I'm starting this post from the common area of Hostel Dada. A French guy, Jean Baptiste, fastidiously eats a meat pie on the table in front of me. Dada (for whom the hostel is named) sits in her bedroom to my left and watches the news while cracking open pomegranates and plopping the ruby red seeds into a blue bucket.
It's a cozy hostel. Wooden dressers, wooden table, a giant bowl of fruit, an incessantly burning fireplace, paintings on the walls.
Some paintings of flower vases.
Others, of crying children.
A hostel that isn't so much a hostel as an old lady's home. An old lady who sometimes falls asleep and doesn't answer the door.
The bus ride from Banja Luka to Mostar was hellish. Serpentine, narrow mountain roads that made my stomach churn, stiff seats and a broken toilet.
Why do buses in the Balkans insist on having toilets that DON'T WORK? What is the purpose of installing a toilet if it's only for show?
By the time the bus stopped at the halfway point, I was so desperate to relieve myself that I rushed headlong into the wrong restroom. I didn't even notice the urinal until I blew past a man using it on the way out.
Oops.
The rest of the journey was significantly more pleasant.
It was already quite dark by the time I arrived in Mostar. I'd downloaded my hostel's address onto my phone, and was delighted to discover that it was only a few meters away from the bus station.
I'm happy I bought Christmas presents for Boy and family. But I'm less happy to lug these Christmas presents all around Bosnia and Herzegovina. Blurgh.
I followed the blue dot on my phone towards a giant white building that looked like a child had found a pile of legos and then just assembled the plastic blocks into a haphazard lump.
There was no sign for Hostel Dada.
I'm sure this is the right place... but where the hell is it?
I wandered up and down the Lego lump, back and forth, round and round.
Nothing.
What do I do?
A young couple with a baby wandered out onto one of the many stairways.
"Excuse me, can you --?" I started.
"Help you?" the young man finished my query for me.
"Yes. Can you help me? I'm looking for Hostel Dada."
"Yes," the dark haired fellow glanced at the pin on my phone and led the way.
"Here is Hostel Dada," he rang the doorbell on an ordinary looking apartment. With no visible notification that it was a hostel and not just an ordinary apartment.
No answer.
*ring*
Nothing.
*ring*
Nada.
"She's not at home," the young man stated the painfully obvious. "Maybe she is at the bus station. We will help you!" he declared, then briskly led his family and me back down the stairs and towards the station.
I hope he knows who he's looking for... I glanced around the station, feeling a mixture of gratitude and bewilderment.
"Do you have the phone number?"
"No, I didn't think I would need it..." I hung my head and felt due shame for my lack of preparation. Then remembered that I probably had hostelworld's confirmation email pulled up on my laptop, so dropped Ellie on the concrete, pulled out my laptop and held my breath.
GOTCHA.
The young man called the number and I sighed with relief to hear a human being on the other side of the line.
"She's at home," the helpful Bosnian told me. "She just fell asleep."
That. Is hilarious.
My new friends escorted me to my hostel and dropped me off with an apologetic white-haired lady by the name of Dada.
Dada made me coffee, gave me two maps of the city, invited me to help myself to a bowl of fruit and told me, "This one, cold," and "this one, hot," in reference to the showers.
"Do you need my passport?" I asked, pulling my US passport out of my laptop sleeve.
"No," Dada scrunched up her face and made a dismissive gesture with her wrinkled hands.
"Okay, can I pay now?"
"Later," Dada made the same gesture.
Umm... okay.
"Breakfast tomorrow... nine? Maybe... maybe ten?" Dada smiled, and I almost thought she would say, "eleven?"
"Super. Nine or ten sounds great."
I shared the hostel with an Australian girl named Sophie and a South Korean girl with a name I couldn't pronounce without extreme mauling. Like, I rendered it completely unrecognizable.
But the South Korean girl was very polite and just nodded and smiled.
After a breakfast (which occurred somewhere between nine and ten), Sophie and I walked into town to see the sights and hunt down a cappuccino.
Mostar has a population of about 110,000 and is the most important city in Herzegovina. It was named after the keepers who guarded the bridge built by the Ottomans in the 16th century.
Stari Most.
 |
| Stari Most (Old Bridge) and the Neretva River. |
Bosnia and Herzegovina declared independence from Yugoslavia in April of 1992, and the war that followed continued until 1995. During those brutal, bloody three years, multiple mosques and churches were destroyed, 2000 people were killed and Stari Most was blown to bits in November of 1993, separating the Croat army on the west of Neretva from the Bosniak army on the east.
The war between Croats and Bosniaks ended in 1994 with the signing of the Washington Agreement, and the entire war ended in 1995 with the signing of the Dayton Agreement.
Walking through a touristic city so recently torn to pieces by war is a bewildering experience. It feels incongruous to see derelict buildings riddled with bullet holes --
-- and then to sit down and enjoy a frothy cappuccino in a street full of colorful tourist trinkets.
The signs of conflict are so fresh, it's hard for me to not focus on them. To not look at these buildings and wonder if there was a family inside while those guns were going off. It's difficult to see these architectural skeletons and not wonder what they looked like before the war.
Mia, a student who'd contacted me on couchsurfing ages back, met me in front of my hidden hostel at around 14:45 that afternoon. Just to show me around.
This part of couchsurfing is so great. And often underrated. Just being able to meet with local people for an afternoon, getting to share travel stories while letting them guide you through a new city... is unbelievably lovely.
Mia isn't even twenty-two years old yet, and the girl already speaks four languages.
Mia is my hero.
Mia is also one of the most helpful couchsurfers I've encountered.
My throat hasn't been getting better. The doctor in Ljubljana told me weeks ago that I had a virus that would go away on its own, no need for antibiotics or treatment of any kind.
But that was weeks ago.
I contacted my speech pathologist friend in Colorado, gave her a list of my symptoms and asked whether or not she thought I should go to a doctor for a second opinion.
"Symptoms get better and worse depending on the day. Although I have no idea what makes them better and worse. So, I feel like there's this swelling under the right side of my jaw and it like... crunches and moves around when I push on it. Then there are little painful knots down the right side of my neck. I also feel like there's something swollen in the back right side of my throat, near the back of my tongue. And it's like I've always got mucus to swallow. When I breathe cold air, it all hurts. Sometimes there's a really deep, sort of throbbing pain in my throat. Sometimes my ears hurt, sometimes my teeth hurt, sometimes I get nasty headaches."
My speech pathologist friend told me to get a second opinion.
But I'm in BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA! my thoughts were laced with panic. I don't know the language. I don't know the healthcare system. And I don't have Andrej to help me navigate it all.
But I found Mia. And Mia found a doctor at a polyclinic who would see me on the 17th at 16:45. She walked with me to the polyclinic, sat with me in the waiting room and went into the doctor's office with me to translate, if necessary.
"Do you speak French?" the short, stout doctor asked upon discovering I didn't speak Bosnian.
"No, only English," I said from my stool.
"That's too bad. I speak French. Do you speak German?"
"Nope."
"Italian?"
"Just English."
"Oh. Well, I know a little bit of English. When I was young and living in Sarajevo, I met an English woman... Oh, I thought I would be with her forever. It was love," his eyes twinkled playfully. "Of course, it only lasted a few months. But whatever English I learned, I learned in between the... you know... "
I nearly doubled over my stool in shocked laughter.
"Now Aimee, what is the problem? You look afraid."
"Well, I am nervous. I've had these lumps in my throat --" I started pressing under my jaw and describing my symptoms.
"Why do you press there?" the doctor asked me, wide eyed. "There are very delicate organs under your jaw."
"Why are they on this side and not on the other?"
"Well, no human being is symmetrical. Except for --- " and the doctor listed off the names of several movie stars.
"What about the pain?"
"Maybe it's a nerve in your jaw that can cause pain with cold, chocolate, laughter..."
The doctor lightly moved his fingers along my jaw, but didn't press enough to even feel the lumps that bother me. Then he poked around my mouth with a mirror and declared me, "Perfectly healthy. You have nothing wrong with you."
"Why do my ears hurt? Why does my throat ache? Why have I been having problems for a month?"
"I am going to take you by the hand and walk you to the next room where a doctor will give you an ultrasound to prove that there's nothing wrong."
"Okay..."
This. Is not helpful. I don't visit doctors unless something is wrong. I am not okay. I need this doctor to tell me why I'm hurting and not to tell me that I'm perfectly healthy.
The doctor down the hall rubbed the magic ultrasound goo onto my neck and then told me he could find nothing wrong. Just that my thyroid looked a bit off and I should get it looked at when I return to the states.
"See?" my first doctor exclaimed triumphantly. "You are perfectly fine. Now, give me a big, wet kiss here," he pointed at his cheek, "and go live your life. Stop touching your neck and be free."
I didn't know what else to do but kiss the doctor's cheek, feeling an amalgamation of amusement and frustration.
Mia and I sat for a coffee afterwards, talking about our travel dreams and our travel histories.
This girl. Has got a big, exciting future.
She walked me back to Dada and promised to call me on Saturday for an adventure with another couchsurfer.
I logged onto facebook and sent my speech pathologist friend a message, detailing my hilariously unhelpful experience at the doctor's office.
She then told me that an ultrasound indicates nothing except that I don't have cysts and I probably don't have cancer. Which my symptoms didn't hint at anyway. The test that I need to take is a flexible nasal endoscopy. Where they stick a wire down my nose and take a look at the inside of my nasal passages.
Fuck.
Here we go again.
I'm exhausted of worrying.
I'm exhausted of being sick.
I'm exhausted of being sick and being on the road and not knowing what's wrong with me.
I bet that doctor would have a hard time "being free" if he was experiencing this inexplicable pain in a foreign country and was about to fly to Asia for the first time.
Blurgh.
I'll figure something out. That's what always happens. Eventually.
Eventually, this will get better.
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