I went to the train station the night before setting off to get a ticket to Nis, as the station was only 5 minutes from where I was eating that evening. I had asked in the hostel what the train times were and the woman helping me thought that the ticket office should be open, but I was going expecting it to be closed, as it was about 9pm when I was going. The ticket office was open and I bought a ticket for the for the fast train to Nis the next day.

I got to the station on time and had to ask if the train at the platform was to Nis, as it wasn’t clear from the signage on the platform and the train was pretty dirty. I got on and it was easily the dirtiest train I’ve ever been on, with graffiti on the outside, windows you couldn’t see through because they were so filthy and very smelly toilets. There was one smelly man taking up a whole compartment with his bags of what I presume were rubbish, because of the smell. The woman sitting opposite me wiped down her seat with a wet-wipe before sitting on it and I was slightly dubious about my one before sitting on it, but they were all leather, so could have only been so dirty. There were people smoking in the corridor, which I didn’t mind too much, as they all did it with the window open. I actually remember thinking at some point that a blind had been closed or something had been done to obstruct my view out of the window, but all that had happened was that the window had been closed and you couldn’t see through it to the outside. It got opened again fairly shortly after.

I was expecting a slightly faster, nicer train to Nis. The train arrived about an hour after I was expecting it to, but someone I asked in the corridor seemed to think that it was getting there at the right time, so I can only assume that the woman in the hostel had been wrong. The person that I spoke to in the corridor about the train times had just got out of a temporary detention centre for not paying his child benefit to his wife in Norway, which was fun! I got to Nis and walked around trying to figure out where I was, as it didn’t seem to match up with my mental image of what the area outside the station should have looked like.

I went and got a Burek in a cafe and looked at the map. The area I was in was nothing like the map, so I got a taxi to the hostel. The train station was actually a 5-minute taxi drive from the hostel and the station on the map on the website was a small local station that was rarely used. I wasn’t exactly where I thought I was going to be but I managed to find the hostel.

The next 2 days were spent walking around Nis, which is Serbia’s 2nd biggest city. The woman were far more attractive in Nis and this was noticeable, as I had been in Belgrade wondering where all the attractive Serbian women were. They’re in Nis. I walked around the Citadel, walked around the parks, went to the Red Cross Concentration Camp Museum and bought some new trousers.