Serbia - see Beautiful Belgrade and more sights, North and South

Map of Serbia.

As the map shows, Hungary is to the north of Serbia. Romania and Bulgaria are to the East. The north is at the top of the map.
You would think that having north at the top of the map would be standard and obvious but it isn't. We drove around Vienna arguing. The driver looked at the road signs and said, "We must go right. I looked at the map and said, "No we go left." Finally, the driver pulled in and grbbed the map. He looked at the arrow and found that south was at the top of the page!

We also have a train line running West-East and East-West in London, called the Central line. On some trains the maps are designed so that the maps on each side of the train are mirror images, showing you the direction of travel, with the front of the train at one end of the map. Some people think that is logical. Others find it confusing. As the Irish joke goes, "If I were you, I wouldn't start from here!"

BELGRADE



























































Belgrade Fortress. Gardoš Tower. (Gardoš rhyming with gosh!)


Belgrade -  (the name means white city) is the capital of Serbia.
Belgrade was previously the capital of Yugoslavia. The river Danube flows into Belgrade.

Novi Sad (the name means new plant) is north of Belgrade.

You are likely to fly into Serbia towards the south at Niš (pronounced like niche or neesh). If you keep looking at the twon and airport name, it is easy to remember that the bowl shape on top of the s - š - is pronounced SH.

To type it, the lower case s3, hold down the s key on a laptop keyboard. You are offered a choice of three types of s: ß ś š . You get them by holding down the s with your left hand and simultaneously tapping the keys 1 or 2 or 3. If you are typing a lot of Serbian words and placenames, it's easy to remeber that s3 is three. You hold the s down with your second finger of your left hand and reach over and tap three with your second finger of your right hand and there it is, bingo,  š! Niš.





Žiča Monastery
Exterior of žiča Monastery. Photo from Wikimedia. Photo by Vera Bukvic.

This place is a photographer's dream.
It's also a typist's nightmare. I had trouble typing the capital Z with the diacritic above. So I copied it, cut and paste, from somewhere online.

The monastery is near Kraljevo. Where's that? Looking back at the map of Serbia, you can see that Kraljevo is south of Belgrade, in fact half way between Serbia and Niš.

Medieval Castle in Golubac. Photo from Wikitravel.

Author
Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer, author and speaker.