It’s hard to sleep when the civil defense sirens keep going off. Last night they went off on two different occasions here in North Little Rock. Here’s why: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,346293,00.html
The National Weather Service for central Arkansas actually had to stop issuing bulletins for a while, because the tornado passed directly over their offices. The tornado actually disappeared from radar because it was passing directly over the radar. Several people were injured in the LR/NLR area; but, so far, no reported deaths.
The pictures on the Fox news website are really good (my excuse for looking at the Fox news website). As you can tell, it wasn’t a huge tornado like the one that hit Atkins, Clinton, Gassville, etc. But it still provides plenty of opportunity for local weathermen to scare everyone to death.
I know my answer. NOT HILLARY. Hillary is accustomed to calls at 3 a.m., but it’s usually related to Bill getting locked out of some chick’s apartment wearing only a dress shirt, one navy sock, and a ball gag. So Hillary will be pissed from the moment the phone rings.
“Where are you, you bastard?”
“Madam President, it’s your Chief of Staff. Pakistan is marshaling forces on the Indian border. We must prepare a response.”
“Stop covering for him! Is he with that tramp from the tobacco lobbyists again? I bet he’s got a ball gag in his mouth,” she says.
“Madam President! We must scramble to the Situation Room.”
“I tell you what I am going to do. I am going to scramble to throw all his [expletive] out onto the west lawn. See how he likes that.”
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.
Since it almost never snows here in Split, we decided to take the boys to Bosnia to go sledding. We borrowed some nice plastic sleds from a friend of ours, and took off over the mountains and into the winter landscape. We had been waiting for several days for the weather to clear up, and Valentine’s Day was the first day with clear skies for a long time.
We had been to Kupres before. It’s a small village at the base of a 4,000 mountain in southwest Bosnia. It takes about two hours to get there by car. Last time it took us five hours to get home because we got caught in a blizzard. The road to Kupres is only a road in the cartographical sense. It’s hard enough to stay on it when there isn’t snow covering it.
We packed all of our ski clothes, coats, hats, gloves, and long johns and headed for Kupres. It was a beautiful day. We got to the Bosnian border at Kamensko, and the Bosnian border guard would not believe that we owned our car. He wanted to see our rental contract, but all I could give him was the registration with my name on it. He took the registration, my insurace card, and some green paper that I’m not sure what it is into his superiors. After a few minutes I found where he was inside the building and starting speaking Croatian, telling them that we were just tourists and wanted to come spend the day in their country. He let us go after stamping our passports. We rolled to the next guard shack and they searched our car. We had just got a package from Lindsay’s mom as we were leaving that morning, so they made us open the box and show them what was inside. In all, we killed about 20 minutes trying to cross the border. During that entire time, no other cars came across the border. Obviously, these border patrol officers are very bored.
The toilet at a rest stop in Bosnia. It’s not really a toilet. It’s a porcelain hole in the ground.
Once inside Bosnia, the road get even narrower and more crooked. Garrett got carsick because of the road and the bright sunshine, so we stopped in Tomislavgrad (TG). TG has a nice mosque that is a good reminder of how close to the Muslim part of Europe we live. As we were leaving TG, we got pulled over by the Bosnian police for no reason. They checked our tags, registration, insurace, driver’s license, lights on the car - looking for something to ticket us for. They found that I was missing a stamp on my registration, and start telling me that I need to pay a fine for that. I understood exactly what he was saying, but acted like he was speaking Klingon. This is my standard move when dealing with the police - wear them down with my ignorance. Eventually he let us go.
We arrived at Kupres around 12:30, got changed into our ski clothes and went out to play in the snow. Although there was plenty of snow and the weather was perfect, the chair lift was not running. They said it would be another day before they got the snow conditioned for skiing. (Last time we were there, it was snowing so they closed the mountain. This time it was sunny, so they closed the mountain.) So we had the whole place to ourselves. We went sledding, had a snowball fight, built a snowman, and made snow angels. Caleb made friends with the ski patrol dog (a Croatian shepherd) and tried to get him to go on the sled. He would chase Caleb down the mountain and then follow him back up the hill.
We played in the snow for 4 hours and then decided to head back to Split. Both boys fell asleep while I could still see the ski lodge in the rear view mirror. We took a different route to get back home to see if we could find a better road. It was better, but we got stopped by the police again. Again, it was for no reason. He checked everything he could, and then let us go. I laughed at him. What a slacker. He wasn’t observant enough to find the missing stamp that other guy had found.Back at the border, the Croatian border guard noticed that our visas had expired. We filed for new ones 7 months ago, and were rejected. We filed an appeal, and they are still reviewing appeal (6 months and counting). Luckily, the guards boss was headed to the coffee shop and just waved us on through without checking our passports. We were back home in time for dinner. You can see more pictures of our trip at http://photos.conrady.org.
One of the many pitfalls of living in a small European country like Croatia is that many products in the store don’t have any Croatian or English written on them. I know enough Croatian to be able to read labels in the store, and some products even have English on them somewhere under the heading ‘GB’. However, many products have only German or Italian, since Italy and Austria are the two western European closest to Croatia. Most Croats know a little Italian (named Luigi) and can read labels.
Anyway, I go to the store to buy candles for Garrett and Caleb’s birthday cake and end up buying those trick candles that won’t go out no matter how much you blow on them. Small things like that don’t get the sticker where the translate the label into Croatian. So when the boys started trying to blow out the candles on their cake, I was as surprised as anyone when they all lit up again and kept burning. Only then did I realize what I had done. I let the boys keep trying to blow them out until it looked like they were getting light-headed and about ready to pass out. Then I came with my fingers and squeezed the wick on each candle. My thumb and finger are devoid of any finger prints today. I’m sure all the Croatian parents were thinking, “What a cruel trick to pull on your three-year-old.” Click on the photo to see more madcap birthday party pics.
Last Days according to Jesus, The [R. C. Sproul] I've tried to dismiss eschatology as a non-factor in my day-to-day walk with God, but it continually comes up in conversation with people I'm ministering to and with. Sproul gives the other side of "Left Behind" theology - it's ugly step-sister Preterism
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For a few years I was writing about living in a foreign country. Now that I've moved back, it seems like I'm living in a foreign country.
