Cyrillic for Dummies

First I want to thank you all for your comments, which are funny and engaging and really reassuring. Sorry I have not been good about sending individual emails and postcards, but your presence on the blog has made me very happy. I feel like you are all here with me, laughing at my stories and yelling at me not to hitchike! (oKAY. I only did it because Sam was there; I would never do it alone!)

Today I wandered around Belgrade - it's very, um, urban, and not all that charming. But the people are friendly and helpful. After several tries, I found an adaptor for my computer charger. I told the guy, "You just made my day. Now I can write to my dad again." He seemed to appreciate that.
I also bought a few snacks. Everything in this country costs 50 cents: cup of coffee, pastry, slice of pizza. And I used the free map provided by my hostel to explore a bit. The Nikola Tesla museum was indeed aces, as Andy promised. It's full of model machines he made, operated/demonstrated by the English-speaking guide. Tesla made extraordinary and uncalculable conributions to modern technology, and after wandering through his museum I can confidently say that I still don't understand them one bit. But I saw his ashes; they're in a spherical urn in a spookily-lit room.
I managed to find a few streets that are for pedestrians only, lined with cafes. And at the end of one of them I reached the ethnographic museum, which contained a very charming and thorough display of 19th century Serbian costumes and artifacts from home life. They had the implements needed for several of the major farming industries: corn, grapes, fishing, tobacco, and olives.In the late afternoon I walked up to the park. It was lovely and I'll return there tomorrow to see the old fortress. I was pretty worn out by the end of the day, I think partly because of the walking and mostly because my brain is tired from reading the language. I absolutely love this language; it is so fun to pronounce. I've developed an utter compulsion to read aloud every word I see (Sam spent several days in Sarajevo listening to "Zel-ya-NEET-sa: Spinach pastry. Krom-pee-ROO-sa: Potato pastry. Doh-vih-JEN-ya: goodbye. Mlee-YEH-com: milk. SEER: cheese. VEESH-na: cherry. Bo-ro-NEET-sa: blueberry. Bee-YELL-ee: white. Blash-chee-CHAR-na: Old Town. GAV-ree-lo PRINT-sip: dude who shot Franz Ferdinand and kicked off World War I. ZHEN-ska: woman.")
Here in Belgrade, the word-pronouncing continues, but now it's more challenging because the words are often written in cyrillic. nEKAPA is pronounced PEKARA and means "bakery". And that's just one of the easy ones.
I think if you say it out loud, "pekara" does in fact sound like "bakery," but maybe I've just been here too long.
The baked goods in this country, by the way, are total crap, and I should know because I eat about five of them every day. If you'd like to read about the best loaf of bread in the entire world, go to http://balkanbonanza.blogspot.com for Sam's rhapsodic description. I can't do it justice.

On a final note, I saw a picture of Gavrilo Princip - aforementioned initiator of World War I - and, is it wrong of me to say, homeboy was kind of hot?