I have 7.5 liters of sljivovica in my bag.
Now that is a souve-freaking-nir

I intentionally left room in my huge pack when I came to Belgrade because I knew I'd want to bring souvenirs home. My bag was light when I left Houston. It is very, very heavy now.

"How much rakija you want?" Mladen asked tonight as I was getting all my stuff ready to go.

"Fill up one of these bottles," I said, pointing to a plastic bottle of water sitting on the table in the common room.

"That's it?" He sounded rather disappointed in me, like a dad from Alabama finding out his only son was gay. "This is just two liter."

"How much do you have?" I asked. I'd thought my request was too much, not too little.

"Ten liter."

"Okay then, I'll take more."

He picked up a different plastic bottle. "This one is 1.5 liter."

My bag is now holding 7.5 liters of this shit.

Rakija is not stuff you can mess around with, either. It's serious stuff. You don't take shots of it. You sip it. And then you sip some water. Even tough, crazy Serbs like Mladen follow this rule.

Osama bin Mladen

Let me repeat this: I have 7.5 liters of homemade Serbian rakija in my bag that I am checking from Belgrade.

"You gonna be on CNN," Mladen just told me when I marveled at how much freaking rakija that is.

This stuff is no joke. I had nose hair until three days ago, when I made the mistake of sniffing my shot glass of it before I took a sip. And I'm taking home the good stuff: sljivovica, known in English as plum brandy. There was a Czech guy here at the Black Catz the other night who thought he was tough. While we were sipping our glasses, he was shooting his, despite my warnings. His friend, though, listened to our warnings.

Guess which one is which, 30 minutes later.