Saturday 7911

today we got to visit novi sad, it was crammed with european 20somethings at the Exit festival (http://www.exitfest.org/), it was a pretty city,

before getting there we stopped at Karlovci (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sremski_Karlovci), which the old seat of the Serbian Patriarch, during the the austrohungarian times, but since the seat was moved to Belgrade the town has clearly lost... its appeal, now it is just a palace for the Bishop of the Srem region of Vojvodina. we also had the wonderful experience of wandering into a baptism.

considering i just learned i have followers beyond my parents, and the internet doesnt yet have a sarcasm font, you should know that i find it very uncomfortable for me, and uncouth in general to roll into a place of worship as a tourist and start taking pictures of shit going on. so it took some flexing of my morals to get you all that wondrous photo.

but yeah Novi Sad was cool the city is home to the largest catholic church in the province.

we also found our way to the beach, on the Danube river, the beach was full of people my age enjoying the stupidly hot weather (some 37+ degrees C)and music and whatnots, as well as families with chitlens running around getting yelled at by the lifeguards, i guess thats the way it goes everywhere. though on the lifeguard note, not a big fan of the blowing your whistle everytime you need to tell the little kid not to go too deep, i was ready to set up for compressions and send someone to the gate.

Novi Sad itself, and Karlovci have a very different feel than Belgrade, i mean besides the obvious lack of cosmopolitan-ness in the smaller cities, there was an architectural and physical difference as well. i guess that could be attributed to the fact that those cities werent bombed to shit on multiple occasions, and that they were inside the Austro-Hungarian empire, while Belgrade wasnt, so they had some Baroque, western europe-y buildings, while Belgrade is full of modern, and Soviet era ugliness.

dont get my wrong Belgrade is cool, and the few government buildings that have their late 18th/early19th century architecture are cool and characterful, but there is alot of the large oppressive buildings the commie leadership loved to make.

im sure as we travel more, and especially out of this part of Serbia i will have more contrast to talk about.

i will now go back to my room where there is no internet to distract me from my paper writing