Press: About Belgrade
About Serbia and Belgrade
The Observer - "Why I love battered Belgrade"
by Eve-Ann Prentice
Serbia is the ideal destination for anyone looking for an adventurous holiday, without any long-haul flights, and a love of meeting the locals. You get a real feeling of being in an exotic location, where the tectonic plates of Islam, Orthodox Christianity and Roman Catholicism, alongside socialism and capitalism, have all collided in the past.
Spectacularly beautiful young women who look as if they have stepped from the fashion pages of Cosmopolitan , students, young men in sports clothes, musicians and writers link arms in camaraderie as they wander the cobbled streets of the nineteenth-century Skadarlija Bohemian quarter, the pedestrianised Knez Mihailova Street teeming with luxury shops or Republic Square with its dozens of pavement cafes.
One of Belgrade's great treasures is the Danube and its tributary, the Sava. The Serbian capital sits astride the confluence of the rivers, with the old city on one side and the self-explanatory New Belgrade on the other. River cruises give a wonderful eye-level view of rich Serbs at play in their speedboats, as well as of Kalemegdan Castle which dominates the sweep of the Danube as it meets the Sava. The fortress, which dates back to early medieval times, mirrors the city's chequered history under early Serb, Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian rule. Well worth a visit are the cafe-bar in a turret deep in the walls of the castle and the zoo which abuts the castle walls.
About Nightlife in Belgrade
The New York Times - "Belgrade Relishes Life
At Peace" by Neil Strauss
The greatest pleasure of Belgrade, however, was its cafes and clubs. The Serbian capacity for night life is nothing short of amazing: some diehards go out seven nights a week, and still manage to make it to work the next morning.
There is a common joke that the average Serbian makes $100 a month, but spends $200 a month on clothes.
The most interesting were the careening Gypsy music clubs and the ones with cover bands playing Serbian pop, to which women gyrated their hips like belly dancers while men locked arms and sang along drunkenly. The lyrics, in Serbian, were fantastic odes to intoxicated, passionate nights that the singers hoped would never end.
About Restaurant Dačo in Belgrade
The Observer - "Why I love battered Belgrade"
by Eve-Ann Prentice
Sitting in the Dacha restaurant in Belgrade, surrounded by Serbian folklore icons and wall-hangings, eating and drinking some of the purest organically produced food and drink available on the planet, it is tempting to believe I am having the last laugh. Especially when the bill for a hungry gathering of 12 comes to less than £70, including tip. No GM or processed food here; economic necessity means that almost everything is home-grown - and it tastes that way. With a penchant for locally smoked ham, grilled meat, stuffed vegetables, specialist breads, salads, pickles and soft Kajmak cheese, most Serbs eat enormous amounts and yet stay enviably slender.
