To Belgrade, Serbia: Baltic Food (Oh yeah and a conference)

An academic conference brought me to Belgrade, Serbia. My first time in Serbia...Nice! That makes 37 countries visited. The conference, Consortium for Higher Education Researchers (CHER), gathered all of the big-name, up-n-coming, and junior European researchers for a few days of academic sparring, wine drinking, and intellectual bantering. Our hotel was very close to the fortress, the University of Belgrade, and the Knez Mihailova Street pedestrian mall. I did not have the opportunity to do much sightseeing, but managed to enjoy the fortress area which has been developed into a beautiful park area with cafes, basketball courts, and spectacular views overlooking the confluence of two rivers: Sava and Danube.

The highlight for me was the Baltic food--no joke! The food in Serbia is amazing and apparently the food is good throughout the entire Baltic region. As a vegan I was treated to amazing green and bean salads, roasted veggies, roasted red pepper spread, and good bread. YUM! My plate was always stacked full of delicious produce. One night a group of 8 of us went out to a traditional restaurant and luckily a Slovenian woman in our group was also a veg-head. She did the honor of ordering for us and the plates of food just kept coming. We ate family style, passing plates from person to person. Just as all of us were becoming satiated...two BIG plates of meat came. Which meant my fellow veggie eater and I got to polish off the rest of the veggie plates (Nice!) Oh, and the wine in this region is also very GOOD!

Back to the conference! It was good; I presented one of the chapters from my dissertation and received valuable feedback on it. I also caught up with my European colleagues and professors and met a fun group of new faces. A group of us junior researchers attended a pre-conference gathering and so we hung out throughout the conference.

And, one last nerdy thing...the Belgrade airport was named after the Serbian-American inventor Nikola Tesla in 2006. This is the dude known for inventing the electric alternating current and also the dude who got a raw deal from Thomas Edison. It is nice to know that Serbia takes pride in his accomplishments, because often times his work is overshadowed by Edison's work.