I'm starting this post from the giant nest that Sarah has created for me in the corner of her quirky living room apartment in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina.
It is the nest of all nests.
I am on an air mattress... which is on top of a couch.... surrounded by blankets and pillows and a small but impressively effective space heater.
Life is so very good right now.
I left Mostar at eleven o'clock on the dot on Monday morning. Or perhaps, ever so slightly after the dot. I had planned to leave around one o'clock, but the ticket seller at Mostar's bus station conspired against me. As ticket sellers in Bosnia and Herzegovina are developing an unpleasant habit of doing. Last week, the ticket seller in Banja Luka told me there was no bus to Mostar.
"No bus to Mostar? Not even one?"
"Mostar, no," the ticket seller confirmed.
"But... but online, it said..."
"Mostar, NO."
Okay. This will have to be sorted. But later.
Igor called the station to ask about a bus for Mostar. And lo and behold, there was definitely a bus for Mostar, and it left at one o'clock.
Goran had told me during our barbecue that there were buses to Sarajevo every hour, so I leisurely strolled to the bus station at ten o'clock on Monday morning to purchase a ticket for a bus that departed around one. The ticket seller handed me the bus schedule and I gulped in surprise.
The buses do not leave every hour. The buses leave at... eleven o'clock and three o'clock. If I leave at three, I wouldn't arrive in Sarajevo until well past dark. And I really dislike arriving in new cities when it's dark... I mean, I could do it, I can always do it...but not being able to see makes things much more stressful. If I buy the eleven o'clock ticket, I will have to RUN back to Goran's apartment, throw everything into Ellie and then become a magician and teleport back here.
I bought the bus for eleven o'clock and started sprinting to Goran's, thankful that my knee wasn't screaming at me and less thankful for all the bloody cobble stones that could easily end me.
By the time I arrived at Goran's, my shirt was drenched with sweat, my lungs burned and my face had taken on the color of a rutabaga. I opened the door in record time, raced towards the elevator and waited... waited... waited, for it to descend 8, 5, 2, 0 floors until it got to me. I charged into the elevator and glanced at my phone.
Damn. 10:38. I do not have time.
I flung all my belongings into my dear beleaguered Ellie and texted Goran about my dilemma, fingers moving across my keyboard at half the speed of light.
Goran then informed me that he'd called the station and had been told that there was a bus that left at ten past noon.
"But the ticket seller told me that there was just a bus at eleven and three," I wailed over text. "So I bought my ticket."
"Okay," Goran texted. "Turn off the lights and lock the doors. Meet me downstairs. I'll be there in five minutes."
Goran is the superhero of the Balkans. He left work, picked me up and delivered me to the bus station by 10:59 -- just as my bus was pulling out of it's platform.
"Maybe I'll see you in Berlin," I gave him a hug. "You're amazing."
I then waved down the bus that was already halfway out of the parking lot, paid to have my bag checked into the bus's underbelly and boarded, smiling sheepishly at the passengers who chuckled at my rather frenzied boarding.
The three hour bus ride from Mostar to Sarajevo is spectacularly beautiful. Stunning mountains, quaint homes, haystacks that resembled giant witch's brooms.
I arrived in Sarajevo around one thirty in the afternoon, and slowly made my way towards Franz and Sophie, a tea shop close to Sarah's where she had suggested I wait for her. The outskirts of the city were plagued with ugly grey box apartments, but the closer I walked towards the city center, the more beautiful apartments, mosques and parks I encountered.
Puffing, sweaty and discombobulated, I thundered into Franz and Sophie (Ellie is so weighed down with Christmas presents that she makes me thunder). The walls of the shop were lined with silver tins of tea, the man behind the counter was probably the most dignified looking person I'd ever seen, and the happy chestnut colored dog that greeted me stole the tiniest piece of my heart.
Tea is served like this. On a candle. With cookies. And you're not even given a cup until the tea has steeped properly, just so you don't mess it up.
Sarah entered the tea shop around four, much less thunderously than me. Even before she said hello, I felt as if I knew her. She just had that remarkable, rare quality that puts people completely at ease. So even though we'd never met, I relaxed into her home like I'd been her roommate for seven years, not an acquaintance of seven minutes.
My couchsurfing host lives in a quirky, cantankerous home. A home I found thoroughly charming for my brief, four day visit, but would probably drive me bananas if I had to live with it for an extended period of time. The toilet doesn't flush properly unless you toss in a bucket of water to encourage said flushage. The heating was a wee white space heater whom I named Calcifer after the fire demon from Howl's Moving Castle. The oven was moody and the front door was downright petulant and required the most delicate finagling and quiet cursing to open. The next door neighbor (poor guy) suffered from PTSD, and this manifested itself in him occasionally throwing rocks at Sarah and Julieta's upstairs window and threatening to cut off the electricity if they got too loud or had too many guests.
My first night with these two, we played around with acro yoga, drank some honey schnapps and then went out to a bar where we drank more and chatted with friends.
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| Thanks for the honey schnapps, Matea! It was amazing. |
Since Sophie, the Australian lady I'd met in Mostar, also happened to be in Sarajevo, we decided to visit the abandoned Olympic bobsled track just outside (and about a million feet UP) of Sarajevo. As we one-foot-in-front-of-the-other panted our way up the monstrously steep hill, we hit a point where we noticed the air had gotten noticeably cleaner. The city of Sarajevo suffers from pretty intense air pollution because most people have wood burning furnaces and there aren't many (any?) regulations on emissions. It felt good to climb above it all.
So breathing in the city is hard. Especially in the winter, when the polluted air can't escape the valley, so it just lingers in a thick, noxious cloud.
We heard the call to prayer as we walked through a cemetery on our way up, up, up to the bobsled track.
This sound makes me think of Marrakesh... Istanbul... and Boy. 'Cos Boy stops in his tracks whenever he hears this sound too...
Sarajevo was awarded the Winter Olympics in 1984, so the city built a bobsled track in 1981 in preparation for the games. Unfortunately, the track was then used by the Bosnian Serbs during the Siege of Sarajevo in the early 1990s, and was left badly damaged.
It now looks like this:
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| Sophie! |
We met some friends of Sophie's at the top of the mountain and decided to all walk down together.
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| This is one reason I couldn't live in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The nature is beautiful, the people are friendly, but there's trash everywhere. |
Sarajevo is the capital city of Bosnia and Herzegovina. It is surrounded by the Dinaric Alps and the Miljacka River flows through it. It is a very religiously diverse city, and one can find mosques, Catholic churches, Orthodox churches and synagogues in the same neighborhood.
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| Sacred Heart Cathedral |
I loved walking through the Turkish old town and reminiscing about my time in Istanbul. I saw restaurants that served salep and boza, baklava and kunefe.
I wish Cathy was here with me now. She would love this place. And I would so love to be with Cathy in this place.
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| Something that Sophie and I noticed is that in Bosnia and Herzegovina, cemeteries seem randomly dispersed throughout the cities. One will be casually strolling through an open market, buying pomegranates and mandarins, and boom, suddenly pop out into a cemetery. People seem to have a very intimate relationship with death. It's not something discretely tucked away and talked about later. It's something you can look down on from your apartment window. |
Thousands of Sarajevans were killed during the Siege of Sarajevo between 1992 and 1996.
1500 children were killed.
15000 children were wounded.
This is a monument for the dead and wounded children of Sarajevo.
I tried to mail my Christmas package again on Thursday morning. And was again told no. And again walked home crying.
This fucking box... and my inability to send it... is really breaking my heart.
I suppose I can be thankful that I have a family and a boyfriend who mean enough to me that it hurts this much to not be just the smallest part of their Christmas.
Sarah, Sidney (a college friend of Sarah's) and I cooked all afternoon. I helped prepare roast vegetables, two chickens, stuffing, and a butternut squash soup. There were mashed potatoes, pumpkin in brown sugar and butter, cornbread and apple crumble. There was wine, wine, and more wine.
It was Bosnian Thanksgiving. And it was wonderful.
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