Land use planning?

Odd-looking bike surreys for rent on Wilson's Lane

There are plenty of things in Sarajevo that make you recall its socialist past. Our Grbavica neighborhood, for example, has tons of high-rise, cement apartment buildings, all covered with colorful graffiti. That they are decorated with pockmarks from shrapnel adds to the rather dreary appearance. The buildings are usually some color (yellow like ours, pinkish or green), but the color is usually faded, the cement chipping away to grey.

We saw recently that there is a hoopla in our hometown, Seattle, about turning a parking places into space for tables along the streets. This puny effort  made us laugh a bit.

About halfway into our stay in Sarajevo, we are coming to realize how much open space there is here. Between the dreary buildings there is almost always a little garden area, sprouting rosebushes that someone mysteriously maintains. And there are benches, this time of year almost always occupied.

On my way to the market the other day I walked through a little park, walled on each side by apartments, and it was filled with children on dilapidated see-saws and swings; a band of pre-teen girls looking at someone’s new smart-phone (reminding me of Maggie, of course!); old ladies sitting on the benches in the sun, one holding a sprig of lilac from a nearby wild tree.

Don’t think of these parks as manicured, they aren’t. The thick grass and love-me-love-me-not daisies grow wild, and the dogs – Sarajevo is full of stray dogs that hang out in packs, sleeping in the parks. (They sleep during the day – Bill never fails to say, “Let sleeping dogs lie” when we walk by them. Then at night they bark. It’s like they have their own nocturnal society.) But the little pockets of green are everywhere, sometimes only a bench under a tree, but a park still.

Lazing dogs and cafes

 There is also  “Wilson’s Lane” ("Vilsonovo setaliste") near us. It’s a riverside, tree-lined street that is closed every day from 5-11 p.m. The street is bordered by two sidewalks that are also very wide, so after 5 it seems the whole city is strolling in and alongside the street. Bikes, people on rollerblades, walkers and – notably – what we call “young love” on every bench along the river. The displays of, shall we say, intense ardor make us smile – I am planning a web album on “young love” if I can figure out the zoom lens (though, as Bill says, they wouldn’t actually notice the camera anyway).

One of "our" cafes.

Then there are the coffee shops. With the sun now out (80 degrees all week!), tables and umbrellas are sprouting. Where you could swear there was no room last week, suddenly there is a café full of people. “You could throw a stone in any direction and hit five cafes,” Bill says. They are so much fun: middle-aged ladies with their red hair, long-legged beauties in short-shorts, macho guys with ever-present cigarettes dangling - all sipping coffee.

Most of the time everyone drinks Bosnian coffee in little cups (like espresso but with sludge on the bottom) – very cheap, around $1.25 each (cappuccino is about $1.50). You can sit all day for about a dollar. A friend here tells us you can go whole days just seeing friends for coffee and never going home! Often, they are eating sweets as well. The coffee shops are called Slasticarna, meaning “patisserie.” It’s very tempting, the cheesecake at my favorite place, Palma, is really good, as is the “sladoled” (ice cream).

Palma: We might have to roll ourselves home when the time comes

The openness has a few dangers; e.g., speeding bikes on the sidewalks. But the leafy and lively open spaces fit perfectly with the gritty elegance of the city. Hmm, talk about ardor; maybe we are falling for this place.  

   

   

Another birthday...another unexpected place!

Birthday girl on the ferry to Korcula Island, Croatia

One of the things we have enjoyed in our latest series of adventures is waking up on our birthday in rather surprising locations. I celebrated my 60th, for instance, with our first trip to Murchison Falls National Park in Uganda, seeing lions relaxing in the morning sun after a busy night's hunt. Theresa had HER 60th in the decidedly more decadent surroundings of Venice, and this year, we celebrated her latest (although it was confusing, because she looks even younger than she did then) in Sarajevo with dinner at a mountainside restaurant, and then a spectacular weekend trip back to the sun-drenched Dalmatian coast.

She likes to point out that her birthdays come at a better time of year than mine, and OK, I admit that's true, especially if celebrated in places like Capri where the wisteria is dripping both color and fragrance all around. This year was like that. We drove to the coast and -- nostalgia! nostalgia! -- boarded a small ferry that took us to the island of Korcula. The tourists who will fill the island in the summer had not yet arrived, but the sun had, and with it, the flowers and the light, light, light everywhere. White rocks, azure water, olive trees, wine grapes just producing green shoots, white and purple wild iris along the roadsides, poppies, lemons hanging from trees.

...And after a day in the sun, and a picnic with local wine. Heaven!

We stayed in a small place along the waterfront, sipping our coffee on the terrace while the nuns in the neighboring convent hung up their sheets or tended to their gorgeous garden. We ate in a restaurant where they make their own goat cheese, their own olive oil, their own wine, their own pasta, their own brandy (deadly, that last one). We, or at least I, swam in the chilly Adriatic, and we picnicked on the rocks at another of its coves.
And so we have marked another birthday, another country, another new and remarkable place. It makes us miss home, at least in part, when we celebrate so far away from everyone we care about. But for now, we wouldn't have it any different. Happy birthday, Theresa!

Water, water everywhere

A bridge at Rakitnica Canyon. It would have been nice to have more of these!

Saturday we took another hike with our guide, this time to a river canyon. The good news is we can almost walk again. And I guess the good news is that we have all our limbs still attached. More good news: It is really beautiful in the mountains outside Sarajevo, where little villages nestle in high valleys and water gushes from caves in the steep hillsides.

But about that water: There can be a bit too much. We crossed numerous flooding streams - leaping with good or bad aim from rock to rock. Occasionally, strapping fellow hikers with long arms offered me a hand and basically flew me over the rapids. But we all landed pretty much in water.

How do we get over this?

To get to a canyon you have to first go up. Then you go down. Then you must go back up again. Then down to cross some streams. Then up again. You get the picture - except the down was 400 meters steep (1200+ feet in a short stretch), and the up was straight up. The guide does not like paths or switchbacks apparently, preferring the direct approach. Oh, and the snow fields, melting as they were. And the last hour it rained. Hard.

This waterfall is from a spring deep inside the cave at the top.

By the end of the 8 hours of hiking, we were bloodied from wild rose branches, waterlogged, and dripping. Not to mention panting. 

There were two Englishmen, a Dutch guy, an Austrian, one other American, and us (in addition to the guide). True to cultural cliche, the Brits "soldiered on," the Austrian was gazelle-like, the Dutch guy slithered all over the place in city shoes but never complained, one American (intelligently) turned back, and we whined. The guide, of course, joked and hiked about twice as far as the rest of us because he kept scouting the terrain (looking for a nice gentle path? No ...).

Our guide, Fikret, knows these mountains so well and obviously loves them. He's a joy to be around with stories for every occasion, and we are learning so much from him about his country. (He reminds us of niece Laura who has led us on, uh, what might be called aggressive hikes!) Fikret pronounces the word "wilderness" with a long I, as in the word "wild." I kind of like that because it describes the countryside here.

Did I mention it was beautiful? Lots of flowers, beautiful river, gorgeous mountains, nice company. And the shoes are almost dry.

Pretty mountains

Signs of the times?

The Cyrillic text on this sign has been obliterated. It's the other way around in Republika Serpska

A couple people have asked why we aren't talking about work in the blog. It's pretty simple: We (especially Bill) are working with a small group of investigative reporters and they most likely wouldn't like their affairs aired, so to speak. So we are keeping this more personal and less professional.

This roadside sign doesn't make you want to get out of the car!

But basically, Bill is doing his usual coaching and mentoring, what he does best! I am sidekicking. Also, I am exercising my best communication skills at the market down the street where a Bosnian woman and I chat rather loudly and with great animation - though neither of us understands the other. She always gives me extra scallions, so I guess it's successful.

One thing that is happening at the org we are working with is that they have a series trying to show how everyone is getting along here. Meaning the Serbs, the Croats and the Muslims. At first we thought that was so nice, how everyone has forgiven everyone else. How naive we were!

 On our trip last weekend we saw a few things to illustrate that. We drove through a piece of Republika Serpska, which is the Serb part of Bosnia & Herzegovena. All the road signs are written in both Western characters (probably it's officially called Roman characters?) and Cyrillic. Driving out of Sarajevo, the signs have the Western on top, then Cyrillic on the bottom. When you hit the RS, it is the other way around. But we noticed the Cyrillic all shiny on top and that the Western on the bottom was usually defaced. When we left Croatia heading back to Sarajevo, the Western writing on top was all shiny, and the Cyrillic spray-painted out. Hmm.

Pretty new Mostar bridge, replacing the bombed one.

And then in RS, we met an Orthodox monk at a monastery/winery, and he told us all about how everyone hates the Serbs, but really they were the victims of the Croats. (And how they hate the Americans, but that's another story.) Then in Dubrovnik, our landlord told us how bad the Serbs were and that the Croats really suffered at their hands. And then in Muslim Mostar (in Bosnia & Herzegovina) we saw how the Croats had bombed the famous Mostar bridge (now rebuilt).

We also hear that the kids in school here are only taught about the war from either one perspective or the other (we don't know for sure this is true, but we've heard it several times).

So we are anxious to read the series about how we are all getting along here. We wish it were true!

Red roofs and sunshine

Ah, the coast. Saltwater. Blue seas. Horizons. Oh, yes - and sunshine!

View down from our apartment; our legs ached after awhile!

We rented a little car this past weekend and headed to Croatia, a drive of about 4.5 hours. Bill's pretty (well, beautiful) interpreter told us we HAD to go. On the way we saw the many stone villages and craggy mountaintops of Bosnia, some of which we explored and of which we will talk later. But with the rain hard on our windshield we had a focus: the arid hills and blue waters of Dubrovnik.

We came over a high hill and - the Adriatic! When we go to the ocean at home we tell the grandkids the first one to see the ocean gets a kiss from Nana, and since Bill saw it first this time, well, he got the kiss, no hardship here.

Red roofs from the city wall

Slightly lost, we wandered into Dubrovnik, parked and found our tiny sobe, or apartment, in the Old Town. It was magical: we were near the top of a skinny and cobble-stoned stairway. In the morning the neighbors were all hanging laundry via high pulleys, and we went out into a sliver of sky trimmed with jeans, socks and slightly tattered shirts.

Down, down, down to a coffee shop with espresso and cappuccinos - ah, heaven on earth. And the view: Italian cruise ship passengers lining up for photos by Orlando's statue, a wedding party with painful looking high-high-heels, oompa bands with Croatian flags ... couldn't you just sit in that cafe for your whole life???

But no, we needed to see the beach, the city wall, the clock tower with its metal automaton-men in helmets (named Mora and Bora) clanging away at the bell in a fateful hourly forever. And mostly, we needed to sit in the sun - and practice saying DU-brovnik, swallowing consonants as best we could.


 The stradum (main drag) was the best - mainly because we were there off-season, as we heard over and over from the locals. In the evening, the stones glowed. The church windows glowed. We probably glowed. If you get a chance, go to Dubrovnik.