Life brings unexpected surprises and also Facebook does. Yeah, yeah, I know Facebook is a social utility that connects people 🙂 but this time has really helped for me to see a long-time friend from Havana here in Belgrade. It turns out that this girl, that I have not seen in ten years is married to a Serbian guy who now lives with her in Podgorica, Montenegro.

After someone uploaded an old picture of me on Facebook she found me and we became “friends”. We exchanged some messages about our whereabouts in the last decade and about the possibility of seeing each other in Serbia, since I knew I was visiting for a while and voilá, I was speaking Cuban Spanish in the streets of Beograd for the last few days. A present from the destiny.

We have had so much fun together joking, eating and drinking, like good Cubans and Serbians like to do. There is nothing more wonderful that meeting friends abroad, in foreign places where life has happily placed us for one reason or another.

The excitement of the first day meeting left us drunk and hoarse. We were screaming at the same time we remembered old sayings, jokes, music and friends. We realized that stories sounded better and funnier with the time and the distance. The twenties are gone but the energy and the positive ways continue as strong as before. It is great to see that good spirits do not change easily.

Thanks to the amount of food we consumed we managed to survive the weekend. Serbians love their barbecue meat so there was no lack of that. We commented on how a Cuban family can eat for a week with the total quantity of meat we had. We ate at a very nice restaurant with live music, in Skadarlija area, called “Sesir Moj” (My Hat). At night we went to Zemun, a municipality on the other side of the city which is very famous for its seafood restaurants along the Danube river. We ended up eating AGAIN and drinking MORE at a fancy Kafana named Talas. The food was delicious, the octopus in particular and the sound of the music playing and people singing traditional songs while drinking rakija was mind-blowing.

Around 1:30 am, we took a cab to go to Novi Beograd (New Belgrade). At this time of the year the rafts along the riverbank are already opened as live music bars or night clubs. We found a not so crowded place with a band playing covers and we danced Cuban style like nobody was watching. 😀

I am not sure yet which city will become our permanent residence but all I can assure is that no matter where you are if you have a good friend or two around you can feel at home.