Walking around Belgrade: Fortress and Nikolai Tesla

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Masayo was feeling chipper today so we finally got to go outside and see some of Belgrade, Serbia. We only had this one day, so we couldn’t see everything, but we got to visit a lot of interesting places and we really enjoyed the city.

My BG when I woke up was 83 — carried over from the excellence that it was last night after the pizza. Masayo made eggs and sausages for us, and we also had bowls of chocolate muesli and milk. Quite a filling and tasty breakfast.

A couple hours later we went out walking around, looking at some of the grand old buildings near our apartment. Near a cathedral I checked my BG, and it was 162.

On one street we saw a map of the area, and it indicated that among all the various embassies and consulates there was a museum dedicated to Nikola Tesla. So we walked a mile or so down the street to check it out.

Although Tesla spent much of his life in New York City and was born in what is now technically Croatia, he is a national hero in Serbia. Not only is he on the 200 dinar note, but the main airport in the city is named for him. I felt I didn’t know enough about him, so I was excited to see his museum.

When we entered the small four-room museum, we were told that a tour was being conducted right now in Serbian, with an English tour scheduled for two hours later, or we could just walk around by ourselves. The tours included electrical demonstrations, but we didn’t have time to wait so we just went around ourselves.

The museum is nice and has some nice examples of the curious electrical devices that Tesla built that stunned and electrified the world. The Serbian tour group was indeed conducting their experiments, and making lightning and things, which we snuck glances at.

After the museum we kept walking towards the center square in town, and it was a nice enough day that people were sitting at outdoor cafes. We joined them, and I ordered a black coffee and a muffin. Both were good, and it was fun to watch all the people walking and shopping.

We continued down a pedestrian street with various stalls on it — Masayo found a couple selling homemade lace things, and I found a place with used books and records. As always, I looked through the LPs to see if I could find any Ray Charles. I have nearly all of them, and wouldn’t buy any while backpacking anyway, but it’s become like a treasure hunt for me. I found two, A Message From The People and Come Live With Me.

Eventually we came to Belgrade Fortress, the real destination of the day. It sits at a point where the Sava and Danube Rivers meet — this was our third view of the Danube, after Bratislava and Budapest.

The Fortress is pretty amazing, a very old and vast area full of interesting ruins and very nice parks. It was pretty busy, but not annoyingly so. Couples grinned at each other on benches, kids ran around in circles, and people like us walked up and down the pathways and along the ancient walls overlooking the rivers or the city, depending on the spot. Near a particularly nice stretch of wall I checked my BG — 138.

We paid about $.50 each to go up to the top of a tower to get a better view of the area, and then went through a hundreds-of-years old gate and found a bunch of tanks and artillery guns. It was the outdoor (free) section of a military museum. We walked around looking at the tanks, most of which seemed to be old from the early days of mechanized warfare.

After that we decided to go back to the room. It was a long walk, and we tried to cut through the Old Town which we hadn’t really seen, but it didn’t seem too different than what we had already seen. It was a nice walk though, and hilly.

Just before arriving at the apartment I realized I was low, and when I got in I checked: 55. I had a Mars bar and waited for dinner time.

Masayo made cevapcici sausages for us and cut up some bread we bought, plus added tomatoes and onions. A real local meal, homemade! It was excellent, though I wasn’t sure how many carbs the bread had. I didn’t eat much though, and since I had just been low I took a modest shot.

Unfortunately, I was 245 at 9 pm. I guess the bread was thicker than I thought. Strange, though, because even so I hadn’t had that much.

Later I got another, worse surprise: at midnight I was 357. Three fifty seven?! I definitely didn’t eat that much bread! Where had this extra glucose come from? The ether, apparently. I couldn’t explain it, though I bet it was related to the 55 somehow. Maybe I had been low for a while already and my moron liver was taking matters into its own hands.

I took four units of Humalog to combat the high, and waited a little bit. I didn’t really even feel that high, so at 1 am I checked again just to make sure it wasn’t a mistake with the machine. No, it now said 261 and I believed it. I figured the Humalog would continue to pull it down so I went to sleep.

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