This one's for you, Hari

The food here in the Balkans is good. Not great, or life-changing or anything, but it's good. I like grilled meat, and they grill meat well here. At every restaurant that's not fancy but not quite fast food, there is cevapi. (The c should have an accent on it but I'm on the wrong kind of keyboard.) Cevapi is pieces of sausage served inside pita-like bread that's not quite strong enough to support the sausages, with a fork stuck in it and no knife to be seen. I alternated between spearing the sausage with the fork and pickıng it up with pieces of bread; I didn't notice any more elegant ways of eating it. In Muslim-plurality Bosnia, they eat a lot of lamb. At lamb restaurants in the hills, they hang the lamb's skin outside to show that it's fresh. The lamb is grass-fed and kind of a big deal, but lamb is not my favorite meat under the best conditions and Bosnian lamb was just too gamey/flavorful for me. In Serbia they eat more pork; roasted and in the form of homemade bacon were particularly good. Desserts are fancy and pretty and, in my experience, not as good as they look. Oh, and meat/cheese/spinach pies are good. There are bakeries everywhere.

In addition to espresso and Nescafe, they drink what the rest of the world would call Turkish coffee, but here they call it Bosnian or Serbian coffee. The beer is adequate but nothing special; there is this Montenegrin beer whose name I forget (I think there is only one Montenegrin beer, or only one that you would see outside of Montenegro anyway) that I think is a little better than the other Balkan beers. The local (also Montenegrin) wines I've tried have also been adequate, but I haven't tried very many. Also, you know how drunks, or people who just happen to be drunk, ooze that alcohol smell? I feel like I get that way every time I have a drink here. Weird.