Sarajevo

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I love this place. i learned so much, and it was all so interesting. i did the first and probably only tour for the duration of my trip, but the story of sarajevo is incredible.

we had this awesome tour guide with the darkest, driest sense of humour. heres some good jokes of his:
guy sitting on a swing, just swinging back and forth, another guy says 'what you doing?' he says 'fucking with the snipers'
(bosnians like to swear in english they think its funny)
(it was a siege-war of sniping and mortaring from around the city, the serbs never really got into the city, they just shot anything that moved from the hills, shot holes in water cans which people had to race/sneak down sniper alley and then line up in the open for, basically tried to screw with the bosnians heads till they gave up. only it never worked, they held lots of festivals, international film festival, even a miss sarajevo during the siege!!!)

another joke: guy is digging a hole for a trench or latrine or somthing. another guy asks 'why you digging so deep?' he says 'maybe if i dig deep enough i'll find oil'
funny how quickly the americans attacked iraq, but noone came to the rescue of bosnia...
yeah them bosnians not too enamoured with the UN and everyone who let the war go for four years before NATO cracked and decided theyd had enough, bombed the serbs out in just 5 days or so. UN did some pretty stupid stuff, like sending a whole plane of condoms as 'aid'. they also sent malaria vaccines. and all the time they sent pork. to a muslim nation. they also sent rations left over from the vietnam war. which apparently were only good as containers for making little oil stoves.

we took a ride out to the tunnel which the bosnians dug during the siege which was the only contact they had with the outside world, on the way we had to take a detour because a car was blocking the road doing some suspicious digging on the side. our guide was joking they found a mine, only we couldnt quite tell if he was joking, and he was chuckling about that later, only then we saw the guys in their mine digging uniforms out in force, so it turns out they found something...

they reopened the ski slopes near sarajevo recently, where the winter olympics was 8 yrs (i think) before the war. apparently the slopes are pretty good, but you dont want to go off-piste just in case you hit a land mine... just the thing for beginners!!!

the city is pretty cool too, its way more patched up and rebuilt than mostar, you have to search a little to find bullet holes and bombed buildings. its really quite a pretty city too, lovely people, possibly the stupidest hostel bathroom so far, and mud for coffee. it is really truly mud, but i loved it. they call it bosnian coffee but actually its turkish. it ocmes with this thick layer of scum on the top which actually rests a sugar cube until it gets wet enough to break up and sink down (exhibit A). quite an art to drinking it, you have to stop right at the right time or you get a mouthful of grounds (exhibit B), but it comes with turkish delight, costs about a dollar, and i grew to love it a lot. as do the bosnians, who are very social creatures, and take 3 or 4 hour lunch breaks all the time.

the food very good here, although extraordinarily oily, which had me shouting 'GREEN' after not too long. the first thing i did in belgrade (serbia, next stop) was cook up a pot of leeks and spinach and other vitrid green things. you can even order a garnish which is, wait for it, a jug of oil with a few slices of onion floating in it. which actually wouldnt even double the amount of oil they serve it with anyway. the soup was very nice though, and the burek much better than croatia (kind of a big sausauge roll wound into a spiral, you can get diff fillings, like ricotta, or spinach and ricotta, or apparently mushroom. in any case, loads of pastry, which pretty much goes for all the food stalls apart from pizza. they love their pastry in the balkans!)

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Photos

The bomb squad
Sunny actually was joking... he got a bit of a shock too

Sniper lookout over Sarajevo
Cambo, Madeleine, Rohan