We Do Adventure

We were standing in the kitchen this morning when I heard a Police siren outside the window. In our experience here that can mean only one thing: dignitaries being ferried about the country in a high speed convoy. Rowan had seen on Facebook that Ivo Josipovic, the Croatian President was dropping in on Jajce today. Sure enough, half a dozen blacked-out people carriers, a few others vehicles whose description I can't remember, and a couple of ubiquitous white Volkswagen Golf Police cars were snaking their way down the valley from the direction of Banja Luka. I can't claim to have seen the President but if he was looking out of the window he may well have seen our house, if not us gawping out of the window! I've just received an email from Balkan Insight that contained a link to an article explaining why he was in the area. As it was a promising piece politically I thought I'd couple some of the stand out sections here in the hope you'll click the link to read the...

My next post was to be about the football but I saw this today I had a feeling this was important news not to be overlooked. Sure enough I got home and Rowan was reading about the civil servant strike in Mostar. The reason for this action is “the city council failed for the seventeenth time to elect a city mayor or to adopt a budget.” It’d be nice to say this was unbelievable but even St Thomas – patron saint of doubters – would have to concede that when you’ve been there, seen it and snapped the photo you know they’re not making this stuff up. The ‘they’ in this instance is Balkan Insight, and if you’re interested in the political challenges facing this part of the world their article is well worth a read.

We still log onto the BBC website to follow the news, but in doing so we’d be forgiven for thinking we live in a part of the world where nothing happens. Obviously that’s not true. However news from Bosnia Herzegovina is clearly not seen as a priority by Auntie’s editors. But doing a search today I turned up a video worth watching . It’s about the ongoing mine clearance, a project I didn’t realise was supposed to have been finished by next month. The country now has a ten year extension on this deadline. OK, if we're honest the video is not really 'worth watching' material; it's short and shallow and the accompanying text even more so. Neither do the subject matter justice. So what do you do if you want to find some local news but don’t speak local well enough to read the local papers or websites? Thanks to some Brits in Bosnia we found BalkanInsight.com , which seems to do the trick.