BBC - Around the World - Ariel's 'Foreign Bureau' - 28 June 2005 - by Matthew Prodger, correspondent, Belgrade

Milosevic, gangsters and beautiful women….three images that were foremost in the minds of my British friends when I told them I was moving to Belgrade.

It’s true – much to the frustration of my Serbian colleagues – that many of the stories I do here for the BBC have their roots in the Milosevic era: the hunt for war criminals, the unresolved status of Kosovo, the plight of refugees from Croatia and Bosnia.

There’s also a fascination abroad with the Belgrade mafia that overran, or rather ran, the country for many years.

But there’s much more than that. Belgrade is a great place to live. Pretty? No. Good shopping? Not really. An efficient and modern infrastructure? Hardly. But restaurants are cheap and plentiful, you can get a box at the opera for £6, and the nightlife is unrivalled. Bars open late (‘closing time’ is not a phrase often heard here), and in the summer you can relocate to the boats which line the rivers Danube and Sava and continue the partying until sunrise.

That presents it own problems – like checking one’s watch at four in the morning and praying that today is not the day that Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadzic – Europe’s two most wanted fugitives – are arrested.

Then there’s the weather – boiling hot in the summer, freezing cold in the winter and not much in between. My own experience is that Serbs enjoy talking about it at least as much as the British.

Within a short flight and a bit of driving lie tiny Montenegro and its two Unesco world heritage sites, Macedonia’s beautiful Lake Ohrid, the green hills and wild coastline of Albania, the Ottoman charm of the Bosnian capital Sarajevo, and Croatia’s Dalmatian coastline. You can even go skiing in Kosovo.

Travelling across the former Yugoslav republics does have its own postwar hazards. I have learned that: it is not wise to speak Serbian in Kosovo, except in a Serbian enclave where it is not wise to speak Albanian; do not leave a car with Serbian registration plates parked in a street in southern Croatia – you may find the tyres flat when you return; remember that as far as Slovenia is concerned, it is not in the Balkans, it’s in the EU; get used to being accused of bias by every ethnic group; and don’t ask a man wearing a Radovan Karadzic T-shirt to do a vox pop for the BBC.

The BBC remains the only foreign broadcaster with a permanent presence in the region, the others having pulled out long ago when the focus switched to Iraq. As a correspondent it means there’s little competition and plenty of good stories that few others are covering.

It also means that I feel an added responsibility to get the story right – not easy when local media reports can often be unreliable, biased or plain wrong, and getting information from official sources can be difficult. So the presence of experienced colleagues from the BBC’s various language services in the region is an invaluable asset.

When I took up my post last year it was cold, wet, grey and miserable. A correspondent who used to work here advised me to stick with it – ‘Soon it will be one of your favourite places.’