Apathy among citizens of Belgrade is being developed through years by the lack of interest of Belgrade city government to cooperate with citizens and byno transparency in decision making. This creates the atmosphere that especially a single citizen is small, insignificant, unable to change anything. Receiving this award gave me the new courage to continue doing what I've been doing successfully, nevertheless it was completely different city representatives that acknowledged work in my city, the city of Belgrade.
Since Velo-city 2013 participants from Serbia and the region were mostly the representatives of various NGO's (Beociklizacija, Novosadska biciklistička inicijativa, Sindikat biciklista etc.) and not a single government institution representative was present, I think that politically and business oriented Velo-city 2013 programme by its' nature couldn't contribute much to the knowledge of these NGO's.
Cycling Visionaries Awards were a good opportunity to meet representatives of other similar initiatives and NGO's from the countries that experience issues similar to the issues in Belgrade and Serbia, to connect and exchange experiences. Nevertheless, this could be done only informally and through direct communication with few initiatives that exhibited their work, while most of the Cycling Visionaries remained practically invisible in this politics-business oriented mass of people.
What I missed in the Velo-city 2013 were exactly workshops and lectures done by the Cycling Visionaries to other Cycling Visionaries and other programmes that these young NGO representatives could actually relate to and recognize their work in. Except for the warm welcome that we received at the FahrRADHaus, where even then we didn't have a chance to represent ourselves and thus meet up, there were no other programmes that would formally bring together this magnificent 60 people.
If somebody asked me to tell one nice story about this trip, I'd tell about how streets rode me in Vienna, except for me riding the streets. The flow and the atmosphere of this city was completely different from any other place I've been. It's not a kind of city that tries to bring the best of it to the random passing tourist photographer, but a natural, comfortable and vivid place to be which will not define you by any variable of your being, but accept you no matter what. Experiencing the kind of traffic in which everyone is accepted and comfortable was the best award I could receive in Vienna.