The Foreignist

After a six-month hiatus from writing anything, I’m back to finish my travel journal from my trip to Bosnia. If you look back to where I left from from Entering the East, Part 1, you’ll see that I was in Vares and getting ready to leave for Sarajevo. So that’s where we start.

We woke up that morning had went for one last walk through Vares while the car was getting washed. I really didn’t see any need for washing a rental, but I guess we didn’t want to look like villagers while driving in to the big city. Sarajevo was about a 45-minute drive away from Vares. As we got nearer to the city center we drove past a track-and-field facility that had been converted into a graveyard. It was very disturbing to see the grandstands with gravemarkers scattered all over the infield of the track. Turns out there were so many people killed during the seige of Sarajevo during the 90’s Balkan War that they were burying people wherever they could find ground to bury them. They couldn’t leave the city because they were surrounded by the Serbians.

As we were driving through, you could tell that the city had great potential but was in disrepair. Most of the buildings had some signs of damage from the shelling. Finally we arrived in the old part of the city, and I parked in a 50-space parking lot with about 200 other cars. First we walked past a few churches and a park with a bunch of old men watching two guys playing chess with over-sized chess pieces. Then we got to the real attraction - the old, traditional part of the city. The mosque there was “renovated” in 1419. We went into the courtyard and watched some of the men and women praying, but we didn’t have time to tour the inside of the mosque.

We strolled down the old stone streets and stopped in at a han, and old inn for travelers on horseback. There were plenty of handmade crafts and rugs on display, with the crescent moon on almost everything. After lots of shopping and looking around, we stopped for a traditional lunch. We had cevapi in Split, but it was much, MUCH better in Sarajevo. The pieces of grilled minced meat were served inside of something like a pita. The sauce on the beef is called kajmak, and is some sort of dairy product - almost like butter made out of old yogurt. It’s very tasty.

After lunch, we bought some halva, tahini, and Turkish delight to take back to Garrett and Caleb. They ended up really liking it. Most everything in the store where we bought our treats was made out of sesame seeds, honey, or some other natural ingredients. After sampling everything in the store, we packed up our things and left Sarajevo. It was a very interesting experience to walk through a Muslim city. I hope that I can do it again sometime.

Our next stop was Mostar. It was already well into the afternoon, but we wanted to make it to Mostar before dark so that we could see the famous bridge over the Neretva River. After making through the mountain pass to the west of Sarajevo, we basically followed the river to Mostar. It was somewhere around a 2-hour drive to get there. Just as we arrived that evening, the whole city was echoing with the call to prayer. Mostar is an interesting place. It is almost like a cultural border town. During the war, Catholics held one side of the river while the Muslims held the other. The bridge was mostly destroyed during the shelling from the Catholic side. It’s been rebuilt, but it’s obvious what parts are new and what parts are the original. What a shame.

We had coffee on the Muslim side of the bridge (where the first picture of the bridge was taken from), and then looked through some of the shops on the way back to the car. It was already 9 p.m. and we still had a few hours drive to get back to Split.