-5 Degrees And That Was Inside...

he thought of breakfast wasn't enticing enough to get us out of bed willingly however our checkout time was 10am so an early start it was. Breakfast was eggs with bread which was o.k, but Rob had most of mine.

Due to our early start we had plenty of time to get to the history museum. We walked past an information board that said that the temperature was -5°c which we definitely felt. On the way we stopped for a quick detour around the outdoor market. This was the site where two shells hit and 68 killed and a further 200 people were injured. Besides the plaques on the wall with the names of the victims, you couldn't tell what had happened there; it was a colourful, busy produce market.

We arrived at the museum and someone unlocked it to let us in. The exhibit was chilling both in its content and it literally chilled us to the bone. It was freezing inside which definitely added that extra (and unneeded) atmosphere to the displays. It was mainly pictures and newspaper articles most of which were quite disturbing to look at. It was small but we took our time reading around the events in chronological order. There was separate exhibit within the museum on early Bosnia but it really was too cold to stand still and read everything. We sped around the remaining parts of the museum and left to do some walking to warm up.

On the way back to the centre we looked for the tourist information but to no avail. I really wanted to buy a map that showed the state of occupation within the city of Sarajevo.

The town centre was fairly busy and the high street that lead to old town was full of people shopping and looking for cafes etc. We mooched around but it was too cold to take your time and wander aimlessly.
We found a popular café and decided to warm up inside. We ordered two hot chocolates and I had a slice of chocolate cake and Rob had a slice of a cake that was in every shop window. The slice was massive and it was basically a giant marshmallow on a tiny cheesecake crust.

After the café we walked through the Turkish style bazaar which was pretty but obviously not as impressive as Istanbul's. From the bazaar we walked up to the brewery to look at it during the daylight. It really reminds me of the gates in the original Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory gates. The old city library was on our route and we stopped to look at what was once blatantly an impressive building. It was bombed during the war and the majority of the books were destroyed. On our way back to the hostel we went through the square opposite us which in many guidebooks is called pigeon Square. We tried to get an "arty" picture by making all the pigeons fly away at once however they wouldn't budge. We walked towards them, ran at them we even flapped at them but they just weren't bothered.

There was still too much time to waste until our evening bus, so we went to the Internet café on our road. We booked accommodation, wrote e-mails etc and then when we ran out of things to do we had a game of Age of Empires 2. We were planning to spend a lot longer there but the owner came over and quite rudely told Rob to give the chair he was using to a guy who had just walked in. We decided to leave and go look for a place to eat instead.

City pub wasn't the greatest choice in the world, but it was cheap, nearby and had food I could eat. We both really just wanted to be on our way and felt slightly agitated wasting time. We had some pleasant food and one beer each so that we wouldn't need the toilet whilst on the bus. Eventually our waiter came over and asked if we could pay so we took it as a sign to leave.

We caught a trolleybus to a bus station in the south of Sarajevo Which we think is in the Republic of Srpska. It took about forty minutes at which we were dumped at the side of a road in the rain, in the dark and no station in sight. We walked for a while and found the station where we bought two tickets that were considerably more expensive than the hostels estimated price.

The journey really felt like it took forever and it was pretty cold. Strangely enough Rob managed to sleep but I couldn't. It really did feel like one of the longer bus journeys even though it was only eight hours.

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