A Month of Globe Trotting: Serbia and London

I was sitting in a pub in Woking (England) watching the bartender fill up plastic cartons full of beer and cider (take out cider! what a country.) and making some small talk. The bar was mostly deserted, football was on the telly, the curry special was etched on a chalkboard along with the half priced drafts sign. He asked what my travel plans are, pegging me as a visitor by my accent. I told him I'm off to Serbia to visit friends. This is technically true, the fact that I'd be playing Warhammer with said friends was inconsequential. He raised his eyes brows over a weathered, tanned face, folded up the top of a carton, and said "The last time I was in Serbia, I was driving a tank."

That was my first introduction to Serbia.

Our motley collection of British and Canadian players boarded a JAT flight from London to Belgrade. There was a drastic shift in quality between our flight and my flight over on British Airways. I especially missed the complete James Bond film library for my flight over. The airport at Belgrade was different in small and subtle ways, in the design and layout and style of architecture, those little reminders that you're not in Kansas anymore. (For the record, I've never been in Kansas.) The other big change was the increased police presence. We met several other teams at the airport, where our Serbian hosts had chartered a bus that would take us to Novi Sad.

We passed through cornfield after cornfield, and several villages along the way. Many of the buildings in the villages were boarded up, X's spray painted on the side. I wondered if we were passing through former battlegrounds. The fact that Serbia has been at war in the past twenty years was always in the back of my mind. How many people were killed in these towns? How many of the Serbians I would meet or see on the street lost family members, or bore the wounds of war? For all of that, I never felt like I was in any danger, and life moved on as it would in Woking, or Boston.

We stayed in student dorms for our visit, and all of us were a bit nervous when they collected our passports for the duration of our stay. I'd been warned that we need to be registered with the police, which would be handled by the staff at the dorms, but we were given no documentation. Visions of A Serbian Film danced through my head, but we were never stopped by the police, and no one asked me to be in a movie. So that' good. The dorms themselves were awful: threadbare sheets, insects surrying away from the light (fortunately I only saw a few) and tiny showers in the corner of a musty bathroom. Our windows barely opened, and we slowly seated ourselves to sleep every night. Our event was held in a massive conference hall, large enough to hold over five hundred gamers from thirty five countries. Sadly, their bathrooms were not really up to the challenge. The food at the event was very basic: stews, beans, meat both breaded and grilled. It was all tasty enough, and made even more palatable by the three bars set up in the hall, where women garbed in military or fantasy or futuristic dress (representing each of the game systems) slinging the beer (and cider!)

Novi Sad held a mixture of Eastern European utilitarian modern buildings and beautiful stone and wooden buildings, steeped in history. The Danube river bordered the town, complete with beaches and beautiful, beautiful women. It was quite jarring at the sheer quantity and quality of humanity on display (the guys were easy on the eyes too). We spent our nights traveling from bar to bar, winding through narrow streets with music blasting from clubs and bistros. The gaming side went pretty poorly for me personally (two wins, four losses) but this was a team event. Our team won three, lost three, and finished well ahead of our dismal performance in Poland.

I had arranged for an extra day after the event to check out London before flying back to America. My captain dropped me off at a train station, which took me from Woking to London. The Underground took me to my hotel at the Arsenal football staduim. After a brief scare with my passort, there was dinner at an Indian restaurant, and some pub crawling. The next day I checked out and went on a whirlwind tour of London stopping at random stations. I wandered through Victoria station, then hit Winchester (which has Parliment, Big Ben, and the London Eye ferris wheel you always see in Dr. Who episodes). I dine on authentic fish and chips (which were amaaaaazing) and organic cider in Blackfriars, and took a brief walk through Whitechapel before riding back to Heathrow and my fight home. Some people might think I'm crazy for flying across the world to play Warhammer, but we all pursue the interests that we love, wherever they may take us. Whether it's nobler or better to look at old things, or bike from city to city, or roll dice and push plastic models around doesn't matter. What matters is expanding your horizons, seeing the world, and having adventures.