My experience this semester can be likened to a bus ride. Before coming to Belgrade, I had almost no experience navigating public transit independently, having grown up in suburban Massachusetts, where public transportation is practically nonexistent. My host family lived in Zemun, an outer district of Belgrade easily accessible by bus but farther than I […]

In my fourth blog post, I wrote about local protests against air pollution in Belgrade. On a national level, another source of protests is the government’s plan to expand mining, specifically lithium mining with the foreign company Rio Tinto. Protesters manages to delay the project in 2022, but the war has not been won yet. […]

Walking through Belgrade, it is impossible not to notice the political graffiti. The messages are huge (see the last picture for scale), aggressive, and displayed prominently all over the city. They are in countless high-traffic areas, including the bus stop I used for class. The graffiti conveys a dangerous message of nationalism and militarism. They […]

Environmental activism is uncommon in Serbia. Most discourse seems to revolve around issues of politics – autocratization, corruption, EU membership, the wars of the 90s, Kosovo’s independence, migrants, recent school shootings … the list goes on and on. There are protests against environmental issues, uncommon as they are. Air pollution is the most unifying topic. […]

When you return to your sit spot this week, take a moment to close your eyes and breathe, listen, smell, feel. Open your eyes and consider the word community in relation to your spot.  As I open my eyes and pick up my pencil to begin my reflection, a tiny bug lands on the journal […]

For this prompt, I am away from my usual sit spot. We are on a two-week excursion — one week in Budapest and one in Vienna. Despite spending only a short time in each location, I will try to answer some of the questions expressed in the prompt. In both cities, we were able to […]

Serbia is a landlocked nation, but Yugoslavia, which Serbia was part of until its violent collapse in the 1990s, had a seaside via Croatia and Montenegro. An older woman I spoke to lamented the loss of her country which “had it all” in terms of nature. Although Serbia has no seaside, it is by no […]