Belgrade train station must seem unforgiven at the best of times. Its concrete facades have the dinge of neglect and the pistachio green pillars bearing the 'Belgrade' sign can't have seen a lick of paint since the break up of Yugoslavia.
Today, however, it looks especially bleak, under siege as it is from a formless, slate grey sky and a steady streamy of arrow straight rain.
I run for the cover of the International ticket office (there are no apologies that our train was over three hours late arriving this morning) and soon wish I'd have stayed in the sopping wet.
The woman at the desk is simply not cut out for the service industry. I ask for the price for a couchette to Venice, and she simply shrugs moodily, as if I've asked her for advice on my premium bonds. I see a price guide closed on her desk and gesture to it. She snaps at me, claiming I should know. I'm tired and have nowhere to go in a hurry, so I decide to irritate her a little more.
It's like poking a starved pitbull as I stand there and continue to ask in different tones about the train to Bergamo (knowing full well there is no such route). She eventually relents, takes off her glasses and, with perfect straight face, confounds me with her heretofor unproven English grasp:
"Fuck off you."
She calmly draws the blind and there is to be no service whatsoever from the International ticket desk today, much to my amusement and fellow commuters' annoyance.
I wait for five hours with no money (as I've broken my card the smallest denomination of euros at my disposal is a 50 and I'm not about to change this all into Serbian. The rain continues to pour down and, just as I think the day can't get any more mundane and miserable, the announcement comes that there shall be no trains to Venice today. At all.
I board the night train to Munich which stops at Zagreb along the way and takes its sweet time doing. There are no sleeper carriages so I sit huffily as an unwashed Frenchman sits unceremoniously opposite. The Croatian lady next to him is cleary unimpressed and her impressions could hardly improved as said smelly Frenchman bites salaciously on an overripe tomato, sending pips and juice flying across her newly starched-white top. Sacre bleu.
The night is long in coming and stubborn in passing. I feign sleep with my feet arcoss the narrow gap between seats - after two of the rudest, avaricious Austrian girls woke us up because they had nowhere to lay down, so, instead of two people not sleeping, all four of us could now lay distainfully awake. Come back aeroplanes, all is forgiven!
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