Sarajevo.

Let me tell you two things about Sarajevo.

1. Sarajevo (and Bosnia and Hercegovina in general, as far as I can tell) is really beautiful. The old town area is almost too charming to be real. It's like if Disneyland had an Ottoman Empire-Land. Lots of twisting, narrow cobble-stoned streets, lined with cafes and shops selling rugs and ornately worked silver and copper pitchers, and old mosques and churches here and there. Outside of the city center, Sarajevo is cursed with the scourge of Eastern Europe - hideous communist architechture. Fortunately, the topography helps somewhat; the city is built in a valley, and the hills rising up from the river are very pretty.

2. Sarajevo (and Bosnia and Hercegovina in general, as far as I can tell) is absolutely covered in bullet holes. I first started seeing them as my bus wound through the suburbs of Sarajevo. Imagine this idyllic scene on a pretty morning in April: middle-aged woman puttering around in her garden, admiring her daffodils and tulips and doing some weeding. Behind her, her house is pocked with enough holes to cause it to resemble gray swiss cheese.

Yeah.

The juxtoposition is very strange. Walking around the city, I watched the pedestrians around me. They all looked very normal and ordinary. Sitting in cafes drinking coffee, shopping with their friends, etc. Whenever I saw someone about my own age, how could I help but think about how their life has been different from my own? When I was reading To Kill a Mockingbird and struggling with geometry, they were dodging sniper bullets. (There are loads of bullet holes in the sidewalks, which I found even more unsettling than the bullet holes in all the buildings.)

There are a lot of images of the 1984 Olympics. Sarajevans do seem to savor the irony that in ten years, they went from holding the Olympics to living without electricity and worrying about their apartments being struck with mortars.

Yesterday I went to the Tunnel Museum. During the four year seige of Sarajevo, Bosnian militiamen dug an 800 meter long tunnel under the airport. (The airport itself was controlled by the UN, who knew about and disapproved of the tunnel.) The airport was located in a sort of bottleneck, with the Serbian forces very close by on either side, and the tunnel was the only way to get supplies into and out of the city. It's pretty amazing.

The sheer ordinariness of the people in the Balkans is what makes this so frightening. They aren't monsters or heroes. They're just regular people. It makes one realize the capacity for horror that is within humans.

Today I am in Mostar. I haven't done much yet, so I don't have a lot to report, other than I got a damned good deal at my hostel. I chatted with the owner for a couple hours last night. I spoke Bulgarian and he spoke Bosnian and it was okay! A lot of the words are the same, but accented differently. Like, the word for 'why' in Bulgarian is zashTO. In Bosian it's ZASHto. The elongation of the opposite vowels makes it sound sort of like Bulgarian with an Italian accent to me. (Macedonian sounds like Bulgarian with a German accent, by the way. I am aware of how little sense this makes, incidentally.) My Bulgarian style head nodding isn't going over well, but I can't seem to stop!

Almost incredibly, I am no longer on that damned bus.

The bus ride from Skopje to Sarajevo was something else. Let me first say that in planning my trip, I had to decide whether to travel via Skopje or Belgrade. There is no direct line from Sofia to Sarajevo. Unfortunately, there is also no information on the web comparing these two options, so I spent a lot of time comparing and contrasting, and finally went with Skopje because a. the Belgrade bus station people struck me as idiots (I emailed them to ask how much the bus ride cost, and they emailed me back when it arrived; further emails received no response), and b. I'd heard Skopje was nice and the Belgrade wasn't.

What I didn't realize was that I didn't even need to choose! Because the bus from Skopje went through Belgrade. Best of both worlds! Look, here's a map. Feel my frustration:



We also took a little detour into, of all places, Croatia. My best guess as to why is that we were following the best roads. Balkan transportation is not always very efficient.

Total time spent on bus: 15 hours.

And I get to do it again, in the opposite direction, on Friday! Yay!

However, I'm not at all regretting that I didn't go through Belgrade. Because I have no reason to think that would have been any better, honestly.

Anyway, I have a lot to say about Sarajevo, but I'll save that for my next entry.

Greetings from the FYROM.

That's right, I have escaped Bulgaria! Though as of yet I have not gotten very far. At the moment I am enduring a VERY long layover in Skopje, Macedonia, as I wait for the bus to Sarajevo. With my nine hours to putter around Skopje, I had been planning to find some bookstore with English books and browse, which I can do for hours and hours. Unfortunately, Macedonia has yet to embrace Americanism as much as Bulgaria (where everything is open all the time, including Christmas and New Years Day), and everything is CLOSED because it is SUNDAY. Boo!

Turns out that April Fool's Day is a big deal in the FYROM. A couple of German backpackers who were on my bus from Sofia and I went off to explore the city and promptly ran into a gigantic crowd of children in costumes. We escaped the crowd by heading across the river to the old city, which is completely charming and very Middle Eastern-ish. There are a BUNCH of mosques here, and, unlike any of the mosques in Bulgaria's big cities, they actually call to prayer, which I love to hear. It just sounds so cool. (I know some volunteers who live in really small all-Muslim villages in Bulgaria and they say that they do do the call to prayer there, but even though there are big mosques in the centers of Sofia and Plovdiv, they don't do the call.) It was a really lovely day here in Skopje, so German dudes and I found a lawn on top of what used to be the Skopje castle and relaxed in the sunshine. Don't worry, mom, I put on sunblock first.

So, it's been a nice day. I took a bunch of pictures that I will post. (I know I said that before, but the computer I usually use at work has been destroyed by some evil virus, AND I've been really busy with Official Peace Corps Volunteer Work lately, so I haven't had a lot of time recently.) If I hadn't spent all of last night in the company of some crazy English people revelling in how much their pounds can buy in Bulgaria and had gotten more than 3 hours of sleep, today would have been better, but it's been pretty good anyway.

Catch y'all in Sarajevo.