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!