I’m not sure if there is a Roleplayers Anonymous (there probably is, in the Bible Belt of America somewhere (I’ll explain later)), but even if there was, I wouldn’t attend. I’m a roleplayer, and proud!

I kind of forgot to add it to the categories on the right, and totally skipped over it in my earlier posts, but I should probably make up for the rather lame ‘more about me’ posts (that really didn’t say all that much about me…)

So, this is me coming out of the proverbial, non-gay closet. I’ve been an elf, a Jedi, a cowboy; an ancient Egyptian God (Osiris of course) and the king of England! I even spent a few hours a week tearing the heads off people, roleplaying a werewolf called Bacon. Yeah, Bacon.

These were just the formalised characters — around a table, with some dice, and other players. Or perhaps on stage, in some kind of play, or dialogue. Each and every one of them had a voice, an ideology, a back story, a way of carrying themselves, mannerisms: for all intents and purposes, I became those characters, if only for a few hours at a time.

Why do I do it? It’s fun. Acting was always a big thing at my school, and we’d all be encouraged to get up on stage and act from a young age, through until we graduated at 18. Combine the love of acting with oratory (speaking!) and someone that’s intensely interested in WHY and HOW things (people!) work, and you get a guy that is nearly always wearing the skin of another character.

That’s not say I’m never myself, but considering I only keep very few close friends, I imagine most people only know me as a certain character. Perhaps a few facets of Sebastian shine through the roleplayed persona. So I guess that makes about… 6 people that know the real me. Scary.

Having been online for so many years probably doesn’t help matters. I’ve created and cultivated different personalities for various online games, or communities. I have a ‘head-strong tyrannical self-righteous’ leadership persona which I use for World of Warcraft, but then I am much more self-effacing when it comes to other games. I’m almost… humble. I guess I develop a character that suits my needs.

Now, I’m writing about this because a) I haven’t roleplayed in a long time (my games master has been slacking…!), and b) my little Zombies rant got me thinking about a time at university, when a bunch of us stumbled around campus moaning and groaning ‘braaaains’. But that’s not the story I wanted to tell — I wanted to tell the story about our little ‘run in’ with the Christian Society.

Through some immensely clueless clerical error in the student union, some administrator had given the Christian Society some rooms very close to the Roleplaying Society, on the same days, and the same times. Now, I didn’t think this would be a problem at the time, but for some reason, because we were always down in ‘the dungeon’ (our affectionate name for the badly-maintained rooms right at the bottom of the campus, where no one else dared venture… except for us intrepid roleplayers), and the fact we were playing with dragons, and demons, and mighty magicians… they thought we were devil worshipers. I kind you not, they thought we were satanists. We got more heat from them than the Goth Society got, for Christ’s sake!

Anyway, that was the story I wanted to tell!

Now, on the topic of roleplaying, a (very tenous) link to some Middle-East propaganda that’s popped up recently. I give to you: the brown jacket guy. This guy on his own wouldn’t be all that chilling, but here’s a video from the second Lebanon War: green helmet guy. Staged propaganda, using a dead child as a prop. Chilling.

My circular polariser arrived today, so off to take some photos!

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I’m going to tell you a little story about a cheerleader, as a build-up to a ‘my first kiss’ entry, which I have to post before the end of January, for my lovely fellow bloggers over at 20sb.

I’m actually stalling for time, because I actually need to contact the girl that I first kissed, but she’s not responding to my telephone calls. Maybe the kiss was that bad…

Anyway, the cheerleader (who incidentally looked a bit like Hayden Panettiere). I’m going to step on some toes here, so I won’t be using real names, and I’m going to be fairly obscure with dates, just so I’m fairly safe from some people reaching false conclusions. I am not a manwhore, despite what you might have been told, and I don’t like kissing and telling the story… but I think this one is fairly safe.

It was some time in early Summer, and I was still at university. I’d been dumped by my first girlfriend a few months earlier, and had my second girlfriend (well, the second girl that I’d been intimate with) had just dumped me — for another girl. So it’s safe to say I was fairly sore at the time, considering I’d managed to make it to 18 years of age without a girlfriend, and then chewed up and spat out by two girls in close succession.

My self-asteem has never been the greatest. Being confident about my abilities is only a recent thing, and I’m still pretty nervous around girls that I fancy (’like‘ for you Americans). There’s something about being bullied that just destroys all of your own self-worth, you know?

It was a bit of a cruel joke, then, to be dumped by my first girlfriend for a guy twice her age. And then an out-of-nowhere dumpage from my second girlfriend, because she decided she liked girls more than boys.

Being a resillient personality, I didn’t take it too personally. Girls still seemed to be taking an interest in me. I still had the gift of the gab; I could still make girls break down into tears of laughter. The problem was, and still is, that I can’t tell if a girl likes me. You know, in that way. I can’t make myself believe that she’s interested in me more than friendship, or she just likes a good laugh. The whole concept that a girl wants to… er… bond with me is just foreign to me. Damn that bruised self-asteem. Damn those bullies.

If only more girls would be like the cheerleader, from the Deep South. After a long internet courtship (I knew I’d be visiting that part of America in a few months), we finally met up in a large house, somewhere near the Appalachians. There were other people present, so for a while we just had to make do with drawn-out glances at each other. A slight licking of the lips. Dilating pupils. It was painfully obvious that the moment we were left alone our carnal desires were going to explode.

Later that night, after everyone else had gone to bed, she snuck into my room and… well, it was wild. Really, really wild. To this day, I put it down to the fact that she was a cheerleader. She had muscles I hadn’t heard of,  in places I’d never seen, let alone felt. I guess it’s expecting too much for every girl I meet, that likes me, to be like that. It’d be nice, though.

For a few days this continued, and I saw and experienced the heart of the Deep South. Trailer parks, hillbillies, and more churches than I thought possible. Some of those towns have 10 churches! For a population of just a few thousand! I had inane conversations with people — people that didn’t care what I said, just as long as I continued to talk. Conversations that made you wonder if lobotomies were performed at birth, instead of circumcision.

All the while, I had this cute, blonde cheerleader by my side. She was intelligent too — this was obviously recompense for the bad times I’d had before. Blissful recompense.

On my last day there, waking up, and stepping out onto the porch that surrounded most of the house, there was a beautiful cobalt-blue lake below me. The sun was just starting to rise over the mountains, and a jet-skiier was speeding across the clear, crystalline water.

A few moments later I felt a gentle tugging back towards the bedroom; I looked down and saw her arms around my waist.

That was one of my most spectacular and memorable holiday romances.

All at once the... the birds were
everywhere. All at once.  She... she
pushed me inside and... they covered
her.

Those fateful words, spoken by Cathy in Hitchcock’s seminal horror-thriller — The Birds. When it was originally advertised it inspired angry letters from school teachers all over the States, as it quite quirkily stated “The Birds Is Coming” — a lot of media experts put down the success of this film to the grammar ‘error’ that caught the attention of the masses. Of course, ‘The Birds’ refers to the film, which is singular… but still!

Anyway, I said I would tell the tale of the goose, and so here I am, at long last.

At the University of Essex, most of the on-campus accomodation was in the form of big, black, f*ck-off towers. The original idea behind these was that there’d be something like 25 of them, each one some kind of ‘European community’ — there’d be a British tower, a French tower… and so on. You know, the standard post-modernistic/globalisation ideas from the 60s and 70s. One big happy family. Sadly, they ran out of money after building 6 of these black brick monstrosities. And they’re listed buildings too, which means they can’t ever be torn down… A blight upon the cityscape, for EVER!

I digress…

Each tower had between 14 and 16 floors — all self-contained flats. With only 2 showers, I might add, which posed a problem in the morning. And only two small fridges too. These were well and truly the ghettos of on-campus accomodation — but cheap, which is why a lot of people wanted to live there.

So our flat, number 4, was obviously a very cool bunch of people (remind me to tell more stories about our antics one day). Unfortunately, there were some meanies in flat 2… bullies. They once pulled a knife on us in the lift. Unpleasant fellows…

To get our own back, we devised a master plan, involving a goose, and mayonaise. Now, most of you are probably thinking ‘Yeah, a dead goose from the supermarket, covered in mayonaise would be pretty scary.’  Such a childish prank wasnt’ going to be good enough for us, no siree. The university had a lake, with a lot of ducks and geese, you see.

So, in the middle of the night, while everyone was asleep, we snuck down to the lake. Did you know that ducks and geese ALSO sleep? We didn’t… And they were all asleep on an island in the middle of the lake.

Me: whispering. So who can imitate a goose call?
Aaron: I can.
Sarah: Why are you whispering if we’re going to have to wake them up?

Aaron gave it his best shot, and before we knew it, a fleet of geese were swimming across the lake towards us — I guess their eyesight isn’t any better than ours, because the noise only sounded vaguely like a goose… in distress… with constipation. Now came the hard bit, which we’d thought about, but hadn’t really decided on — how do you catch a big goose that can (apparently) bring your finger, if it gets a good grip? Aaron tried chasing one, without much success. Me, I went for the duvet-over-the-head technique, which worked a whole lot better.

Now we’re stumbling back to the Onyx Tower (Orthanc, anyone?), a goose held between us inside a duvet. He’s struggling quite a lot. We stop by at Flat 4 quickly, to grab the industrial catering-sized vat of mayonaise. We ride the lift slowly down two floors and sneak into their flat, with a key we’d appropriated a few days before.

Quickly, we lather their entire kitchen floor with mayonaise, dump the angry goose, and scarper before anyone wakes up and catches us in the act.

To this day, I like to think we traumatised 16 people for the rest of their collective lives. I like to think they’re now afraid of geese, and eat it at Christmas whenever the chance arises. The bullying stopped soon after that, too. Incidentally, try filling condoms up with mayonaise and throwing them from the top of a 16-storey building.

Anyway,  as this is kind of ‘Duck Day’ (it sounds better than ‘Swan Saturday’), I have a couple of links to richen the whole thing. First, the truck driver that has a pet duck. I think they call these ‘human interest’ stories. I think it’s more ‘how sanity is slipping away from people that have everything in the Western World’… but I guess that wouldn’t go down so well in a news program. Secondly, I have a great video from TED, on the crazy intelligence of crows. TED’s amazing, by the way, if you’re a geek (or just an interested intellectual) that wants to know where the bleeding edge of technology is, or perhaps some new, funky applications of existing ‘Technology, Entertainment & Design‘.

There, I told the bird story.

Well, the rolling edelweiss-covered hills of Austria are kind of similar to the black, imposing mountains of  Eastern Anatolia, in that they’re both big and mountainous… but I guess the similarities stop there.

BUT it is a good title, as I’m going to tell you about the start of my trip to Turkey, which begun in Istanbul: Constantinople, the home of Christianity until ‘The Great Schism’ (a great name) in the 11th century,  when Roman Catholicism split from Eastern Orthodoxy (the Greeks, the Balkans, etc.)

In fact, an awful lot of early Christian and Islamic history occured in Turkey. People forget that Christianity was even larger before the Great Schism. After  its ‘ratification’ by Roman Emperor Constantine in 313 AD, and then being made the official religion in 380 AD by Emperor Theodosius, Christianity grew at an immense pace, dwarfing and absorbing any of the existing polytheistic religions in Europe, and later North and South America.

After the Schism, Christianity left much of Asia Minor, allowing the new (relatively) Islamic religion to flourish, resulting in the almost polarised West/East Christianity/Islamic geographical split that we see today.

Enough basic history of the region. Nowadays, Turkey is a secular/Islamic nation — Islam is certainly the national religion, but it’s not forced like in many other Middle-Eastern countries, and it’s also not run with ‘Islamic law’ — it has been a democracy since the fall of the Ottoman Empire, shortly after the First World War. Atatürk (Mustafa Kemal), with his revolutionary party formed a new, democratic government. It was a single-party system for about 30 years though, which made Atatürk a bit of a tyrant… but who cares, democracy is over-rated anyway. Maybe I’ll rant about benevolent monarchy one day…

So… fast-forward to June 2007, and I’m at Heathrow airport. For some reason I booked a 7am flight to Istanbul — something about making the most of my time there — and as I simply couldn’t get to Heathrow at 5am in the morning, my dad had taken me there at midnight, to wait for 5 hours. It’s amazing just how hard it is to sleep on a steel chair, with solid metal arm-rests between each. No way to lay down, no way to sprawl, and a camera and laptop worth worth over £5000. There was no way Iwas going to be able to sleep, surrounded by other crazy travelers that also thought a 5-hour nap on a metal bench was a good idea.

After a 3 hour flight (about 90% of the cute girls I saw in Turkey were on the planes), I was in Istanbul, tired, but ready to go! The first thing I noticed were the cobbles. Ancient, well-worn and gappy cobbles. If you’ve been to Rome, you have some idea of what it’s like to walk on cobbles that have irregular few-inch gaps between them. Luckily I had hiking boots, or I’d probably still be nursing a complex ankle fracture. These cobbles surrounded the Sultanahmet region — the core of old Istanbul — the region that features both the Blue Mosque and Hagia Sophia. The Hagia Sophia was the largest cathedral in the world for over a 1000 years. It’s been standing since 500AD, and for a long time was the center of the Eastern Orthodox religion, until the Ottoman Turks came marching in, in 1453AD, and converted it into a mosque.

Not many people know this, but most mosques and old Christian churches look almost identical, because almost all early mosques were converted sites of Christian worship — and the design of the basilica (dome) goes back even further, to the Roman and Greek pantheon of Gods. Religion is awfully incestuous and plagiarised…

After an awe-inspiring trudge around both of the mosques (in the Sophia I had to pretend I was a Muslim so that I could get inside the area of worship to take some photos — I’m such a rebel), I stepped outside into a beautiful day now wide-awake, and ready to absorb as much of Istanbul as I could in 4 days. Little did I know, I was about to be accosted.

While I was trying to find my bearings, I asked a pleasant-looking man if he knew the way to the Grand Bazaar. ‘Just head in that direction, it’s about 15 minutes away.’ Giving him my thanks, I headed off, big camera around my neck, and looking every part the affluent tourist. It was after the second road-crossing that I noticed the guy that gave me directions was following me. He was keeping his distance, but he was certainly following me… and gaining.

As my pulse picked up its pace, so did my stride. It seemed I was about to have my very first chase around the dirty back streets of Istanbul only hours after arriving. I was about to be Aladdin, fleeing from the guards, with just an apple for protection. Sure, I didn’t have a pet monkey called Aboo, or anywhere near the same amount of dexterity, but damn, I was excited!

Find out what happened next, in part two!

Read part one from yesterday, before reading on…!

Ducking into a side-street I quickly caught my breath. Being a computer geek, it probably comes as no surprise that my muscle tone isn’t fantastic. My fingers, well, they are finely-honed, agile implements capable of typing at 150 words per minute. But my legs and heart? Not so great. Back at university, when I was a little more active, it might’ve been a different story, but now I’m in some dark alley panting and wheezing.

It wasn’t until last year that I finally caught up with all of the Godfather/American Gangster films, so at the time I didn’t realise this, but the sun coming from behind me created a perfect silhouette. My persistent pursuer saw me clearly in the alley, smiled a little creepily and started to close the gap. It’s then that I did something I hadn’t done for about 10 years: I sprinted. With my legs wobbling beneath me, head pounding and my heart trying its best to leap out of my chest, I started to put some distance between us.

I should’ve figured at the time, by the way he was striding quickly but with delicious intent, that I wasn’t going to get away. He surely knew it; it’s just a shame I didn’t — I probably took a year or two off my life, running around Istanbul like a spastic, with hardly any sleep (and a meager Turkish Airlines breakfast).

Eventually, I found myself outside the Grand Bazaar. It wasn’t quite what I expected — I expected more of an open-air affair, like the one in Aladdin. Apparently that kind of bazaar is more common in Egypt and Morocco. In Istanbul you have this massive maze of crisscrossing streets; narrow streets, lined with shops, each one armed with an owner trying to sell you his wares. I explored for a while, figuring the guy couldn’t possibly be following me through such a massive throng of people. I even stopped for a 20-cent class of freshly squeezed orange juice and marveled at how the same thing could cost 8 euros in the Istanbul airport.

I even bought a nice piece of silk that my girlfriend would later turn her nose up at, because she preferred the emerald bracelet I bought. Women, huh. I thought it was diamonds that were the key to a girl’s heart…

Before long, I caught a glimpse of my predator behind me. Somehow he’d kept up with me; I guess he just knew the area a whole lot better than some pesky tourist. My trip to the Bazaar was over and I headed out, along some tiny street, back towards the mosques. To be honest, I was starting to tire, and my rationality had started to kick back in. I really doubted that he wanted to kill me, in broad daylight, surrounded by hundreds of tourists. So I promptly stopped and sat down with my back against a wall, waiting for him to catch up.

Muhammad: You come buy some carpets? My uncle’s shop is just around the corner.
Seb: wheezing. You must be kidding. You followed me, to make sure I went to your uncle’s store to buy a… carpet?
Muhammad: Yes. Follow me, sir.

And so I had my first, true Turkish experience. ‘Apple tea, sir?’ Sure, don’t mind if I do. I found out later that if they really like you, they get out the liquor — some kind of brandy — but they obviously didn’t like me all that much, after I hauled ass half way across central Istanbul, as they only offered me apple tea.

For about an hour a guy tried to flog me carpets that ranged from 250 euros to about 4000 euros — and that was just for the small ones.  ‘This one would be a lovely gift to your mother.’ Sorry mum, but I just don’t love you enough. It was informative though, and I learnt all sorts of exciting things, like the number of knots per square inch, and how silk carpets are far superior to other threads. It takes about 9 months for some young woman, in a hut somewhere in the Eastern mountains of Turkey to weave a 1 meter silk rug — thus the insane price, the man said.

I finally managed to get out of the shop — it took about 20 minutes from me standing up, to actually being allowed out of the shop — I couldn’t help but think I’d really upset these guys by not buying a carpet. I’d sipped their tea, and rubbed my feet on their rugs. I’d flaunted their hospitality.

Then I reminded myself that a creepy guy called Muhammad had stalked me across Istanbul. Something told me this was just the opening act of  a trip that would turn end up being far more interesting than I had anticipated.

You’ve probably figured by now that I’m a bit of a storyteller. For me, the recollection of events and glorious little moments in the past, is more pleasant than the actual experiencing. Why? Because you get to share the moment with other people! You know what they say: sharing a moment with someone is… magical! Be it just a brief lock of the eyes, a moment of sympathy, or just something that makes you both laugh — it’s these events we remember and retell the most.

Let’s go back 7 years.

After she left England for the second time, with no sign of returning, I had to admit to myself that this was going to be a long courtship. But the slowness of the dragged out foreplay was teasing, not infuriating. This was an epic kiss,  6 years in the making, stemming back to when I was just 16. I had to wait. I had to be patient. I had to wait through 2 false starts, a marriage to another man, and a 3 year communication blackout.

It’s odd, thinking about it now, but I always knew she was going to come back. I didn’t know when, how, or why, but I hardly batted an eyelid when she sent me an email. A brief, cursory email.

“I’m coming back to England. Want to meet up?”

‘Sure,’ I said, the email gratefully removing any proof of my shaking fingers.

I’ve been hot-air ballooning over lands that can only be described as moonscapes, watching the sun rise over the horizon. I’ve stood with my back to a mighty arch of the Colosseum as the sun set. I’ve sat atop the highest building in Belgrade and gazed out across the city, a full, blue moon glinting off the Sveti Sava.

I’ve seen and done a  lot of things, and I’m only young — God knows I’m going to do a hell of a lot more before I die — but it all pales in comparison to when I first kissed The American. It’s humbling, recalling the moment when our lips first touched. It was more emotionally intense than when I first stood at the top of the Grand Canyon and looked down. We’re talking about a chasm so large that you could fit a small country — like Ireland — in it. It was dwarfed by that kiss.

Looking back, the only moment that more readily brings tears to my eyes is when I drove a race-tuned Dodge Viper GTS around a serpentine, mountainous road in the Appalachians. They were both the source of the same kind of heady, euphoric feeling: that fantastic feeling that courses through your body when you’re doing something truly awesome. The Viper had me reeling from its acceleration; the girl had just to touch her lips against mine for the same effect.

I remember every single kiss. I can recall each and every one of them in an instant; I just shut my eyes, and she’s there. Those lips are there. The memories will never diminish.

* * *

Funny, this entry began as something completely different, and I wasn’t actually intending to write about it. I got to the end of the first paragraph, and the rest just flowed, almost automatically. The original subject was meant to be ‘A Goose Egg’. Why? I’ll tell you in my next entry.

Foreword: I’m currently sitting here in the darkness, with just a weak candle flickering and trying to stay alight. God bless my phone’s Internet capabilities.

As I begun yesterday, but didn’t quite manage to finish, I like telling stories. Some of them are epic tales with a beginning, middle and end. Some of them span countries and years — like the American. The problem is, I tend to travel alone — I meet people while I travel, but I still come home with a massive body of experiences and stories that just need to be told. They’re no good, just locked up there in my head.

Of course, for every grand tale, there are some little ditties that are quite the opposite; they are  go-nowhere tales, often with no rhyme or reason at all. They are just fun little stories.

Now, for the last 3 years (since I graduated from university), my main contact with other people has been with my World of Warcraft guild mates. This is the main reason I don’t get to travel with people — most of my friends live in other countries, or are entirely virtual. I may never meet them.  These are the people that I tell most of my stories: some of them great; and some of them… Goose Eggs.

The Goose Egg Story was probably the ultimate of go-nowhere stories. It was an elaborate story (I love talking, even if it’s completely pointless, adding intricacies where there really shouldn’t be), about my grandmother… and a goose egg. Basically, I stretched out a tale of how my grandmother fried a goose egg, instead of a chicken’s egg. Let’s face it, it’s not the most wild story, but I told it in such a graphic, detailed way that it was interesting!

Well, I thought it was interesting. The rest of my guild mates, on the other hand, thought it was a bit inane and useless. Thus they branded all of my future, similar stories ‘Goose Egg stories’.

So with that said, I give you one of my Goose Eggs, from Belgrade, Serbia. Unrehearsed, and in just two takes!

 
(If you can’t see the player, you’ll have to visit my blog)

I wondered if I should tell another story from my trip to Turkey, but I figured while I was on some kind of ‘thematic streak’ with my other Eastern Bloc-oriented posts, I should tell you a little about my trip to Belgrade, the capital of Serbia.

I won’t bore you with the details, but the whole Balkan Peninsula  — Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia, Montenegro and Macedonia — was once the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. Various diplomatic struggles and wars have resulted in a bunch of independent nations that although are very close to each other geographically have wildly different demographic makeups. There are Muslims, Catholics, Orthodox Christians… just about every kind of faith, really. It was the gradual increase of ethnic tensions which finally resulted in a permanent split into separate countries; but even now, many Serbians consider Croatians and Montenegrians their brethren and fellow countrymen. They are still bitter that they were forcibly split up, whether they liked it or not. Families were forever broken, and ethnic minorities had to leave their homes to live in their ‘correct’ country.

The ethnic strains are still the main governing political factor in the area today — you’ve probably heard of the Bosnian genocide, and the war that took place in Kosovo. Without taking sides, let’s just say Milosevic was an Orthodox Christian, and the war crimes he sanctioned were on the Bosnian Muslims.

Anyway, that’s enough deep and heavy history for one day; I’ve given you enough information that you can probably now understand what makes a standard run-of-the-mill Serbian tick.

Belgrade is, for all intents and purposes, a western city. The first thing that struck me was just how much it looked like Paris or London. I found out later that a lot of cities around the world were based on Parisian and English fashion, especially new cities — like Washington D.C — or cities that have seen significant reconstruction over the years (due to bombing and the like). The next thing that amazed me was just how social these guys are. Street after street is lined with street cafes. I’m not talking 10 chairs outside a shop either — I’m talking vast swathes of tables with umbrellas, with excited men and women jabbering and gesticulating wildly with one hand; while the other rests reverentially on the cup of coffee.

Seb: ‘Why are there quite so many people out here, in the middle of the day, on a Wednesday, drinking coffee?’
Boris: ‘We have over 30% unemployment’

(He’s not actually called Boris, but it sounds suitably Serbian)

30%! So basically… everyone over the age of 65, under the age of 18, and 30% of all of those inbetween are jobless bums. Out of a population of 10 million, that means about at any given moment, about 7 million people that could be sitting under a parasol drinking iced coffee. That’s definitely what it felt like, walking around the lovely cobbled streets of Belgrade; no one was in a rush to get anywhere. Heck, they had no where to go but home, or perhaps the city’s park that’s situated in the ancient Turkish fortress of Kalemegdan (actually a Turkish word!) that once contained the medieval city of Belgrade.

Kalemegdan is where I took most of my photos of the city. It overlooks the Danube and Sava rivers (and the confluence — where they join), and I think you’ll see from the following pictures that it’s a rather special place.

Those were the actual colours — sure they were only there for about 60 seconds, but it was pretty spectacular sitting there on a 1000 year-old rooftop terrace, looking down over one of most beautiful rivers in the world, the Danube… and drinking coffee of course! I’ve still to this day not seen a sunset like that out my travels; I guess I might have to go to the Far East, or some island in the middle of no where before I top the sunsets I saw in Belgrade.

You can see in the first picture that there are people just sitting there, relaxing. The number of couples that I saw just canoodling on a little stretch of the ruined fortress walls was immense. It’s a big fortress, maybe a kilometer or two in circumference, and you couldn’t go more than a few meters without finding another couple in each others’ arms, or a group of friends laughing.

So now I’ve set the scene for my 10-day stay in Belgrade, but unfortunately it’s getting late! Next time I’ll try to tell some stories to bring the beautiful city of Belgrade to life. Goose egg stories perhaps, but fun and interesting, I hope!

Sledding is meant to be fun, a flight of reckless fancy down an icy or snowy hill.

Unfortunately, a 16 year old from Yorkshire in England decided it would be a wise idea to slide merrily down a slippery incline… with a barbed wire fence at the bottom. Unfortunately, she died shortly afterward — luckily her 3 other friends that also joined her in this stupid spectacle survived with serious injuries.

Apparently they used the roof of a car, turned upside down. Pretty clever, when you think about it, for a bunch of 16 year olds. Shame really that the fence that sliced her into little itty pieces at the bottom has probably guaranteed her a Darwin Award.

Anyway, the idea of make-shift sledges reminded me of a time in my first year at university. The campus itself was built into the basin of some kind of valley, so there were pretty large hills all around the campus. One of these hills was particuarly steep — man made, when they had to level out some ground. One week in winter, it snowed rather heavily.

‘Wouldn’t it be great if all 16 of us could sled down the hill together?’ someone asked, aware that the answer was certainly ‘no’.

‘Well… we do have that huge ‘COMPUTER SALE NOW ON’ laminated banner that we stole from PC World last week…’

Yeah, we had a 10-meter banner that once adorned a big superstore in town. And it was lovely and plasticised — perfect for sliding down a hill at high-speed! (Something like this, only about 3 times as long.)

So, there we are at the top of the hill, banner on the ground, and each of us trying put as many meat shields as possible between the front and us. No one wanted to be at the front (duh), so in the end our brave, American transfer student called Josh offered to sit at the front. How American (he got all the girls, too). Proof that you can have brains, or brawn, not both.

The sad thing is, there was a wall at the bottom of the hill, so we knew it was going to be a painful landing. We figured the fun would far out-weigh the pain that awaited us at the bottom.

Luckily Josh took the brunt of the landing, so the rest of us escaped unhurt and having just had one of the best moments of our lives. I just wish I had more photos from that time at university… I am so sad that I didn’t scan in all the photos that my friends took before I left university. Now I may never see them again… damn.

Or if not killed, at least seriously injured with a baseball bat.

So there I was in Beograd — Belgrade –  capital of Serbia. Hopefully you’ve read my little introduction to Serbia; the backdrop has been painted for the retelling of one of my little escapades.

I’m not ashamed to say that the main reason I went to Serbia was to meet some of my World of Warcraft guild mates. Actually, as guild leader, I guess they were my peons, but carrying over that kind of relationship from online to offline can often result in horrible consequences: so I treated them like equals. It was a little weird being treated like some kind of leader in real life though, I have to admit. That slight element of deference, that instantaneous silence if I start talking over someone else.

Anyway, when I wasn’t in my hotel (a 3 star hotel in Belgrade is a bed and a sink, by the way — I think the cleanliness of the sheets dictates the star rating), or at Petar’s house, hitting on his younger cousin, my home was the dark and dingy subway beneath one of the main junctions in Belgrade. When I was being taken there for the first time, I wasn’t really sure what to make of it. ‘Just a little further down here, Dell.’ (Dell being a shortening of Delling, my nickname — being called by your online persona in real life is cool and kinda weird at the same time). Stepping down broken enamel steps, further and further, sunlight disappearing behind me, I emerged into… the seedy online underworld of Belgrade. Once it was probably a shopping mall of some kind, but now it was a scattering of white-painted-window derelict shops, and… internet cafes! Lots and lots of internet cafes. Basically, everyone that plays WoW in Serbia plays from this little hub.

There are cafes there for every kind of player: the posh cafe with cute Slavic wenches that walk around and bring you drinks, the middle-of-the-range ones that are clean and functional, and finally the dingy shitholes that, of course, I would end up playing from for a week. Apparently my guild mates picked that one because it was ‘cheap and cheerful’. Yeah, cheap like a bunch of ancient 486s with 14″ CRT screens, and cheerful in that they played awful happy hardcore music. Admittedly they turned the music off after a few days of me whining, which was good of them.

You can’t see much from the picture, but I couldn’t find the better one… if I track it down, I’ll post it.

Online gaming is a highly-competitive arena. You might’ve heard of the Chinese guy that got stabbed to death after he sold a ‘dragon sabre’ that belonged to someone else (the murderer). There have been lots of reported cases of real life brutality in Korea too, caused by online disputes that have sprawled into a real life brawl. While gamers in Europe are not quite as passionate as our Far Eastern brethren, some of the… ‘less developed’ Slavic friends still take gaming very, very seriously. Steal his loots, and he’ll threaten to break your legs with a baseball bat. Steal an important player from his guild, and he’ll threaten to track you down and break your neck.

This was never much of a problem, as I was all the way over in England. I just laughed and shrugged off their threats. Unfortunately, I was now in Serbia, and those over-excited, evil Serbs that were threatening me and my family were just around the corner in the next internet cafe. I’d conveniently forgotten this before I’d jumped on a plane and flown into a dangerous climate where I would have to constantly alert for impending attacks.

So, there I was, trying to lead a raid, shouting into a microphone, trying to desperately to be heard over some particuarly tragic hiphop music (did I mention you can hardly see the screens because everyone’s smoking too?), when suddenly a large, buff, muscular Slavic Schwarzenegger-lookalike is silhouetted in the doorway to our internet cafe. He’s wielding a baseball bat menancingly, a malevolent glint in his eye.

‘DELLINK? WHERE IS DELLINK? JEDI GOVNA IZ KANTE, DELLINK! ‘

At this point, I wish all of my loyal guildmates stood up and said ‘I’m Delling!’, ‘No, I’m Delling!’, but sadly I don’t think Spartacus is a very popular film there. Instead, they all stood up, very menacingly and started walking towards the spastic Serbian that was busy spouting death threats and still looking for me. They surrounded him and said: ‘You’ll have to get through us to get to Delling.’

I think he realised very quickly that online loyalties exist in real life too; these guys were going to make damn sure I was kept safe — if I got harmed, who was going to lead their guild to great glory?!

And that was just within the first 24 hours of my stay in Belgrade… it was going to be a long 10 days.