The Balkans: Part I: Bosnia

What a trip! I now have 10 stamps in my passport and 4 more countries under my belt! I'll start with some pictures.

On the bus from the airport to the hotel

The sight where Archduke Franz Ferdinand was shot

A Sarajevo Rose

Sarajevo

Hiking on the Bjelasnica Mountain

Al-Jazeera!

Visegrad

The Drina in Visegrad

 

 

 

Mostar - the unofficial capital of Herzegovina

At the Jewish museum in Sarajevo

A view of Sarajevo from part-way up one of the mountains

Can you tell I like rivers?

A little history first: our first week was based in Sarajevo, which was surrounded by the Serbs during the Bosnian War and was under siege from 1992-1995. All around the city, wherever a shell hit and a person was wounded or killed, they refilled the hole with a red clay. These are called Sarajevo Roses. The Bosnian War involved the three main ethnic groups of Bosnia: Bosniak Muslims, Orthodox Serbs, and Catholic Croats. 20 years later, the country is still struggling to recover and come to terms with the horrible atrocities that occurred all over. It's a truly terrible paradox: the country is one of the most beautiful I have ever seen and yet less than two decades ago it was ravaged by death and violence.

Our first day in Bosnia we took a hike through the mountains - my pictures don't do it justice. I'd love to live out there just for a year. It was so peaceful! The people out there live mainly by subsistence farming. There's just something very appealing about the idea of living in a small stone cottage and not having to worry about paperwork or bills or a 9-5 job. And the mountains are absolutely ideal for running! But I digress. After the hike we visited the Tunel Museum. Since Sarajevo was surrounded during the war, no people or supplies could enter or exit the city, so they built a tunnel 800m long to transport supplies and soldiers between Sarajevo and the rest of free Bosnia. Our guide asked for 4 volunteers - 2 girls, 2 guys - and have each of us lift a backpack full of cinder-blocks that was the weight of supplies that women would carry through the tunnel. The man working the gift stand said he would give a free souvenir to any girl that could carry the backpack through the section of the tunnel that was still operating (it wasn't very long - only about 2 minutes). So I obviously can not resist a challenge and the pack hadn't been too hard to lift and do a squat with, so I jumped right up. They definitely thought that I would fall in the tunnel - our guide walked backwards in front of me and they had my friend Daniel go behind me. The tunnel was only 1.6m high, so even I had to crouch a bit, but luckily I'm only 5'5'' so it wasn't too bad. They were extremely impressed when I made it without any problems. They took multiple pictures with and of me, our guide told me that I was her hero, and the gift shop man shook my hand twice and gave me two free souvenirs!

We had 3 meetings almost every day for the rest of the week; we went to the U.S. Embassy, met with a few people from NGOs, the EU Special Representative, a few journalists, went to the Al-Jazeera Balkans office, representatives of the Association of War Camp Prisoners in Visegrad, the president of the Muslim Community of Visegrad, the Court of BiH (Bosnia and Herzegovina), a rep from BIRN (Balkan Investigative Reporting Network), and an adviser at the Ministry of Civil Affairs.

I'm not even sure where to start for the rest of the week.. I think I'm still suffering from a bit of information overload. We visited Srebrenica and the cemetery/memorial center for the 8,000 Bosniaks who were massacred there. It was just astounding. I have no other word for it. 20 years later, they are still trying to identify some 1,000 of the victims, and they think there are more mass graves that they haven't even discovered yet. It's a very sobering reality. We met with a man who escaped the massacre, but lost his twin brother. They were my age at the time.

The memorial at Potocari

Srebrenica cemetery

 

After Srebrenica we drove to Visegrad. We spent the night in a hotel there, right along the River Drina, which is the most exquisite turquoise color I have ever seen! I got up at 5:30am the next morning and sat on the bridge to watch the sunrise. It was so perfect. I didn't take any pictures because I knew that there was no way to capture that moment in a photograph. The mist was rolling in along the river, not a soul was in sight, the birds were chirping and fluttering about, the water was glittering, and the sun came up peaking over the tops of the mountains. Then I ran a few miles along the river and up one of mountains. It was a pretty stellar start to my day! I also saw the sunrise in Sarajevo on our last morning there - early morning runs really are the greatest.

One very interesting thing that we kept hearing from all of the ethnic groups was that people were getting along just fine, and then suddenly there was a war and the international community was involved and everything got crazy polarized. We also heard from all sides that the truth is the only way that people can live together - everyone needs to accept the truth of what happened and stop counting numbers. But it does seem like it is hard to draw the line between remembering what happened and wallowing in the past. Both sides committed some terrible war crimes, and there are still thousands of court cases trying to prosecute those crimes, 20 years later!

Upcoming Hiatus

So I'm actually rather impressed with how often I've been updating this in the past week (although mostly it means I'm procrastinating...) but starting on Saturday morning, I will be taking a 2 week hiatus. My program originally had two one-week field study trips scheduled: one to Bosnia and one to Turkey. However, with the recent strife going on throughout Turkey, and most specifically in Istanbul and Izmir, where we would have been traveling, they have altered our trip. So we will now be spending two weeks in the Balkans. We have a week in Bosnia, and then a week visiting Croatia, Albania, and Kosovo! But I will not be bringing my computer on this trip and we will most likely have limited internet access anyways.

One last little post - I took a run today up the mountain and up a tower. We'd done this run before, but I didn't have my camera with me, so I made sure to bring it this time! The view is absolutely spectacular. My pictures do not do it justice, but here they are:

I may have been a little worn out...

Classes and Cooking Attempts

My parents pointed out to me recently that I never say anything about my classes. So. My program is partnered with the European Union, and has everyone take an integrative seminar called From Marginalization to Inclusion: Turkey, the Balkans, and the EU. Then I am also taking an IR elective entitled Politics, Security Issues, and International Relations of the Balkans, Turkey, and South East Europe. (And people wonder why I never remember the names of my classes...) We have one class each day - the seminar is Mon/Wed/Fri and the elective Tues/Thurs. Each day we have 2 sessions of the class - 9:00am to 10:40, then a 15 minute break and class again until 12:40. It's a little long, but surprisingly, it goes very quickly! And this is coming from a girl who sometimes struggles with 50 minute classes, so you know it's interesting. We have our mid-terms this Thursday and Friday, unfortunately enough. There is so much to do and experience that no one ever wants to study, but we manage to squeeze it in! I am learning so much about the former Yugoslavia and all of the problems of that area - which began before I was born. It does lend some hope for the Middle East, though, because the Balkans had some truly horrible experiences what with the wars and concentration camps and ethnic cleansings. The fighting began in 1991 and 13 years later came the peak of anti-Serbian violence in Kosovo. At this point, every country in Yugoslavia had experienced war/violence to some extent. While things are still not entirely fixed in the Balkans, the situation has improved since then, with Croatia even being accepted for EU membership (it will become an EU member on July 1st). So if the Balkan countries can be recovering and, however slowly, starting down the path of increased cooperation and acceptance, perhaps somewhere down the road the ME can achieve the same results. Of course, there is still the whole can of worms with terrorism to think about, but that's another story.

Okay, enough about classes. I've begun to try to cook some meals for myself in an attempt to cut back on spending. My first attempt was pasta last night. Basically I cooked some noodles and heated up some tomato sauce. It was rather flavorless and fairly bland.. So this evening I made my second attempt. I couldn't find celery or peas in the grocery store (part of my dad's famous spaghetti sauce recipe) but I did find peppers! There was a package of one each of a red, green, and yellow tomato, so I sliced some up and cooked them with the sauce, then topped it off with some grated Gouda cheese. It wasn't a masterpiece, but definitely an improvement from last night! It looked better before I mixed it all up, but I forgot to take a picture. I also cooked myself some eggs this morning, which were delicious! For a first attempt, I did a pretty good job if I do say so myself. (I did get one of my fellow program mates to tell me how to cook them, though, so I can't really take too much credit.) The side of fresh strawberries was clutch.

Cooking definitely makes me appreciate my mom more, though. Just cooking for myself isn't bad, because I don't have to be creative at all. I could eat the same thing every night for dinner if it was the cheapest thing for me to make (and that is probably about what I'll be doing!). And as long as I can turn on some music and dance around the kitchen, the cooking isn't too bad, either. But I can't imagine trying to come up with a different meal every day, cooking for multiple people, getting it all done simultaneously and in a timely manner (I put my vegetables in my food tonight, so no sides necessary; and if I'm hungry it's my own fault for not starting sooner). The clean-up is the worst part. I live with 5 other girls, 4 of whom are German students who I think have lived here for awhile, so I don't want to give off a bad impression of Americans or intrude on their space at all, so I make sure to wash and dry all of my dishes right after I eat. And there's no dishwasher - all by hand. So thanks, Mom, for putting up with all of our whining about what's for eating and when and the reluctance to help cook and clean!

Just a Sunday Stroll

Yesterday I took a 2 hour stroll all around Freiburg. I thought that I'd wandered pretty much everywhere, but it turns out Freiburg is bigger than I thought! I should have realized that seeing as it took me a good week and a half to finally find the post office, which only happened when I enlisted the help of a friend and got directions from the Tourist Information building (and even then we struggled... but in our defense, the sign said Postbank; Finanzcentre so we thought it was a bank)! But I got a lot of gorgeous pictures - there is so much art!! - and I further cemented my desire to live here.

a mural outside the movie theater

Der Munster

lit a candle for my grandparents

The Hippie Party

There's no good way to describe this, but this weekend there was a 3-day long party celebrating the 20th anniversary of Susi - the community that lives in the Vauban dorms. I didn't get any pictures from it (too dark and crowded) but even if I had, there would have been no way to truly capture the spirit of the event. The set up was incredibly extensive - on one side was a band and an area surrounded by shelves of books, with a huge ceiling of silver streamers overhead, that glittered red, green, and blue with the lighting - this was the more techno side.

A quick little walk to the other side could give you a more reggae experience. And let me just say, German Reggae is fantastic! On this side, they had two stages for bands, different colored paper lanterns lighting the way, a ship bar (really no way to describe it - they built a ship out of wood, but the deck was a bar), and some rather interesting structures such as the slide covered in foil and construction paper - I thought it looked like a dinosaur, but we have no idea what they were actually going for - or the large camper wrapped up with foil and a bow to look like a present.

They had lawn games (ladder golf and a giant connect four game), men walking on stilts, and performers with fire! Last night at about 1, we noticed some fireworks going on, and went to investigate. There was a parade. We have no idea where they were going, but we followed for a good while before turning back. The crowd was enormous and everyone was just dancing down the street. There was a giant silver contraption with glittery wings traveling with the crowd, blasting music, and throwing out handfuls of glow-sticks. A little further back was a camper being pulled along by a few people and also blasting some awesome German Reggae. There must have been a couple thousand people dancing/walking along with this parade!

Basel, Switzerland

This weekend, one of my friends from the program and I took a spontaneous trip to Basel, Switzerland! We have a train pass that lets you ride for free around Freiburg and a small surrounding region during the week, and has a much bigger radius on the weekends - including Basel. So we hopped on the train and an hour later I found myself in my second European country ever.

We wandered around for a few hours, and found the Rhine River - almost every single person we saw there was eating ice cream. These are my kinds of people!

We also discovered a zoo! It was the best kind of adventure - completely unplanned. We had hours to spend and no agenda, and just wandered the streets taking in the beauty of being able to just hop on a train to another country with no stress. Casual. I love Europe.