Flightster

Serbian Royalty for a Weekend

• by Alan Perlman
• on November 1st, 2010
• 4 Comments

Sometimes life throws you lemons. You get stuck in an old, smelly elevator. Your car is rear-ended. Just before leaving on the trip of a lifetime, a loved one falls seriously ill.

Other times, though, it seems as if the world is shining down upon you. You hit the game-winning shot. You land a lucrative client at the office and are promoted. You find an old t-shirt you thought had been lost for months.

During the summer of 2008, the world was most certainly shining down upon me. My brother, two friends and I were romping around Eastern Europe, and when we arrived in Serbia, we were treated like royalty, literally, for a weekend. We slept in the Royal Palace, had our own bodyguards, a photographer and tour guide escort us around the city and shared meals with the Crown Prince and Princess.

Let me explain.

It all started my freshman year of college. As I began to meet people on my freshman floor, I took mental notes. David, the musician. John, the architect. That guy who smells funny and plays a lot of World of Warcraft. That girl whose grandparents are the Crown Prince and Princess of Yugoslavia.

Wait, what?

Fast forward to graduation, and in the final weeks of school, everyone is talking about their plans for the summer, for additional schooling, for future employment (or lack thereof). I happen to tell this girl, the one from my freshman floor, that my brother, some friends and I would be traveling around Eastern Europe for a few weeks following a trip to Israel and Turkey.

Her eyes light up. “Ooh! I’ll be in Belgrade with my family! You should come visit!”

At that point, I had forgotten why she would have been in Belgrade. “I think her grandparents live there,” I told my brother. Our travel group of four had not made any particular plans for the Eastern European portion of the trip, so I made another mental note to try and work Belgrade into the train schedule.

I had sent this girl a Facebook message a couple of weeks before our intended arrival, just to make sure that she would be in town. She advised us to stay in a hostel and said that she would come pick us up the morning after we had arrived.

You can imagine our surprise when we found out that we were being taken to the Serbian Royal Compound. As we climbed the palace stairs and laid our ratty backpacks down inside, tourists walked through some of the adjacent rooms, snapping photographs, unaware of the bearded travelers just next door. We marveled at the size, the architecture, the artwork.

Throughout the weekend, we explored the compound with golf carts, were escorted around Belgrade by a professional tour guide, photographer and bodyguards and even partied in the basement of the Royal Palace—where Slobodan Milošević used to play billiards and watch movies.

My brother and I shared a bed that the King of Sweden had slept in before we had arrived. Each night, we sat down to dinner with the Crown Prince and Princess and discussed politics, philosophy and travel. We drank Carlsberg while a private Italian chef served up delicious soups and pastas. We learned that the Crown Prince is a strong proponent of recreating a constitutional-monarchy in Serbia. He first came to Yugoslavia in 1991 and actively worked with the democratic opposition against Slobodan Milošević, moving into the Royal Palace and finally having his citizenship restored (and property that had been seized from his family, returned) in March 2001.

His wife, the Crown Princess, dedicates the majority of her time to humanitarian organizations within Serbia and the United States. I was amazed to hear that she speaks English, Greek, Serbian, French and some Spanish. What a woman!

If only I had a tape recorder to have better documented those discussions.

We visited the Serbian National Zoo and were escorted into some of the hottest nightclubs, blasting techno music on the water. We were ferried around town like VIPs, in stark contrast to the way we had been traveling and living during the first part of our trip.

Growing up, my grandfather always told me, “It’s not what you know in life. It’s who you know.” He couldn’t have been more right!

photo from perry_eller

Alan Perlman

Alan Perlman travels the world as an international cost-of-living surveyor. When he's not hunting for the price of female undergarments in places like Syria, Rwanda and Turkmenistan, he's hanging out in Boston, MA, staying active, meeting people and brainstorming business models. You can read more about Alan and his plans to conquer life at his blog, The 9 to 5 Alternative.