I’ve had a variation of a Beach Boys’ song stuck in my head this week:

🎵 Serbia, Croatia, ooh I wanna take ya / Bosnia, Slovenia, North Macedonia / Albania, Montenegro, baby why don’t we go? / To Greece not Kosovo 🎵

Serbia has been a different travel style for us. We usually wander and visit monuments, museums and churches, but they don’t have many to see. To quote an Australian child out of context, “There’s not much to do here.” They do, however, have cheap, amazing food. And so we eat. Between the crepes, brew pubs and fantastic BBQ, we have been spoiled with delicious cuisine. We are adding extra walks to keep up with the high caloric intake.

We got to meet up with my aunt and uncle’s friends, and it was fascinating to gain an inside perspective on Serbian culture and the work of God in Novi Sad.

Then in Nis we saw the tower of skulls left over from an Ottoman intimidation campaign.

We crossed the border into Bulgaria and it seemed like they might forbid us entry. Every stamp on my passport made the border agent shake her head and roll her eyes. She asked to meet the husband that I claimed was traveling with me, but Aaron’s new haircut didn’t match his year-old picture. Earlier he had jokingly complained that the Serbian border agent hadn’t complimented the update, and now he was trying to flatten it out to show how he used to look. She was perplexed that Americans could possibly be interested in tourism in Bulgaria, and she didn’t trust that Aaron’s passport with 52 pages was legit. I wish I knew what was going through her head and what interesting back stories she might have assigned us, but she rolled her eyes again and stamped us through.

We had two nights and a full day in Sofia, so we visited the churches and took a food tour.

Tomorrow we go to Romania.