Tied up alongside Restoran Vodenica  just across the road from the lower edges of the Belgrade Fortress.  The restaurant/barge was a family business and the owners were very helpful.  There was power and water for DoraMac.  We would climb off DoraMac, walk through the outdoor seating area, through the restaurant and out the front door.  Thankfully it was not a “music blaring restaurant” and most diners were gone by 11 pm though I think the quiet Serbian conversations just outside our portholes lulled me to sleep.

“The first raft restaurant in the old Belgrade anchored at the mouth of the river Sava and the Danube below Belgrade Fortress Kalemegdan-, near the Nebojsa Tower and only 200 m away, as the crow flies, from the monument ,, Winner ".     (The Victor monument.)

     Name a fish restaurant ,, VODENICA "resulting from an authentic and warm interior of the old oak beams, taken from more than 370-year-old Serbian mills.”

www.restoranvodenica.co.rs

We had a lovely dinner our first night:  grilled catfish and more potato with Swiss chard.

Our final night we walked across Belgrade to meet a longtime work colleague of Rick’s.  We passed through some charming older neighborhoods with cafes and art an art gallery. 

Randal managed to withdraw money from the corner ATM while the light counted down to 0 at which point the red man would turn green and we could cross.  It had started at 90 seconds, Randal began the transaction at 50,  and there were about 20 seconds still left when he finished. 

Restaurant at the corner

These symbols were embedded in the sidewalk

The cigarette is circled in red but there’s no line through it implying that you could smoke indoors!

Nikola Tesla Museum

We stopped at the Teslar Museum just in time for the last tour of the day.  I really knew nothing about Tesla and know pretty much nothing about how electricity works, but the tour guide did a great job so made it interesting and fun.  Wish I’d had her for a science teacher.  She reminded me of the TV Mr Wizard but with a sense of humor.

The museum is quite underfunded, the public toilets were out of commission and the show and tell equipment had to be coaxed and jerry-rigged into working. 

“In the middle of 1882 he travelled to Paris to join Edison’s Continental Company, and in 1883 moved to Strasbourg and made the prototype of the induction motor. In 1884 he travelled to USA to start working in Edison’s company. In 1885 he left Edison, founded his own "Tesla Arc & Light Co." and started producing motors and generators for polyphase alternate currents.

http://www.tesla-museum.org/meni_en.htm tells much more about Tesla, his discoveries and his collaboration with Westinghouse.

Nikola Tesla Museum is located in the central area of Belgrade, in a residential villa built in 1929 according to the project of Dragiša Brašovan, a distinguished Serbian architect. The building was used for various purposes until December 5, 1952, when Nikola Tesla Museum was founded in accordance with the decision of the Government of the Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia.

     The material for the Museum arrived in Belgrade according to the decision of the American court, which declared Mr. Sava Kosanovic, Tesla’s nephew, for the only rightful heir. In 1951, in accordance with Tesla’s last wish, Mr. Kosanovic transferred all the documents and Tesla’s personal things in Belgrade.

http://www.tesla-museum.org/meni_en/nt.php?link=tesla/t&opc=sub1

Nikola Tesla was born on July 10, 1856 in Smiljan, Lika, which was then part of  the Austo-Hungarian Empire, region of Croatia. His father, Milutin Tesla was a Serbian Orthodox Priest and his mother Djuka Mandic was an inventor in her own right of household appliances.  (Her father also had been a Serbian Orthodox Priest.)

http://www.teslasociety.com/biography.htm

Why Belgrade you ask? Below is from a visit Tesla made to Belgrade in 1892:

    “- I feel much more than I can say. Please do not measure the extent of my feelings by the weakness of my words… If I am fortunate enough to fulfill at least some of my ideals, that will do good for the whole of mankind. If that is achieved, I will be glad to say that a Serb has done it. 

     Then he took a specially decorated horse carriage to the Imperial Hotel which used to be near Captain Misha’s Building (today the Rectorate of Belgrade University). On June 2, he was received by the young Serbian King, Alexander Obrenovic. Tesla told the Serbian King that Belgrade will need to introduce electricity. The King was fascinated by Tesla’s words and demonstrations. Belgrade, at that time with a population of 60,000 people, got electricity the following year (1893). It was a huge and widely celebrated event. 

    The King wanted to award Tesla with the Medal of St. Sava for extraordinary contribution to science. But, since Tesla was legally a citizen of the United States of America, the medal was sent to him later on, via diplomatic postal service. The then US Secretary of State John Foster approved the action and Tesla got the medal of the Serbian King on January 27, 1893 – on Saint Sava Day.

http://www.teslasociety.com/serbia150.htm

In the third room of the Museum, in the gold-plated sphere on the marble pedestal is the urn with Tesla’s ashes. After death Tesla was cremated and the urn was transferred to Belgrade in 1957.

http://www.tesla-museum.org/meni_en/nt.php?link=tesla/t&opc=sub1   (I took no photos as I thought the guide said that would be disrespectful.)

A fight over Tesla’s ashes:

Inventor and scientist Nikola Tesla, whose ashes are to be moved from the museum bearing his name.

A furious dispute has erupted between Serbian scientists and the Orthodox church after it was announced that the remains of the inventor Nikola Tesla will be reburied in a church…….

A Facebook campaign, Leave Tesla Alone, started almost immediately after the announcement was made and has already gathered more than 30,000 supporters on social media who want to see Tesla’s ashes stay where they are.

http://www.theguardian.com/

I couldn’t have explained this but I found a blogger who could –

“Next they demonstrated the wireless transfer of electricity using a generator and fluorescent tubes filled with neon gas. They asked for volunteers to hold the tubes, and the other people were all a bit nervous so I volunteered. A couple of guys followed. The guide switched on the generator, and as little sparks of lightning shot out the top, the fluoro tubes – which we were holding a metre from the generator – all lit up like lightsabers.”

http://curiouscatontherun.wordpress.com/

Our group had lots of volunteers.  Unfortunately my tube lit up bright white, too hard to see in the daylight.  But you can see that your hands could limit the color change but I don’t remember why.

Put your finger near the lower part of the round spindle and you would get zapped.   If you actually touched it, nothing happened.  I tried this too.  You definitely heard the zap more than felt it. 

Under her photo are the words “Very little is known about May Cline,” and annoyingly that seems to be true if you’re limited to the Internet for information.  But I was interested in her because of her watercolors.

“May Cline (? – ?)

This is the woman who wrote the greatest amount of letters to Tesla. There is scarce information about her, i.e. her letters to him are not well-known because they were not explored. The archive of Nikola Tesla Museum in Belgrade keeps about 2500 her letters and different papers (newspaper articles, drawings, natal charts…), which tells us she wrote to him very often, almost every day. She exchanged letters with Tesla between 1891 and 1942. She lived in New Jersey. There are two of her books in Tesla’s library: “The Principles of Bird Flight“  (published in 1905) and “Trailing Evolution“.  She was a member of New York Academy of Sciences. There are no copies of his letters to her, so we do not know whether and how often Tesla answered to her. Many things about their relationship are still mysterious, and the mystery is greater because a long time will pass until her letters are deciphered, because she had very unreadable handwriting.  https://ru-ru.facebook.com/

From the museum we went off to meet Rick’s friend for dinner. 

Rick, Mary, Predrag and his wife Dr. Markovic who is a family practice doctor

Rick and Predrag are longtime work colleagues as well as friends.  We met at Pedrag’s computer software company after the Teslar Museum and then all went to dinner.  We all drove back to DoraMac for a brief visit.  I should have written down Dr. Markovic’s first name but I’m afraid I’ll mangle it as neither Rick or Mary is absolutely sure of the spelling. Draga perhaps?  They have a son studying engineering  and a daughter still in high school who is interested in art.