After I arrived, I took a train and then the tube to downtown London, where I met my friend Liz at her hotel. After arriving, I heard that two men crashed a burning car into the entrance of Glasgow airport in Scotland, so everyone was reading these sensationalist “newspapers” with headlines like “UK UNDER ATTACK!!!” So we just went to a pub and had some ale and delicious beer-battered fish n’ chips. My next flight left Gatwick airport in London at 5:50am, so I decided to just stay up and left for the airport at 3am. That flight was of course delayed as well… I didn’t sleep on the flight, but it was so nice to fly over Italy and the coast of Croatia; so beautiful.
I got into Split around 9:30am on Sunday, and the change from cold and rainy Holland to hot and sunny Croatia was refreshing. Unfortunately, I missed the bus out of the airport that went to the main bus terminal in Split, due to a coffee craving… and the next one didn’t leave for a few hours.
This is the view from the airport.When I got into the bus station, the bus to Sarajevo was pulling away. So I asked the woman at the ticket desk for a ticket for the 1pm bus, and she informed me that the next one did not in fact leave until 4pm. Naively, I said “but… my guide book says they leave every half hour!” She just laughed at me.
At that point, I was so exhausted and my body was in so much pain from lugging around 800 lbs of luggage (thanks to my coursebooks) that I really felt like I was going to collapse. So I walked around the market for a while and found a tourist agency, they made a few calls and introduced me to this old couple who run a hostel right there, and they let me use the room for 3 hours for like $20. The situation was even more fun because of course they didn’t speak English, so we went through a series of drawing pictures, pointing at things, and me going through my Croatian dictionary…
So then I walked around the harbor at Split; I had never seen water so blue in my life. The harbor was really nice; there are a bunch of outdoor markets, cafes, bars and restaurants. Here are some photos.
I wandered around and found this little stone corridor with a restaurant sign on the outside. I followed it through this winding stone maze and got to this beautiful little café enclosed on the outside by a trellis-like thing and vines. I then had one of the most amazing meals of my entire life. There was just a big outdoor oven/grill thing that they cooked everything on. The fisherman just came in with this fresh bucket of fish, and they grilled it with some herbs and olive oil, and fresh eggplant with several kinds of squash, and the bread just came out of the oven at the bakers’ across the street… WOW. I have never tasted such freshness in my life. I tried to eat as slowly as I could.
So the “5-hour” bus ride to Sarajevo (the one that “leaves every half hour”) actually took 8 hours. Apparently the bus drivers have deals with certain restaurants along the way, and they tell you they’re going to stop for 10 minutes to use the bathroom, but they really mean a half hour, and they sit and have coffee and food. A few goats crossing the road slowed things down too. The ride was beautiful; we went from the coast of Croatia northeast through the mountains, and followed the Neretva River through a lot of Bosnia. The music was hilarious; the drivers went from blasting Metallica to old Balkan folk songs… one of the drivers was Bosnian and the other was Croatian, and at one point one of them starts blasting this Serbian nationalist song (?!); it was something like “Galic Galic da da da!!” (Galic is a war criminal convicted at The Hague.) They were yelling at each other and laughing, and the other one switches the radio, and that song that goes “psycho-killer… qu’est-que-c’est?” came on, which is obviously sort of funny (not funny-funny; but funny-disturbing). I guess they tired of that, then started yelling and switching around the stations, and finally land on some Balkan folk music that kind of sounded like polka music to me, with some roosters cock-a-doodle-dooing during the chorus…
I was so exhausted at that point that my eyes and ears started playing tricks on me. You know how apparently when you have severe sleep deprivation you go nuts? Well I think I started to go nuts; I kept thinking I saw people out of the corner of my eye, and when I turned it was a bus seat or street sign or nothing. They turned the news on, and it was in Croatian. But I was sort of drifting in and out of consciousness, and started to think I totally understood what they were saying on the news; in my head I heard reporting on some war criminals that was half English and half Croatian, but when I focused and snapped myself out of it, it was in reality all in Croatian. I think I was actually delirious.
The ride through Mostar was kind of depressing. It’s in the Hercegovina part of Bosnia-Hercegovina, which is the south. It seems to have not recovered from the war as well as some other areas; there were so many bombed out buildings and houses along the road. Some people were sitting outside of some of them, but most were just abandoned. The Neretva River was so beautiful though; it was actually turquoise.
So I got to Sarajevo late Sunday night/early Monday morning. I stayed in the Holiday Inn for the first night, just for the experience and to give myself some time the next day to look at apartments. The Holiday Inn is where the war in Bosnia is said to have officially started; a shot was fired from the hotel, where Radovan Karadzic (Bosnian Serb leader indicted at ICTY and still on the run) was allegedly staying. It is also where all the journalists were holed up during the siege of Sarajevo and reported from, and apparently the entrance was a frequent target for Serb snipers positioned in the hills surrounding the city. It was very nice and I just passed out when I got there.
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