There's nothing scary in Serbia - except Jelen and other domestic beers. Rakija could be scary as well, but only if you drink too much.

Oh, I don't know, one measure of it made me nervous. :-D But I don't usually drink spirits.

I went to the Guča trumpet festival. It's pretty intense. Things like rifles being fired into the air in the crowd at a music festival is scary to me. This is something I might associate with the Middle East, not Europe.

The T-shirts on sale were another example. My Cyrillic is poor and my Czech is too but I can understand a bit. One was in English: "I am Vladimir Putin, and what I put in, stays there." The ones praising "war heroes" were worrying, too.

On my train back to Budapest the last time I was there, the crop-haired older gentleman opposite me was reading "Ветеран" magazine and a biography of a general.

The general impression I got was that here was a country whose sympathies lie East, not West.

At the time, I lived in Czechia, and I drove to Guča with some friends. The cultural difference from where I lived and where we drove in a single day -- and we didn't drive fast -- was shocking.

On my next visit, I had an overnight stop.