Nis ... who knew?

This morning, I headed out of the room before Mike woke up because the sounds from the open market below my window were calling me with their promise of delicious fresh fruit.

Unfortunately, the produce was rotten and disgusting, so I took a few photos and got out of there.

I wandered into town and, ashamedly, got a Happy Meal for lunch.

And that, of course, made me think of Osijek, and how much I miss Croatia.

I went back to the room at noon to fetch Mike, and we went for a wander.

We saw a Serbian-Idol type of show holding auditions (sadly, no one there spoke enough English to explain it to us), and then we sat on a terrace, had a coffee, and people-watched for an hour. The cafe was very cool; the interior was like a train, and you actually had to open a sliding train door to get into the bathroom.

We found a fortress and walked around there for a while, noticing how different Nis feels from Belgrade and Novi Sad. We're quite close to Kosovo here, so perhaps there are a lot of Albanians around? I'm not too sure. Showing up in Nis unexpectedly has thrown us for a loop!

We knew we wouldn't be back to Serbia again, so before we got on the bus we wanted to spend Mike's remaining dinars (worth about 5 euros total). What a mission that turned out to be! We bought all kinds of snacks, drinks, everything else that we needed for the next couple of days and we still didn't go through it all!

We caught the bus at 4pm and had a really nice ride with some very cute soldiers in uniform sitting in front of us.

I'll save the story of our arrival in Sofia for my next entry... it's a doozy!