The question you have all been wondering: Where does he get his shoes?

As some of you know, I'm kind of a big guy. I'm two meters tall and my weight is about 0,11 tonns. Which also, not surprisingly gives me pretty big feet, size 49/50 to be precise. It turnes out that the shoes I brought is not good enough for the Serbian winter. I brought sandals, sneakers and some light footwear. Not anything suitable for the wet, wild, chilly Balkan conditions. So join me in my Serbian adventure: The hunt for the new winter shoes.

After discussing with some of my Serbian friends, we came to the conclusion that the most likely place to find a pair of shoes for me was the Chinese marked. Which conveniently enough is located in the wonderful city of Pančevo. The Chinese marked is a huge "flee marked" mostly consisting of new products imported from China. You can get practically anything here, everything from exclusive female stockings to huge drills and saws, sizes most men only can dream about.
So I went to the marked together with Danijel to get some shoes, among other things. We started walking around the area looking for different stuff. Danijels brother have actually got his own little store at the marked, and Danijel knows a lot of the people working there, so he's a great guide. When we met some of his acquaints, and I started taking pictures with my big camera, Danijel started telling them about how I worked in Interpol and that they would all go to jail for selling bad stuff. It was pretty funny, some of them started being a little bit scared

This guy was among other things selling a lot of pirate movies.

Finally we started searching for some good shoes...

No shoes here...

not here either...

No shoes here ....

Hmm, this looks like big winter shoes...

Still no shoes...

Finally, we found some places selling shoes, but when we told the size they started laughing and screaming.We found a lot of shoes but nobody had the right size. Finally we asked one Chinese guy if he had any winter boots in size 50, after some surprised looks at my feet he started speaking Chinese with some people, making some phone calls, and then he walked a way. When these people speak Chinese it sounds pretty much like when they speak Serbian, they have an very strong accent which is really funny to listen to. After some minutes the Chinese guy came back, and after some more minutes another Chinese showed up and they started screaming and yelling loudly to each other. He had brought with him a box containing a nice pair of shoes in size 50, but it turned out that these where a little bit to big. But we followed after the guy with the box and finally ... I was wearing a nice pair of boots in size 49. I bought them for the convenient price of 2000 dinars, equal to about 200 NOK. Happy and warm I was now ready for my trip to the south of Serbia; to Niš and Leskovac (a place which is supposed to host the best Hamburgers in all of Serbia)! More about the trip in a future post...