Slow start to the day as I made some oats in the kitchen and chatted with people. I met a nice Irish girl (Julie) who's leaving Belgrade tonight to do the same overnight train to Montenegro that I'm planning to take, so we decided to collaborate on booking tickets. The random woman I emailed the previous night put me in contact with some other random woman who got back to me and led me on for some time before realizing that she couldn't help me after all. As such, we decided the only option was to show up in person at the train station and book them there. Julie had been complaining about an annoying English guy who'd been following her around and I feared that this sounded familiar - sure enough, we ran into him on the way out and it was the same annoying English guy from Vienna who'd been hounding the Kiwi.

Belgrade has no metro system; it's rather infamous for being the largest city in Europe that doesn't have one. Supposedly one is coming in the next decade or so, but I remain skeptical. This means that navigating the city is more difficult than it should be and you end up being very dependant on busses. None of the Google Maps suggestions were especially fast given that the train station was only a few miles away, but we had no choice and picked one of the nearby bus stops to leave from. We waited for quite a while before concluding that the bus wasn't coming that way - it wasn't listed on the stop's signage as being one of the supported routes, but we saw a few that did stop and also weren't shown so that didn't seem to mean much of anything. We pivoted to a different route that left from only a few hundred feet away, but that bus wasn't coming either. Google thought both of the routes we were looking to catch would run every 5 minutes or so, and all the routes we did see passing by were coming at least that frequently. The "41л" bus route became something of a meme as we joked about its lack of punctuality. We were about to give up after about 30-40 minutes of neither of these 5 minute busses showing up, when three 41л finally arrived at the same time. I assume there was an accident or some other issue on the route that caused them to backup. It really wasn't such a harrowing experience, but having company for this whole thing made it much more enjoyable than it would've been otherwise.

We got to the the train station smoothly from there. Unfortunately, none of the actual ticket booth workers spoke English, so we had to go to someone from the info desk and she wrote us sticky notes describing what we needed in Serbian. Interestingly, she wrote in Latin characters. I've noticed that in general, nobody except the government seems to use Cyrillic around here. No businesses I've seen thus far have been branded in any form of Cyrillic, nor have menus or billboards or products in stores. Seems like there might be a difference between what the government wants people to do and what the people want for themselves. Anyway, we eventually got the train tickets sorted out. I have a 6 bed shared room Wednesday night.

Back at the hostel, we cooked some dinner before Julie left for the station again to get her train, by taxi this time. A nice American guy gave us some Montenegro advice and the consensus seems to be to avoid the capital, Podgorica, and go straight to the coast. As such, she and I are going to do the same route of taking a bus from there straight to Kotor, which is supposed to be incredibly beautiful. We might overlap for a day, but she's got to get down to Greece by Saturday for work so I doubt it. I hung out in the common room for a while with various other figures but never really felt a connection with any of them. Annoying English guy showed up and I took immense satisfaction in beating him in chess. He's not all bad, honestly, and is capable of being kind enough. He's just got absolutely zero social awareness and gets very drunk constantly which really doesn't help matters. The cat was here again and I guess she's a stowaway - apparently the owner doesn't want a cat living in the hostel, but all the staff and guests like her so she never has any trouble gaining entry when she wants. Every few hours she'll get dragged outside so they can save face if the owner happens to come through. I went to bed without going out again, so I still haven't seen much of Belgrade - it seems ok but not that exciting, and still very air polluted (even if not quite as bad as Sarajevo).