On to Europe! First stop, Sarajevo where I was meeting up with my friend Bri from Tulane and her husband Ryan who have spent the last year living in Bucharest Romania, where she was a visiting professor. I was super excited to meet up with some friends after travelling solo the past 5 weeks. I actually don’t really mind travelling solo, but it gets exhausting after a while as you’re always looking to make new friends in each city you go to and then you start back at square one each time you arrive somewhere new. Travelling solo you also have to plan everything yourself, which isn’t exactly my happy place. Luckily my friend Bri is an excellent travel planner and I didn’t have to plan a thing once I met up with them. When she sent me her itinerary I was completely blown away with how organized it was, but it proved to be very useful.
I arrived in Sarajevo a day before they did and when they came and met up they were not surprised to see that I had befriended the rowdiest group of Europeans in the city 😂. This group of like 5 Norwegians sat down at my table and challenged me that I couldn’t drink a beer faster than their friend who they claimed was the beer drinking champion of Norway and had never lost a chugging contest. Well suffice it to say that is no longer true. She lost twice in a row to yours truly and then I started a USA chant that nearly got us thrown out of the bar and we all became friends. The things I do for my country.
The next morning we did a walking tour of Sarajevo and got a better understanding of the city and the tough history of the country. They’ve basically been ruled by other countries for most of their existence. Originally it was the Ottoman empire, who brought a strong Muslim influence and is the reason that most of the country practices Islam. From there, it was ruled by the Austo-Hungarians, then invaded by the Nazis, then was part of communist Yugoslavia until declaring their independence in the early 90s, following a brutal war. Sarajevo was a nice city, but definitely still displayed some of the scars of it’s pretty recent war in the early 90’s. You could still see bullet holes on many of the buildings. One thing we learned on the tour was that anywhere you saw a red rose painted on the ground is a place where civilians were killed by a mortar shelling during the siege of Sarajevo in the 90s. We also walked across the bridge where Frand Ferdinand was assassinated, which started World War 1.
That evening we went and checked out the oldest brewery in Sarajevo and ate a lot of grilled meat, which was the Bosnian specialty. One dish they are famous for is cevappe, which is basically these pieces of ground beef that look like sausages and typically come with a pita and sour cream. Delicious street food.
The following day we took the cable car up to see the the old bobsled track from the 1984 Olympics. This was much cooler than I expected, we were able to actually walk down the track, which has been turned into a graffiti lovers paradise. On the way home we decided to hike back down to the city and we’re looking to do some exploring off trail, when a local ran up to us screaming that the area we were about to explore was part of the front lines and may still have active landmines in it. We did read ahead of time that there were still a lot of active landmines in Bosnia and Herzegovina, but we found it very strange that there were no warnings or anything posted related to this. Anyway, we decided to take that guys advice and not risk getting blown up. We stuck to the trail 😂.
That afternoon we checked out the Sarajevo city hall, a beautiful recently renovated building which contains a museum on the city and some weird modern art museum as well. From there we went to the genocide museum, which was one of those museums that just leaves you feeling awful for how bad of a place the world can be. It was filled with testimonials from innocent Bosnian civilians who were rounded up and taken to camps to be beaten, tortured, raped and murdered by the Serbian troops. For absolutely no reason that makes any sense. There was also a lot of history about the siege of Sarajevo, which lasted months and required the residents to risk their lives daily to go out into the streets for food, water, or to go to school. The Serbian forces occupied alot of the area overlooking the city, so they would regularly attack civilians with mortars and snipers during the siege. The craziest part of the whole thing to me was how recently that happened, it occurred during my lifetime. From that point on, for everyone I met my age or older one of the first things I thought was- I wonder how the war impacted this person’s life?
The next day we grabbed a train to Mostar, home of the famous old bridge. We stayed at a cool little hotel, that is actually one of the oldest examples of Ottoman architecture that still exists in Europe, dating back to the 17th century.
We spent the day is Mostar checking out the beautiful little city and trying to stay cool (this was right during the major July European heat wave and temps were over 100). The old bridge was beautiful and there were men there collecting money in exchange for jumping off the bridge which was fun to watch. We also climbed up into the minaret of the mosque, which provided an amazing view of the city and river below.
Not going to lie, I had zero expectations for Bosnia & Herzegovina going in, I didn’t know much about the country and mainly went there to align with my friends’ trip. With that being said, it really was a gem and I really enjoyed learning about the history (although alot of it is very sad) of the country. From Mostar, we were on to our next adventure, 9 days travelling through Croatia!
