Here we are in Belgrade...

And it's warm, finally. We were happy this morning that a sprinkle of rain cooled the air quite a bit. I am happy that Belgrade possesses Internet cafes with English keyboards that let me access my e-mail. (And the towers even have a USB port, but unfortunately I've got no pictures with me to upload.)

Ever since arriving in Croatia (where we stayed in Vukovar, famous for being the first town destroyed in the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s)we have been treated to varying explanations for just what caused the Former Yugoslavia to implode. In Croatia, the basic answer is: Serbia! In Serbia: many conspiracy theories, presented by people who speak impeccable English.

Especially in Belgrade one gets the feeling that no one has gotten over the Tito era, when a Yugoslav passport would take you almost anywhere and socialism worked reasonably well. Now Serbs, alone of all the other ex-Yugoslavs, have to get a visa for almost anywhere they want to travel, and the local joke about medical care is that it isn't free, it isn't medical, and they don't care.

We sail in and out of these places on a luxurious hotel ship on which we have 5-star accommodations no matter what the local situation. It's easy to feel a complete disconnect from the passing scene, even more than when you are traveling by local transport and staying in hotels.

Late yesterday afternoon we moored in Novi Sad, Serbia, and after dinner on the ship the customs permitted us to walk around the town a bit. We had to take passports with us (same thing today,) a sure way to feel you are in a different country.

There isn't quite so much football (soccer of course) madness here as we encountered last week. UEFA European championships are being played out all over Europe, and in Prague, Salzburg, and Vienna we ran into hordes of fans.

Vienna was particularly football-mad. In the shops we saw tortes decorated to look like soccer balls, and some entirely unexpected places (buildings along the Ringstrasse, for examle) had piles of soccer balls as decor. Most extreme things were the bushes in the Stadt Park, trimmed and tinted to look like soccer balls, and the giant cutouts of soccer players applied to the support beams of the huge ferris wheel in the Praterstern.