And the final country of our third continent is hear – Serbia. We’ve just arrived in Subotica (pronounced Subotitsa) right in the north of the country, close to the border of Hungary (which we will fly out of at the end of the month) and not far from Romania (we may pop back to visit Mihai if we can make a quick enough trip on a day off…).
We were blessed with a couple of days off in between finishing up in Vidin and travelling to here, which we spent visiting Bulgaria’s capitol, Sofia. We stayed in a hostel in the city centre and were able to get some R&R, even getting to briefly see Team 2:20 (who we had stayed with in Romania) as they came in to start their month in Bulgaria, having spent this last month in Serbia (we’ve switched countries, although we’re each going to different ministries).
We enjoyed some of the restaurants and food outlets (including McDonalds… yes I know…) and got to see a lot of the sights by taking the free walking tour. There’s a lot of history to the country, dating back to Roman times, and it turns out that the Cyrillic script, which many people associate with Russia, was invented and first used by Bulgarians. A few of us also went to see The Hunger Games at the cinema (in English with Bulgarian subtitles) on our first night, which unsurprisingly is not as good as the book, but definitely a good starting point if you want to then go on to read the books 🙂
So, last night we bundled ourselves and our many packs (seven of us, but we take up the space of probably 12 people because our packs are the size of us) into two taxis and headed to the train station. Itinerary – 10 hour train ride (including a time zone switch, I’m now only 1 hour ahead of the UK), 1.5 hour layover in Belgrade (at 5.30am local time), 4.5 hour train ride to Subotica, rounded off with two more taxis to get us to our location. Not too bad as travel days go, quite short in fact. But this one had a slight twist.
The border crossing itself (on the train between Sofia and Belgrade) was relatively uneventful, although it’s a little disconcerting when out of the group of seven of you only two have their passports taken away for inspection (all were stamped of course) and yours is one of them. Eventually the border police did return our passports and we settled down to carry on. I remarked that they seemed pretty thorough in making sure people weren’t being smuggled in (Eastern Europe is a hub for trafficking) and that was good, but that we could be smuggling anything in our packs and they wouldn’t have known.
Anyway, getting off in Belgrade, my other team mates (we had been split across two compartments) told us what they had experienced. After the border crossing, as we approached a later station, a man from another compartment (a man who seemed to know one of the two other ladies in my compartment too) had entered their compartment to reclaim something he had stored in there. My team mates watched in amazement (and some fear) as he retrieved from under their seat two separate parts of a rifle… I realised at this point that the woman in our compartment had also helped them retrieve a long package from the parcel shelf that could easily have (and therefore I think did) contained another rifle. So apparently we witnessed weapons being smuggled into the country.
I don’t know what would have happened if they had been found by the police however, since their owners had purposefully left them in compartments that they themselves weren’t staying in. They left them in ours. Believe me, this would be a very different blog entry if they had been found by the authorities…
Not really sure what my response to all of this is yet. We’re just happy that we are all here safely and we’re ready to start another month of ministry.
