The Kingdom of Aleksandar has changed. Just how much becomes apparent in a series of very short sketches from early summer I wrote for the Croatian independent portal Lupiga.

Uroš is drinking vodka together with his morning coffee in Subotica. “The system here is much better than in the West”, he says. “You only have the system. We live in the cracks of the system”.

His boss owes him several weeks of wages. Uroš opens another 100 ml bottle of vodka.

Butter costs more than 400 Dinars in local supermarkets.

A bar of ordinary chocolate costs more than 300.

The barber’s friend returns to the barbershop in Belgrade. He is holding his wrist. “The guy hit me and bailed”, he says. He had accompanied a costumer to the next ATM.

The guy had said he didn’t have any money for the haircut Goki just gave him. The bill was 1.800 Dinars. “Hit a guy for 15 Euros?”, Goki says in disbelief. “We have security cameras and will find him.”

(Read more about this incident in this vignette.)

They have put up huge TV screens in the windows of Palat Albanija. Every night, the screens show Serbian flags.

Around the corner, on a little wall on Sremska Ulica, there is a mural in the colors of the Serbian flag. “Kad se vojska na Kosovo vrati” the slogan on the flag reads.

Neither the screens nor the slogan on the mural were there on the last trip.

„On a street light in Novi Sad, a guy jumped out of his car to beat me up“, Ivan says. It was not the first time this happened. Ivan is not of pure Serb lineage. He doesn’t like people who care about pure blood, and says so openly. Some people here don’t like that.

The government has finally admitted that Jared Kushner bought the old General Staff building and the old Ministry of Defense. NATO had bombed them out in 1999.

“They didn’t say a word when Kushner was in Belgrade”, says my old friend Pera. “They signed the contract back then, and kept it secret.” They still keep secret how little Donald Trump’s son-in-law paid for the prime real estate.

Kushner will build a luxury hotel there for 500 million dollars. Another Belgrade Waterfront, just smaller.

They have finally finished the train station at Prokop. Sort of. There are still cranes here, and another wing needs to be built. At least they have a café and a bakery in there now.

Prokop is still called Beograd Centar, and hasn’t moved an inch closer to the center.

There still aren’t enough bus and trolley lines to the city center.

“Croats are all Serbs, they just forgot”, my taxi driver from Montenegro tells me. “Bosnjaks are all Serbs. And we Montenegrins, too. And also the Macedonians. They just forgot because the West told them they were something else.”

He is trying to charge me 2.000 Dinars for a ride to Beograd Sajam. Like at the bus station, the cab drivers waiting at Prokop are all crooks.

The fastest trains between Belgrade and Niš take six hours and 17 minutes. There are only four connections per day. There is a bus connection every hour, and it’s usually just a bit over 3 hours. There are no trains between Belgrade and Kragujevac.

A statue of King Nemanja in front of the former central train station in Belgrade compensates Kralj Aleksandar’s subjects for the fact that the center of the country’s rail network was sacrificed for the Belgrade Waterfront project. It’s turboarhitektura, made in Russia.

What will they get for Kushner’s project?

The mayor of Belgrade wants to close Muzej Jugoslavije. He wants Tito’s remains to be moved to his birthplace in Kumrovec. “No more Yugonostalgia”, he says.

At Ada Ciglanja, an old man goes from table to table in a small restaurant. “Are you still eating this?”, he asks us and points at a plate with two ćevapi on it. “No”. He stuffs the ćevapi in his plastic bag.

Gasoline costs around 200 Dinars. In Bosnia, it’s 2 Marks 60. That’s a third less.

Kralj Aleksandar went to New York to defend his people against Srebrenica.

Nenad asks me: “When were you here last time?”

“Last year”.

“What has changed?”, Nenad asks me.

“It has gotten worse”, I say.

This piece has been originally written for and published in translation by Lupiga.