Today was a big, big, big day. I've been dreading writing this day as it was so full on with such a massive amount of information and emotion overload. It was a fantastic day, just big! So big.
The weather forecast for our time in Sarajevo was meant to be pretty crappy - lots of rain and thunderstorms. Thankfully, all our timing ended up pretty perfect which meant we were never really encumbered by the rain when it did fall.
One of the first things we wanted to do this morning before the rain started was go to the Yellow Fort as Dan had been here previously and it had a pretty spectacular view over Sarajevo. I had worn my rain jacket and as we walked (uphill) I became increasingly hotter - even if it was going to rain later, it was certainly warm and humid now! When Dan had visited before, there was a little coffee shop at the fort, however when we rounded the corner this was under construction so sadly no coffee break for me this time.
But we had something even better - a kitty! Actually a kitten. I'm getting distracted, though. Before the kitten, we stood on the barrier surrounding the fort and took many photos of the clouds rolling into the Trebević Mountain, with the beautiful lush green landscape dotted with red roofs. It was really very pretty. The sun peeked in and out from behind the clouds, and we watched as the route to the top of the mountain slowly became less encumbered by clouds.
And yes, there was a very, very, very affectionate kitty here which distracted us for a long time!
Our next stop was to be the cable car up to the top of Trebević Mountain. We would have still done this had it been under cloud because it is quite symbolic - the cable car was built in the 50's, and during the Bosnian war of the 90's, was destroyed. It was only opened a single month ago (to the day we went up it, I think) after having been closed for a couple of decades. Tickets weren't cheap - especially for tourists - €10 return for tourists, €3 return for locals. But I had no qualms about pumping some money into this economy - hopefully it goes where it is supposed to go.
From the Yellow Fort we made our way to the base of the cable car. I got into a bit of a situation getting onto the cable car - I gave my ticket to the young man and didn't expect him to turn the turnstile first before I pushed through it, and instead ending up getting myself wedged between the machine and the turnstile with it digging into my upper thigh. It was all a bit embarrassing! The journey was quite beautiful as we crept higher and higher, realising that the clouds had lifted and we had a pretty clear view all the way across the city. Another thing we noticed was that the gondalas on the cable car seemed to be on the opposite side to every other cable car I think we've ever taken!
At the top we had one main objective: find the old, abandoned bobsled track from the 1984 Winter Olympics held in Sarajevo. As we learnt later, this whole area was the strong hold of the Bosnian-Serbs when they were bombarding the city. However at the time, it was just a cool thing to do!
As we were walking down the path towards the beginning of the bobsled, we passed a little parking lot where an enterprising man tried to sell us soft drinks and water out of the back of his car. Turning the corner, we saw a big concrete structure and knew we were close to the bobsled start.
The walk was fascinating and strangely beautiful, eerie as well. The concrete structure was almost completely untouched, and in places still had what might have been padding or insulation around the outsides. The entire length was graffitied - some quite beautiful, and also in places we could easily see where different tracks were able to be switched between, the mechanics long gone though.
We only saw a handful of other people the whole time, and we either kept ahead of them or stopped to let them pass. We also took a lot of silly photos of us sitting on the ground pretending to be in a bobsled! At one point, we took the path less travelled - a section that went uphill and must have been a run off but while most people don't go down, so it was very sludgey. It became a deadend, so we had to go back and rejoin the original track.
Each time we came to a bobsled turn, we could hear the voices of the other people on the track echoing back to us. They could probably hear us too! And be able to understand us...while we couldn't understand them. We eventually reached the finish line, and the track took a steep uphill turn (to stop the bobsleds), and now we had to make our way back up to the top.
This didn't take all that long, but it was very humid and seemed quite steep, so we were both pretty sweaty by the time we got to the top again. The man was still selling drinks, and had been joined by a few other enterprising individuals. On our way down, I couldn't imagine he would be selling very much as there was practically no one around, however on our way back up again we realised the place was now swarming with people. Probably mostly locals, as the journey was so inexpensive!
We praised ourselves and our timing for getting up and out of there before the crowds, and noticed that the city looked hazy again. On the cable car on the way down, we drank our wine. Yes, our wine. This morning we had poured some wine into our sippy cups so we could have it at the top - we had forgotten, so the cable car journey back down was the perfect opportunity!
As the cable car pulled in, we notice some big spots of rain beginning to appear, and as we started to walk out into the open the heavens opened up and it began torrentially downpouring. Torrential. We took refuge under a small alcove because despite our rain jackets, we were still getting soaked - our legs and our back packs in particular. It didn't take long for it to stop and turn into a light drizzle, and then stop altogether.
As we had eaten a lot of local cuisine lately, I was feeling ready to try something a bit more bland, and there was a place near the centre of the Old Town that was called Chipas (chicken and pasta) where all the main dishes were 4.50, or the equivalent of €2.25. Dan went with the spicy chips, while I had some veggies and chicken. We finished off with their dessert, which was a huge range of cakes, quite sizeable, for €1. This prepared us well for the walking tour we were about to embark on.
The tour is called War Scars and New Times by Neno and Friends, and I highly, highly recommend you join this tour if you ever visit Sarajevo! We had one of Neno's friends and she was sensational. I don't know quite where to begin. I took a lot of notes during her tour because I was simply so uneducated about the whole business that all of the information was new to me.
Our guide was 6 and a half years old when the war broke out in 1992, and she remembers it all. As she said, "You're a child until your mum tells you what a sniper is!"
Sarajevo endured the longest siege in modern warfare, about 3 years, 8 months of constant shell fire and sniper fire. The average shell fall onto the city was 300 shells per day. Some days more, some days less. Some days may only be 100, other days 1000. On the 22 July, 1993, 3777 shells were dropped on the city. That's 157 shells every hour. That's 2.6 shells every minute.
As I have never seen or experienced a shell exploding, I obviously can not fathom what this would have been like. But just hearing it all made me shiver. I urge you to do some research into why all this happened as I will probably make a hash of it trying to explain with my not-fully-comprehending knowledge.
One of the biggest things I got out of the tour was the Bosnian and the Sarajevian resilience. Our guide would repeatedly say, "Oh well!" which at first was a little grating, but later on she explained, what could they do but keep living? They had no weapons, no way to fight back, so the biggest and best thing they could do was to survive and keep on going like nothing was happening. Oh well! Shit happens.
At one point during the siege, one of the Bosnian-Serbs graffitied on the post office:
This is Serbia!
To which a local person spray painted underneath:
No, this is post office, you fool!
That sort of sums up the attitude of the people. It's incredible. Our guide said that once the siege started, she continued going to school. The school was transferred to a pub, and it was only for a few hours a day, but education continued. People continued going to work, even though there were no pay cheques. People continued to get dressed up in their finest clothes because, well, if today is going to be your last day, you might as well look good!
Here I learnt all about the Republic of Srpska - this is the land that the Bosnian-Serbs had claimed as their own, and were essentially rewarded with at the end of the war. They keep to themselves, there's a peace agreement. The Srpska people and the rest of Bosnia don't necessarily want to kill each other any more, but there's not a particularly good relationship there.
We visited the main market in Sarajevo. It was in a little bit of a blind spot of the snipers and the shells - or maybe it was just pure luck that it took so long to get hit. The market continued on during the whole war - it was a place to buy a few little extra things but also a place where people could socialise a little. One day, it was finally hit by a shell - and you can still see the shell tail today. 67 dead and 150 wounded. The next day, the market reopened and continued on like nothing had happened. They had to keep going, no matter what.
We also visited the memorial for all the children who died as a result of this conflict. Our guide explained the snipers to us here. You have to remember that the majority of the people fighting in the hills were originally Sarajevians, who wanted the land to remain Yugoslavia/Serbia. Therefore they knew the people below them that they were shooting or targeting. Some of the snipers never shot women or children. Some snipers wouldn't shoot their neighbours or friends. Some were so focussed on the cause that anything was a moving target, women, children or otherwise.
There were 3 main types of shells, too. Small ones, piggies (these were the big ones and looked a bit like a pig in shape) and at night - the witches would fly at night. These would make a cackling noise as they flew through the air. As our guide explained, if you hear a shell launch, but then stop being able to hear it flying through the air - you ran. You ran because if you couldn't hear it anymore, then you were in its flight path.
Our guide also explained the current political climate in Bosnia. They have 3 presidents, one for each "religion" or "region". A Serbian president, a Croatian president and a Bosnian president. This means nothing ever gets done. Oh well! They survived 400 years of Ottoman rule. They survived the Austro-Hungarian rule. They survived Yugoslavia and the war. They'll survive this parliament situation!
Close to the end of the tour we approached the parliament building, surrounded still on one side by big sheets of corrugated iron. This was Sniper Alley - the metal in place to try to help hide people who might have to run across this area. Sniper Alley began here and went all the way, 12km, to the airport as it housed all the main offices in the city and was an easy target from the hills. Our guide showed us a picture which said "RUN OR RIP", which completely blew my mind.
Residents tried to avoid this section of course, but if they had to take it, they would try to run between the UN vehicles stationed along here - because they were bullet proof. If someone was known to be shot here, their friends and family would be compelled to think - was it suicide? Why else were they there? Directly in the middle of it was the Hotel Holiday (or Holiday Inn as it was at the time), which is where all the journalists stayed. It was all fine and well for them to arrive - the UN vehicles would take them right up to the door unharmed. But once the journalists were out on the street they looked like anyone else - so our guide said she had respect for them!
But, she assured us that this was a Sniper Free Walking Tour, and indeed it was! She told us about the Bosnian flag and that they didn't even have a flag for 3 years, in the end the UN just made them one. It means nothing to the people, and the amount of stars also means nothing - and so there is a different number of stars on every flag. I kind of noticed this, but I want to do some more research! She said that if they wanted a flag to really represent Bosnia, it should be "cevapi and cigarettes"!
We passed the Romeo and Juliet Bridge (as it has been nicknamed), and this story brought tears to my eyes, and our guides, and almost everyone around. You can even find the pictures online if you so wish to look them up. I don't want to go into too much detail, but two lovers, who thought they were safe, were shot by snipers within seconds of each other on this bridge and died in each others arms. Their bodies were unable to be retrieved for 8 days because the area was so unsafe.
Our tour ended at the Canned Beef monument, which Dan and I had been wanting to find. Built by the "grateful citizens of Sarajevo", it was a tongue in cheek representation and a thank you to the food that was delivered to the starving people of Sarajevo. Our guide said it was quite telling that no cat ever wanted to eat it, it was probably tinned cat! Often, the tins of food would have dead (not alive) worms inside, it had deteriorated that much. She said that you knew you were back to your normal self after the war when you find a work and don't want to eat it! Either way, being skinnier was better. You moved quicker and it made you a smaller target.
It truly was an amazing tour, sniper free thankfully, and although I've probably completely quoted the whole thing here - I highly recommend you go do it when (not if) you visit Sarajevo! It was really amazing. I have even more notes from the tour written down but my account of it was already getting a bit too long...
BY now it was almost 6pm. We ended near the train station and so we wandered over there to get tickets to Mostar for the morrow. Dan had taken the train before, and it is supposed to be one of the most scenic journeys in the world, however it only runs once or twice a day. When we got there, the ticket office was shut already, but we could see the train times. They were pretty inconvenient. The 4.50pm one would have been fine, but it would have meant leaving our luggage at our accommodation - and seeing how disorganised they had been the day before we were loathe to do that. Imagine them not responding and we being unable to get our stuff back!
We wandered to the bus station next door and noticed that the buses left every 30-60 minutes. I made the snap decision that we just get one around midday and be done with. The bus journey takes mostly the same path as the train, and it eliminates any faff. And so the tickets were purchased.
There was a museum/gallery that Dan had visited previously and which he wanted to go to again if possible, and I was interested in it too, but we were running out of time and daylight hours. I was also interested in visiting the "World War 1" bridge - the Latin Bridge, where Arch Duke Franz Ferdinand was shot, sparking WW1. The museum shut at 8pm, though, and in the end we decided to leg it to the museum as we could possibly fit in the bridge on the morrow if needed.
It wasn't a short walk, but thankfully I had put the wrong address in my phone and so we arrived where we needed to be a lot sooner than I expected. The museum is called Gallery 11/07/95, and is dedicated to the Srebrenica Massacre, where over 8000 Bosnian muslims were killed in the town on that day in an attempt of ethnic cleansing.
The gallery is quite small, and the majority is 2 screens playing videos, the longest being about 30 minutes (so we just had time to watch them all through). The rest of the room is full of photos. It's harrowing. And the videos are simply heart wrenching - the bit that got to me the most was how many bodies are still missing, and how many families (only women left) are unable to find any kind of peace as they have not found any body remains. In some cases, a finger, or a single bone is all they have been able to identify of a body, but it is something for families to bury. Mass graves continue to be found all over Bosnia, and I was told later on that many graves were actually dug up and moved elsewhere so that they would never be found.
8pm came around and we were asked to leave the museum as it was closing. We hadn't quite finished all the movies so we took a photo of their names and hopefully we can find them online somewhere. We weren't far from the Latin Bridge, so we had a quick peek at it. But somehow I wasn't so interested in WW1 anymore, not after everything I had learnt had happened in Sarajevo in recent history. I took a quick picture and that was it.
On our way back we thought we'd grab an icecream, and as we were trying to choose from a vendor we weren't particularly interested in, we spotted Lee from our transfer and said hello. It was cool catching up with her and finding out how she had filled her time, and we were able to give her some advice (like the War Scars tour!).
In the end we forewent the icecream and grabbed some cheese and hummus to go with our wine and had dinner back at our accomodation. It had been an extraordinarily big day. Overwhelming. So many things I learnt. But it was amazing and I recommend you do everything we did! But maybe stretch it over two days so your brain doesn't get overloaded...
Til next time,
Xxx
The weather forecast for our time in Sarajevo was meant to be pretty crappy - lots of rain and thunderstorms. Thankfully, all our timing ended up pretty perfect which meant we were never really encumbered by the rain when it did fall.
One of the first things we wanted to do this morning before the rain started was go to the Yellow Fort as Dan had been here previously and it had a pretty spectacular view over Sarajevo. I had worn my rain jacket and as we walked (uphill) I became increasingly hotter - even if it was going to rain later, it was certainly warm and humid now! When Dan had visited before, there was a little coffee shop at the fort, however when we rounded the corner this was under construction so sadly no coffee break for me this time.
But we had something even better - a kitty! Actually a kitten. I'm getting distracted, though. Before the kitten, we stood on the barrier surrounding the fort and took many photos of the clouds rolling into the Trebević Mountain, with the beautiful lush green landscape dotted with red roofs. It was really very pretty. The sun peeked in and out from behind the clouds, and we watched as the route to the top of the mountain slowly became less encumbered by clouds.
And yes, there was a very, very, very affectionate kitty here which distracted us for a long time!
Our next stop was to be the cable car up to the top of Trebević Mountain. We would have still done this had it been under cloud because it is quite symbolic - the cable car was built in the 50's, and during the Bosnian war of the 90's, was destroyed. It was only opened a single month ago (to the day we went up it, I think) after having been closed for a couple of decades. Tickets weren't cheap - especially for tourists - €10 return for tourists, €3 return for locals. But I had no qualms about pumping some money into this economy - hopefully it goes where it is supposed to go.
From the Yellow Fort we made our way to the base of the cable car. I got into a bit of a situation getting onto the cable car - I gave my ticket to the young man and didn't expect him to turn the turnstile first before I pushed through it, and instead ending up getting myself wedged between the machine and the turnstile with it digging into my upper thigh. It was all a bit embarrassing! The journey was quite beautiful as we crept higher and higher, realising that the clouds had lifted and we had a pretty clear view all the way across the city. Another thing we noticed was that the gondalas on the cable car seemed to be on the opposite side to every other cable car I think we've ever taken!
At the top we had one main objective: find the old, abandoned bobsled track from the 1984 Winter Olympics held in Sarajevo. As we learnt later, this whole area was the strong hold of the Bosnian-Serbs when they were bombarding the city. However at the time, it was just a cool thing to do!
As we were walking down the path towards the beginning of the bobsled, we passed a little parking lot where an enterprising man tried to sell us soft drinks and water out of the back of his car. Turning the corner, we saw a big concrete structure and knew we were close to the bobsled start.
The walk was fascinating and strangely beautiful, eerie as well. The concrete structure was almost completely untouched, and in places still had what might have been padding or insulation around the outsides. The entire length was graffitied - some quite beautiful, and also in places we could easily see where different tracks were able to be switched between, the mechanics long gone though.
We only saw a handful of other people the whole time, and we either kept ahead of them or stopped to let them pass. We also took a lot of silly photos of us sitting on the ground pretending to be in a bobsled! At one point, we took the path less travelled - a section that went uphill and must have been a run off but while most people don't go down, so it was very sludgey. It became a deadend, so we had to go back and rejoin the original track.
Each time we came to a bobsled turn, we could hear the voices of the other people on the track echoing back to us. They could probably hear us too! And be able to understand us...while we couldn't understand them. We eventually reached the finish line, and the track took a steep uphill turn (to stop the bobsleds), and now we had to make our way back up to the top.
This didn't take all that long, but it was very humid and seemed quite steep, so we were both pretty sweaty by the time we got to the top again. The man was still selling drinks, and had been joined by a few other enterprising individuals. On our way down, I couldn't imagine he would be selling very much as there was practically no one around, however on our way back up again we realised the place was now swarming with people. Probably mostly locals, as the journey was so inexpensive!
We praised ourselves and our timing for getting up and out of there before the crowds, and noticed that the city looked hazy again. On the cable car on the way down, we drank our wine. Yes, our wine. This morning we had poured some wine into our sippy cups so we could have it at the top - we had forgotten, so the cable car journey back down was the perfect opportunity!
As the cable car pulled in, we notice some big spots of rain beginning to appear, and as we started to walk out into the open the heavens opened up and it began torrentially downpouring. Torrential. We took refuge under a small alcove because despite our rain jackets, we were still getting soaked - our legs and our back packs in particular. It didn't take long for it to stop and turn into a light drizzle, and then stop altogether.
As we had eaten a lot of local cuisine lately, I was feeling ready to try something a bit more bland, and there was a place near the centre of the Old Town that was called Chipas (chicken and pasta) where all the main dishes were 4.50, or the equivalent of €2.25. Dan went with the spicy chips, while I had some veggies and chicken. We finished off with their dessert, which was a huge range of cakes, quite sizeable, for €1. This prepared us well for the walking tour we were about to embark on.
The tour is called War Scars and New Times by Neno and Friends, and I highly, highly recommend you join this tour if you ever visit Sarajevo! We had one of Neno's friends and she was sensational. I don't know quite where to begin. I took a lot of notes during her tour because I was simply so uneducated about the whole business that all of the information was new to me.
Our guide was 6 and a half years old when the war broke out in 1992, and she remembers it all. As she said, "You're a child until your mum tells you what a sniper is!"
Sarajevo endured the longest siege in modern warfare, about 3 years, 8 months of constant shell fire and sniper fire. The average shell fall onto the city was 300 shells per day. Some days more, some days less. Some days may only be 100, other days 1000. On the 22 July, 1993, 3777 shells were dropped on the city. That's 157 shells every hour. That's 2.6 shells every minute.
As I have never seen or experienced a shell exploding, I obviously can not fathom what this would have been like. But just hearing it all made me shiver. I urge you to do some research into why all this happened as I will probably make a hash of it trying to explain with my not-fully-comprehending knowledge.
One of the biggest things I got out of the tour was the Bosnian and the Sarajevian resilience. Our guide would repeatedly say, "Oh well!" which at first was a little grating, but later on she explained, what could they do but keep living? They had no weapons, no way to fight back, so the biggest and best thing they could do was to survive and keep on going like nothing was happening. Oh well! Shit happens.
At one point during the siege, one of the Bosnian-Serbs graffitied on the post office:
This is Serbia!
To which a local person spray painted underneath:
No, this is post office, you fool!
That sort of sums up the attitude of the people. It's incredible. Our guide said that once the siege started, she continued going to school. The school was transferred to a pub, and it was only for a few hours a day, but education continued. People continued going to work, even though there were no pay cheques. People continued to get dressed up in their finest clothes because, well, if today is going to be your last day, you might as well look good!
Here I learnt all about the Republic of Srpska - this is the land that the Bosnian-Serbs had claimed as their own, and were essentially rewarded with at the end of the war. They keep to themselves, there's a peace agreement. The Srpska people and the rest of Bosnia don't necessarily want to kill each other any more, but there's not a particularly good relationship there.
We visited the main market in Sarajevo. It was in a little bit of a blind spot of the snipers and the shells - or maybe it was just pure luck that it took so long to get hit. The market continued on during the whole war - it was a place to buy a few little extra things but also a place where people could socialise a little. One day, it was finally hit by a shell - and you can still see the shell tail today. 67 dead and 150 wounded. The next day, the market reopened and continued on like nothing had happened. They had to keep going, no matter what.
We also visited the memorial for all the children who died as a result of this conflict. Our guide explained the snipers to us here. You have to remember that the majority of the people fighting in the hills were originally Sarajevians, who wanted the land to remain Yugoslavia/Serbia. Therefore they knew the people below them that they were shooting or targeting. Some of the snipers never shot women or children. Some snipers wouldn't shoot their neighbours or friends. Some were so focussed on the cause that anything was a moving target, women, children or otherwise.
There were 3 main types of shells, too. Small ones, piggies (these were the big ones and looked a bit like a pig in shape) and at night - the witches would fly at night. These would make a cackling noise as they flew through the air. As our guide explained, if you hear a shell launch, but then stop being able to hear it flying through the air - you ran. You ran because if you couldn't hear it anymore, then you were in its flight path.
Our guide also explained the current political climate in Bosnia. They have 3 presidents, one for each "religion" or "region". A Serbian president, a Croatian president and a Bosnian president. This means nothing ever gets done. Oh well! They survived 400 years of Ottoman rule. They survived the Austro-Hungarian rule. They survived Yugoslavia and the war. They'll survive this parliament situation!
Close to the end of the tour we approached the parliament building, surrounded still on one side by big sheets of corrugated iron. This was Sniper Alley - the metal in place to try to help hide people who might have to run across this area. Sniper Alley began here and went all the way, 12km, to the airport as it housed all the main offices in the city and was an easy target from the hills. Our guide showed us a picture which said "RUN OR RIP", which completely blew my mind.
Residents tried to avoid this section of course, but if they had to take it, they would try to run between the UN vehicles stationed along here - because they were bullet proof. If someone was known to be shot here, their friends and family would be compelled to think - was it suicide? Why else were they there? Directly in the middle of it was the Hotel Holiday (or Holiday Inn as it was at the time), which is where all the journalists stayed. It was all fine and well for them to arrive - the UN vehicles would take them right up to the door unharmed. But once the journalists were out on the street they looked like anyone else - so our guide said she had respect for them!
But, she assured us that this was a Sniper Free Walking Tour, and indeed it was! She told us about the Bosnian flag and that they didn't even have a flag for 3 years, in the end the UN just made them one. It means nothing to the people, and the amount of stars also means nothing - and so there is a different number of stars on every flag. I kind of noticed this, but I want to do some more research! She said that if they wanted a flag to really represent Bosnia, it should be "cevapi and cigarettes"!
We passed the Romeo and Juliet Bridge (as it has been nicknamed), and this story brought tears to my eyes, and our guides, and almost everyone around. You can even find the pictures online if you so wish to look them up. I don't want to go into too much detail, but two lovers, who thought they were safe, were shot by snipers within seconds of each other on this bridge and died in each others arms. Their bodies were unable to be retrieved for 8 days because the area was so unsafe.
Our tour ended at the Canned Beef monument, which Dan and I had been wanting to find. Built by the "grateful citizens of Sarajevo", it was a tongue in cheek representation and a thank you to the food that was delivered to the starving people of Sarajevo. Our guide said it was quite telling that no cat ever wanted to eat it, it was probably tinned cat! Often, the tins of food would have dead (not alive) worms inside, it had deteriorated that much. She said that you knew you were back to your normal self after the war when you find a work and don't want to eat it! Either way, being skinnier was better. You moved quicker and it made you a smaller target.
It truly was an amazing tour, sniper free thankfully, and although I've probably completely quoted the whole thing here - I highly recommend you go do it when (not if) you visit Sarajevo! It was really amazing. I have even more notes from the tour written down but my account of it was already getting a bit too long...
BY now it was almost 6pm. We ended near the train station and so we wandered over there to get tickets to Mostar for the morrow. Dan had taken the train before, and it is supposed to be one of the most scenic journeys in the world, however it only runs once or twice a day. When we got there, the ticket office was shut already, but we could see the train times. They were pretty inconvenient. The 4.50pm one would have been fine, but it would have meant leaving our luggage at our accommodation - and seeing how disorganised they had been the day before we were loathe to do that. Imagine them not responding and we being unable to get our stuff back!
We wandered to the bus station next door and noticed that the buses left every 30-60 minutes. I made the snap decision that we just get one around midday and be done with. The bus journey takes mostly the same path as the train, and it eliminates any faff. And so the tickets were purchased.
There was a museum/gallery that Dan had visited previously and which he wanted to go to again if possible, and I was interested in it too, but we were running out of time and daylight hours. I was also interested in visiting the "World War 1" bridge - the Latin Bridge, where Arch Duke Franz Ferdinand was shot, sparking WW1. The museum shut at 8pm, though, and in the end we decided to leg it to the museum as we could possibly fit in the bridge on the morrow if needed.
It wasn't a short walk, but thankfully I had put the wrong address in my phone and so we arrived where we needed to be a lot sooner than I expected. The museum is called Gallery 11/07/95, and is dedicated to the Srebrenica Massacre, where over 8000 Bosnian muslims were killed in the town on that day in an attempt of ethnic cleansing.
The gallery is quite small, and the majority is 2 screens playing videos, the longest being about 30 minutes (so we just had time to watch them all through). The rest of the room is full of photos. It's harrowing. And the videos are simply heart wrenching - the bit that got to me the most was how many bodies are still missing, and how many families (only women left) are unable to find any kind of peace as they have not found any body remains. In some cases, a finger, or a single bone is all they have been able to identify of a body, but it is something for families to bury. Mass graves continue to be found all over Bosnia, and I was told later on that many graves were actually dug up and moved elsewhere so that they would never be found.
8pm came around and we were asked to leave the museum as it was closing. We hadn't quite finished all the movies so we took a photo of their names and hopefully we can find them online somewhere. We weren't far from the Latin Bridge, so we had a quick peek at it. But somehow I wasn't so interested in WW1 anymore, not after everything I had learnt had happened in Sarajevo in recent history. I took a quick picture and that was it.
On our way back we thought we'd grab an icecream, and as we were trying to choose from a vendor we weren't particularly interested in, we spotted Lee from our transfer and said hello. It was cool catching up with her and finding out how she had filled her time, and we were able to give her some advice (like the War Scars tour!).
In the end we forewent the icecream and grabbed some cheese and hummus to go with our wine and had dinner back at our accomodation. It had been an extraordinarily big day. Overwhelming. So many things I learnt. But it was amazing and I recommend you do everything we did! But maybe stretch it over two days so your brain doesn't get overloaded...
Til next time,
Xxx
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