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Published: April 18th 2009
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Lukavica hovel--I mean, bus station
it was like arriving at the countryside I'll have to admit that I knew embarrassingly little about Sarajevo before I came -- all I knew about it was that it's the capital of one of the longest country names I had the misfortune to memorize in geography class, and that its claim to fame (in my mind, mind you :P) was being the city that was bombed to smithereens in the recent Bosnian conflict.
The moment I arrived at the bus station, I instantly learned a couple of important things:
1) The Lukavica bus station is a decrepit, sorry-for-an-excuse bus depot/hovel which serves as the secondary international bus station in the city where all the reject routes end up in Sarajevo (AKA the buses coming in from Serbia and Montenegro :P), located in the middle of nowhere
2) And because I was currently stranded in the middle of nowhere, the nearest exchange office was a good walk away, in the "center of town".
Hmph. You'd think that for the capital city of a country with its own specialized currency (1 Kuna = ~1.95 Euro), you'd think that there'd be more exchange offices lying around, and not hidden in post offices and banks :P
Latin Bridge
site where WWI began Despite my initial reservations about the place, the remainder of my stay went by mostly without a hitch -- I think Sarajevo's historical and cultural charm won me over in the end 😊.
The place I was most nuts about, though, was the Latin Bridge -- supposedly, it was at the street located opposite this bridge where a Serbian assassin Gavrilo Princip gunned down the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie, thereby instigating a conflict on a scale this world's never seen before at the time...
World War I, anyone?
If it weren't for the hobos that've already staked out their territorial claim on the bridge, I'd be content lazing away my days in Sarajevo right here. This very spot where shots were fired and blood was shed. LOL, that sounded frighteningly morbid, but what I can I say?
There were these 2 history classes I took in the same semester last year -- "Persecution and Toleration" and "The American Revolution" -- and on the first day of each, we were all asked to share why we were taking the course.
My answer was the same for both: quite simply, I liked to study
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Top Model anyone??? lol! conflict (and there's plenty of conflict to be expected from persecution and revolutions, ;D).
Concert musicians make pilgrimages to their favorite composer's birthplaces -- history majors interested in bloody conflicts would naturally migrate to similarly historically significant places...same principle, right? haha :D
Not much else to comment on my week in Sarajevo, just the usual sightseeing, attempts to communicate in broken Serbski, and the like. And the less I say about my hostel's bathroom, the better. Believe me...I'd like to forget my experience of using the toilet and the shower in that place.
Let's just say that I never realized until then how important locks and doors that close properly are in the public bathroom experience. Oh God.
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