One day of being a Serb

I love airports. Don’t get me wrong. I once got stuck two days on Oslo airport and I had so much fun and even took a few photos to mark the occasion.

Now what I did not expect is to be stuck again, this time in London. I woke up at fucking 7 am just to be there in time and be safe. Then first surprise – your flight is delayed. Just great. How much? 4 hours! Still not to bad, I mean Friday night home is still mine to take. But then when I was going through security checking a major surprise happened.

So, they take my staff and run it through scan to check. Fair enough. Then I pass through and they don’t give me my bag back. “Sorry mister, it needs to be checked further”. Fuck off I thought but didn’t say, stop masturbating stupid airport workers. After a while another 2 guys come and start putting staff out of my bag with gloves and checking them on some strange machines. Then one of them started asking me very weird questions, like where do I study and so on. As I was a bit rude/aggressive toward him he needed to call his superior. The superior guy had some credentials so I quickly figured out that I shouldn’t fuck around with that one. So he comes and starts asking an interesting sequence of questions:

Security Man: Where are you from?

Me: Serbia.

SM: When did you arrive in UK?

Me: 26^th of September.

SM: What are you studying?

Me: Economics and Business at University College London.

SM: Which city is that?

Me: Errrr… London?

SM: Aha ok. (starts listing through my passport)

You travel a lot?

Me: Yes.

SM (notices Lebanese stamp): Did you go to Lybia?

Me: No, to Lebanon.

SM: When did you go there?

Me: This summer.

SM: During the war.

Me: No, actually I left before the attack; you can see it on the passport stamps.

SM ( looks through the passport and sees that I am right and ponders a bit):

What did you do there?

Me: I visited a friend.

SM: Mhm. Where?

Me: Jbeil.

SM: Hmmmm… Where is that, north or south?

Me: Ehmm, sort of center?

SM: Who lives there?

Me: Maronites.

SM (looking really puzzled): What??

Me: Christians.

SM: Aha. Well, you know that your camera is actually showing explosive particles on our scans, and it is getting us concerned?

Me: Well, if it is like that – it gets me concerned as well.

After a bit of shuffle and talking between themselves, they decided to give me back my possessions. Probs I don’t look like a friend of Bin Laden after all, too blond J But it is about to get better. The flight is delayed and I am stuck in smoker’s cage – yes, it is a cage, it even looks like one! And then I hear that our flight is cancelled. Just great, and to make it better we need to go through immigration procedure and fill in the cartons and blah,blah,blah. The luggage is delayed by another half an hour and then we all go to Serbian Air Transport company desk. Because there was only Balkans there a dispute erupted between passengers and desk workers. Surprised?

We are shipped to some barracks near the airport to wait for morning flight – which means brutal waking up at 4 am without a possibility of saying no. The hotel of course has no lift so we go through a labyrinth up and down to reach rooms. My room card didn’t work. I go to reception and ask for another one. A funny looking Maharajah gives me another one and I go back and it still doesn’t work. Getting rather pissed I head back and give him a glare and the same message again. He thinks I am too stupid so he comes along to open it for me. He could not do it, not even with the master card so he concludes that the lock is probs not working and gives me a new room – on a fucking 2^nd floor with zillion set of stairs to climb with my luggage. After all that shit I went to dinner which was to no surprise – shit. Ah well, at least you can smoke in the bar and chill. And a fellow passenger had a birthday so people opened their duty free whiskey and we had a nice sort of party there. Balkan people are good at something it seems.

The wake up was like a scene from “1984”. The phone starts rising, then the fax and finally TV starts producing noises. Then another nice surprise, after the check-in at 5.30 they told us that we will likely not fly before 11. While smoking in the cage (yes it actually looks like a cage) an older guy told us that his son-in-law is the pilot and that they knew we wouldn’t take off before 11 but they send us there earlier so that they not pay the bill in the hotel. Hahaha, I didn’t expect better from a Serbian company anyway. After we finally were almost near Belgrade, a great fog started appearing around airport again. So after flying around for 20 mins they decided to fly to Nish and land there, some 250 km away.

The Nish airport is quite a good joke. The area between passport control and landing is a corridor with removable side doors, and on the left side there is a small fence that you can jump over and go inside from the other side. Oh, and it was quite funny to see a file-storing room, apparently they use that as a database instead of a computer. Not to mention that there were 4 planes at the airport, around 600 people and 1 policeman stamping passports. And of course once through there is one luggage line and 600 passengers to hustle with in order to get your luggage. Adorable, ain’t it?

Finally I got home and am happy to be back in the motherland, even if it takes ages to get there!!!