Our time with him and his brother was great. We made jokes, cooked food, shared recipes, and learned about Serbia. Over the next couple of days we spent a lot of time together.
One of the buildings bombed by NATO during the Kosovo War. There are many buildings in the center of Beograd that have not be demolished or repaired from damage during those bombings.
On the second day in Beograd our host asked us if we wanted to go visit his hometown in the south of Serbia. We thought this would be a great adventure, so we all jumped in our car. A few kilometers from his home we stopped in another village to see a friend of his. His friend was the manager of a cave. Since our host was so close with this friend we were offered the opportunity to take a cave tour when normally it would be closed. So, without any fee, the four of us went to the cave.
We only spent one night in this town with our host. We were running out of time, and we needed to move on. We left our host with his family and headed back up north. We stopped in Novi Sad and then continued on to Subotica where our next host was.
As we entered Subotica we got caught in a speed trap. It became a huge ordeal for us, because to prevent us from leaving the country without paying the piddly fine, they police took my passport. It took us all evening and part of the next day to get it back.
The young man we stayed with there considered himself ethnically Hungarian (an apparently common thing in the north of Serbia). Before the First World War this city was part of the Austral-Hungarian Empire. After the war it was taken by Serbia and the other Slavic kingdoms to the south. This man's family had been in that city since before World War One, spoke Hungarian in their household, and with recent political acknowledgement held special rights to Hungarian nationality.
