Accompanied by 4 litres of sparkling water, 2 litres of still, 3 litres of beer and 1 of Coca Cola, some jelly beans, pretzels, pistachios, twix, peaches, bananas and cereal bars, and with a 24 hour train journey ahead of me, I’m now comfortably positioned in my couchette, complete with washbaisin a la Phileas Fogg, and in a position to bring you up to speed.

Belgrade is a difficult city to love. Arriving at the train station, anybody with any idea about the place knows not to expect neoclassical facades and sweeping avenues.

Even the decrepid, seen-better-days grandeur and Soviet kitsch that pulls the punters into Budapest or Prague is often missing here. Parts are, to be frank, pretty ordinary- run down but without any ‘character’ with which to redeem themselves.

But though the Belgrade is difficult to love and far from easy on the eye, It’s equally tough not to leave with a certain amount of respect for it- or, perhaps, the kind of sly admiration one has for the fat woman flaunting her stuff in the water without giving a damn. It’s a city with thick skin that knows how to have a good time.

The budget airlines haven’t made it here yet, which means people are generally pleased to see you. Your feeble attempts at Serbian are greeted with a slap on the back and a reply in their best English. It’s a friendly place, and at 11 at night, you’ll find the streets lined with families, groups of kids, couples and seniors eating ice creams and drinking beers. There are plenty of bars, hidden in basements and alleyways- the legacy of the various opposition groups to Milosovic in the 1990s. It may be ugly, but it’s got the kind of contagious, care-free attitude that reminds me of New Orleans.

As a history and politics student, it would be dishonest though to pretend that I hadn’t visited Belgrade with a good knowledge of its past, and curiousity about the place we all grew up seeing on TV as a war zone. Traces though are hard to come by, and you have to make quite a consious effort to find them.

One place is the Military Museum which is located in the red-brick Napoleonic-era citidel on the hill and which dominates the city. Alongside flourescent-lit perspex cabinets that have seen better days, containing old military uniforms, swords, and fez going back to pre-history, there’s a seperate exhbit on the 1990 war.Here you can see a piece of that stealth fighter wing the Serbs managed to down during the war, the uniform of one of the captured US soldiers I remember seeing paraded on TV via CNN, as well as remnants of a NATO cluster bomb and horrific photos as a reminder of their grisly work.

What was unusual about Serbia, of course, is that you can visit the museum in the morning, walk past Lush and the Nike store and have lunch in one of the McDonald’s signposted across the city. A couple of blocks away lies the remains of the old State TV headquarters, witth a missile shaped hole gorged out of the frontage. Meanwhile, a nearby construction site for a new cultural center bears a sign delcaring ‘New $3.5m project: A Gift of the American People’, whilst many buses carry similar messages of goodwill from the governments of Japan and Switzerland.

I’m sure that most Serbianse just happy that the buses now run on time, wherever they’ve come from. But still, you have to wonder how it feels for a country with such a long history to have parts of your infrastructure donated by foreigners.

Sitting there, I begin to imagine whether this might be Baghdad in 10 years time. All I can say is that it’s looking off schedule at the moment, and on appearances Albright’s efforts at nation building here seem to have had more succes than Rumsfeld’s. But either way, whether we take it for granted or not, the relentless march of freedom across the globe raises some questions.

Once EasyJet arrives, will Belgrade be distinguishable from Cologne?

The idea that people should stay in poverty or repression for the sake of ‘traditional culture’ and the tourists is pretty grotesque. It’s also rediculous to pretend that the the sweep of international culture across the globe can be rolled back, or that we’d all be better boxed off again.

Serbians are doing better and partying harder than during the bleakness of the Milosovic years, that’s self-evident, confirmed by brief conversations with Serbian young people. But does ‘liberation’ and ‘regime change’ have to mean that every city becomes identical? In another 9 years, will Belgrade be much different to Cologne and other ‘mainstream’ cities?