FINALLY. Pictures from Bosnia.

This is actually not Bosnia, but rather (the Former Yugoslav Republic of) Macedonia. I had several hours between busses here in Skopje.


Finally, after a 15 hour bus ride, I reached Sarajevo!


Did something happen here? This is an ordinary building photographed at random. Pretty much everything in Sarajevo (and Bosnia, really) looks like this.


Okay, even for Bosnia, this is a little extreme. This house is the Tunnel Museum. During the war, the Bosnian Army built an 800 meter tunnel that went under the Sarajevo airport. For three years, it was the only way in or out of Sarajevo. (Except with UN escort, but the UN and the Bosnian Army had slightly different priorities, as you may imagine.) Serb forces attacked it six times.


Inside the tunnel. Only about 20 meters of it are open now.


The bridge of deeeeath. Gavrilo Princip assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sofia, on this bridge, which he then jumped off of in an attempt to commit suicide. Alas, he only succeeded in breaking his legs. D'oh.

Then I went to Mostar. I wish I could show you how amazing the scenery between Sarajevo and Mostar was, but taking pictures from a bus doesn't usually work very well. Anyway, it was spectacular.


Most means "bridge" (in Bulgarian, too), and although there are 12 bridges spanning the river, this is the most. The original version, built hundreds (I forget exactly) years ago during the Ottoman Empire time, was destroyed by Croatian shelling in 1994. This new version, an exact replica of the original, was finished in 2004.


More Mostar. This here is the eastern (Muslim) bank of the city. (By the way, both of these pictures were taken from the minaret of a mosque that's open for visitors.) As you can see, Mostar is a ridiculously pretty place, but all of these buildings are new. You can tell because of the lack of bullet holes. All one has to do to see how terribly devastated this city was is to walk about two blocks from the tourist area, where shells of buildings, missing windows and covered in bulletholes, sit, trees growing out of their roofs.

I didn't take any pictures of these. I didn't want to be a tourist of other peoples' tragedies. Besides, I think I'll remember okay without photographs.