Serb authorities are trying to convince the population that life is normal. Rain and the 12th annual Belgrade marathon clogged the streets with traffic on Saturday, and the holding of the 46th Yugoslav documentary film festival in an air raid shelter is advertised as "proof of Belgrade's free spirit".
To discourage panic buying, grocery stores have never been so well stocked. Three McDonald's restaurants that were sacked by anti-American mobs at the beginning of the war reopened at the weekend; both their staff and the food they sell, we were told, are "made in Yugoslavia". The chain will contribute profits to the war relief effort.
Paper-thin walls and an influx of Serb families from hard-hit suburbs made our second-floor hotel room too noisy, so last week we traded it for a fifth-floor room with a view. Unwittingly, we exchanged the blaring television set next door and the patter of little feet overhead for a nightly sound and light show.
Anti-aircraft units that were silent at the beginning of the war now fire dozens of missiles each night. Usually there is the whoosh of a NATO bomb first, as the oil refinery at Pancevo or some other much-attacked target is hit again; NATO's strategy appears to be to prevent the Serbs repairing, rebuilding or salvaging any of their wrecked infrastructure. Then, from our balcony we see what looks like an inverted shooting star, its flash accompanied by a loud, popping explosion.
If there is a symbol of this war, in the West it must be the tragic faces of Albanian refugees, burned out of their homes and often separated from their loved ones. But except for the small minority of Serbs who have satellite television dishes, those faces are unknown here.
Inside Serbia, the dominant image of the war - shown constantly on state television - is one of fire and destruction. Most afternoons, the air in Belgrade is heavy with smoke and the fumes of burning petrol, not unlike Kuwait City after the departing Iraqis set fire to oil wells in February 1991.
As in Kuwait, the weather has grown colder and rainier, making NATO's bombing missions more difficult. The authorities have limited fuel to a maximum of 40 litres per family each month, and there are long queues at petrol stations.
Travelling south to Kosovo a few days ago, I discovered another source of Serbia's air pollution. As our bus approached a highway overpass, I was alarmed to see black smoke billowing up on either side of it. The driver didn't even slow down, and we sped through the black fog as if it wasn't there. I spotted burning tyres placed at each end of the next bridge, and at more than a dozen others throughout our journey.
NATO has destroyed eight bridges and damaged nine others, and the Yugoslavs apparently believe smoke from the burning tyres will confuse the laser-guidance systems of "smart" weapons.
The Serbs are trying to counter NATO's far superior hardware with ruse and subterfuge. In a bright green field alongside the main highway south out of Belgrade, I spotted what I thought were four anti-aircraft missile batteries trained skyward. They were painted exactly the same shade of green as the grass. Five soldiers standing in the field were strangely immobile. They, like the "triple A", were wooden cut-outs placed there in the hope of wasting a few NATO bombs.
Things are often not what they seem in Yugoslavia; inside Kosovo, the MUP paramilitary police wear red or light blue ribbons tied to their epaulettes according to their geographical district. The Kosovo Liberation Army have stolen MUP uniforms, so the ribbons are used as a code to prevent KLA infiltration.
The army and MUP are everywhere in Kosovo, except in the barracks that NATO is bombing. Blue and white Yugo police cars are the only official vehicles in use, and I was surprised to hear a NATO briefer allude to "daily attacks on military convoys". In two days in Kosovo, I saw soldiers travelling in civilian buses and crammed into BMWs and Audis, but not a single convoy.
At Gnijlane, two tanks had been caught in the bombardment of a barracks, their turrets and barrels blown off. But nearby, an armoured vehicle sheltered between two buildings. In another town, a mobile rocket-launcher was parked flush against a house, covered with cheap oriental carpets.
The military vehicles, it seems, are being kept in store for a possible NATO ground offensive. In another sign of preparation for a land war, long stretches of the road across southern Kosovo, which runs parallel to the Macedonian border, have been mined. The mined sections are cordoned off with plastic ribbons, and buses and cars use a single lane, too narrow for a NATO tank to pass through without detonating the mines.
The Serbs increasingly call Kosovo "Kosmet", a contraction of "Kosovo-Metohija" with an antiquated, Sputnik-era ring to it. At Bujanovac in south-eastern Kosovo, there was a sand-bagged police checkpoint at the first street corner, but the police had abandoned it to join dozens of civilians in the road. Everyone stared upwards, and several pointed at white puffs of smoke in the sky where the Serbs were firing at NATO aircraft. Just outside the town a man tilled a field with a horse-drawn plough.
The first three or four Albanian villages we passed through were not yet touched by "ethnic cleansers". Young Albanian men loitered in the streets, women hung laundry on clothes lines. Were these "Potemkin villages", intended to convince the world of the Serbs' innocence?
They were far from the Albanian border, where the Kosovo Liberation Army is fighting hardest, so perhaps Belgrade believes they pose no threat to its authority? Or perhaps the MUP paramilitary police and Yugoslav army have not worked their way this far east yet?
At the first big checkpoint we passed, six MUP men picnicked in the grass by the roadside. One of them had left a breech-loading second World War rifle on the rock beside him.
The endless succession of burned-out villages began soon after, and at a checkpoint a few miles farther down the road I saw the first of several coaches packed with Albanians who were being deported.
The grim-faced refugees were standing on the steps and in the aisle of the bus, and a few Serb soldiers stood at the back with rifles. Later, in the mountains near Albania, I saw a few more untouched Albanian villages. These "good villages" had not "collaborated" with the KLA, a Serb official told us.
In some towns, like Pozeranje where we saw perhaps 200 Albanians waiting with their luggage for the buses that would ferry them into exile, the expulsion appeared to have been methodical. There was no sign of life in Albanian neighbourhoods, but doors and windows were closed, as if their owners had simply left on vacation. Did these Albanians take their front-door keys with them in hopes of returning, like the Palestinians who were expelled from Israel in 1948?
As we moved westward, other houses bore signs of more chaotic departure. Front doors were wide open, curtains fluttering out of broken windows, clothes strewn down porch steps. In one village, I saw three soldiers in Yugoslav army uniform walk out of a villa. A lonely dog, someone's abandoned pet, wandered out of the house next door.
With its mineral wealth, northern Kosovo is the richest part of the province, but the plains and white-topped mountains of the south are more beautiful. Smoke is always ominous in war, and we knew the fires that burned to the south, west and north of us were either Albanian homes or targets struck by NATO.
Jet engines vibrated overhead, but the shepherd watching a flock of white sheep grazing in a pasture seemed unconcerned. Across the burning province normal life continues in an incongruous way, even as Albanians are rounded up for deportation and NATO keeps bombing.
In Urosevac, where we waited an hour for a new armoured MUP escort, we watched two young men load a covered lorry and the boots of several police cars with hundreds of six-packs of orange soft drink and wholesale bags of crisp packets from a small Albanian warehouse.
While this looting was going on, across the street a tall Serb officer in a jump-suit uniform walked through the gate of a little white house surrounded by red tulips. Two women ran from the porch to kiss him, then served him coffee at an outdoor table.
In the mountain village of Strpce, another Serb family cooked a barbecue lunch in their garden. Just down the road, we happened upon three bay horses still wearing halters, the abandoned property of deported Albanians. The animals' fur was matted with mud and when they saw our bus, they bolted and ran into the forest.
Normality. That's what it is. In Belgrade, we've grown used to government-sponsored events, nightly explosions and anti-NATO propaganda. And in Kosovo, there's a monotony of destruction, of burned homes and deportees in dirty buses. Business as usual in Serbia.