in my hostel were not practicing good hostel etiquette, I didn't know where I was, this was a very important appointment, I lost my hostel bed for the night and had no place to stay, I was hungry, and the intensity of the heat..all these factors contributed to my incoming meltdown. I was so discouraged that I wanted to sit down and cry. I think the painter saw the look on my face and took me back down to the cafe where he told the cafe waiter to bring me a cold sprite. They wouldn't let me pay for it, and the painter left after shaking my hand.

After riding on a random bus for an hour, I finally was able to figure out how to get back to the main part of Beograd. Dirty, sweaty, hungry, thirsty, I stumbled into my next destination: a small humanitarian organization. I think I might have had a touch of heat exhaustion, so my head was spinning as I sank into the warm hospitality that Bread of Life offered me. I met Ratko, one of the Christians who worked there, and my day got a whole lot better. I related the story of my day to him, and he began giggling so hard that I also began to laugh.

When the sun went down, he gave me a little tour of different sites. He helped me take my luggage to the new hostel, and then took me out for a drink. We walked all over the city and enjoyed the nightlife and I tumbled into bed at 2 a.m. What a day!