Our bathroom has two drains: one in the shower, and one on the floor of the bathroom. Initially I was confused as there did not appear to be a fire alarm sprinkler or anything of the sort. Where would all this extra water come from? The answer I quickly found was from the shower. The drain is so poor that it effectively sets a 5 minute time limit on showers, because the water will overflow the shower and spill onto the floor.
The center of the "Modern" half of Sarajevo, which is split (with an actual line in the pavement) into two distinct halves: historic and modern.
We went on a walking tour of Sarajevo today. The above picture is the image that the city would like to sell to the rest of the world--a fusion of history, beautiful countryside, and modern design. And there are definitely parts of the city, as evidenced by the pictures above, that fit that description. Unfortunately, the reality is that the beauty above is less then a third of the city. The other 2/3 of the city is a stark reminder that a brutal war happened here less then 30 years ago that the city never really recovered from.
Click on Image Below to Scroll Through Gallery:
Here is a monument outside of a cathedral near the cities center. It is the site of a mortar strike; the dents in the ground were filled in with red. Our tour guide told us that he learned as a child that the bomb was shot from the mountains towards where I was taking the pictures from; the splatter going away from me is where the dirt was kicked up behind the bomb, and the shrapnel mostly went forwards towards where I was standing. Our guide grew up during the war; he about when he was 10 he put sleeping pills in his grandmothers tea so he would be able to go outside and play. Within 10 minutes of beginning to play he was hit with mortar shrapnel, and received 34 stitches and 3 permanent scars in his legs. Despite this he was a very jovial and nice man
After the walking tour we visited the Office of the High Representative (OHR). The OHR was appointed after the Dayton agreement to oversee the rebuilding of Bosnia. Initially the OHR's job was to pass laws when local governance would not, interpret treaties, and remove corrupt politicians. The OHR was not designed to last forever, so while it performed the duties above with gusto in its early years, OHR began to cut back on its activities around 2006/2007. OHR needed the locals to step up and begin to govern effectively without international help. This has angered the locals, because after years of OHR removing corrupt politicians and moving along the political process, Bosnians do not seem to really know how to effectively "get angry" about political issues.
We had a Q&A with the second in command of the OHR, an American from Northern California. Along with our Northeastern student group was a group of students from American University, some of who were Bosnian. The Bosnian students angrily grilled the OHR representative, asking loaded questions such as "What has OHR done at all for the country?" (The answer, by the way, was set up an entire government, enforce borders, establish a viable Bosnian currency, create a police force, and remove 140 corrupt politicians, among other things.) The man was very frank about the failures of OHR, and how they hoped to better service the Bosnian people. He seemed forward and "right" to me, but many of the American University students spent a lot of the time shaking their heads angrily while he was answering.
The 2 most interesting things to me about the meeting were:
- The fact that "education is fundamentally broken in Bosnia." The man said that a reasonable course of action could be to close all Universities in the country for a year and force them to rebuild their curriculum. There is no common set of education requirements, and there are many local battles about which version of history to teach (the Serbian version of the recent wars, the Croatian version...no one proposes the in-between moderate version though). "Diploma Mills" are rampant. Unemployment for young people is around 50%, even for the ones that do graduate from college. Leaving the country to find work isn't an option either, because Bosnian degrees aren't recognized/deemed to be worth anything outside of the country.
- It seems that everyone in Bosnia has very strong feelings about the United States, but very few people in the United States even really know where the country is, much less care how effective our international aid efforts have been.
For dinner I ordered a "meat" pizza. That was the entire description. What I ended up receiving was (from 1 o'clock going clockwise) a ham / mushroom-onion / smoked beef / Tuna pizza. The tuna pizza was shockingly good, and is something I am eager to eat again.