We had no idea that the most favorite form of travel from student days is still functioning, and that we Serbs have not been expelled from that God-given organization. Our destination was the city of Giessen near Frankfurt, more precisely the Justus Liebig University, where one of our companions was awaited by the chance of a lifetime embodied in Professor Schmidt, an expert in the field of molecular biology whom we contacted by e-mail, thank you.
And really, the inter-rail is still working, we are not excluded from it, the stamp is calculated at the exchange rate of six dinars, and the total ticket is about DM per person over 26 years old. There was a confusion about the timetable - it turned out that the agency only has a timetable from last year - and we were a bit depressed, like "oh, we knew something was going to go wrong".
However, the Germans have not changed the timetable since last year why would they? We asked how to get to that Giessen, and they told us to go via Vienna, where we would change to another train to Frankfurt and then a third to our destination. You have to go to Vienna again via Novi Sad, since the railway bridge connecting Belgrade to this suffering city was destroyed.
With the inter-rail tickets of the Yugoslav Railways in our hands and the feeling that one hundred percent something will go wrong, we set off on our journey.
At the station in Novi Sad, flashes from the past are shining, whether we like it or not. With rucksacks on our backs in our student days, we traveled all over Europe by inter-rail, we ran away from first-class conductors, we slept in campsites or on roofs We somehow overcame the painful and unhealthy imposed comparison by pretending that we were still young so what, I'm over 30 years old, but I'm young in spirit, after all, the whole world travels inter-rail.
