We Do Adventure

It was an afternoon for firsts. I dropped my parents of at Dubrovnik Airport at the end of their first trip to Bosnia Herzegovina. As I drove up the coast road I realised I was following the first Albanian car I’d seen. (It was a Ford Mondeo – which somehow seemed appropriately global!) Suddenly it started slowing down and I realised I was about to see my first road accident since we’ve moved. (It was a Croatian one, as I hadn’t crossed the border, so maybe that doesn’t count?) Sadly a big white Mercedes had taken a serious side swipe from a small anonymous-looking car that had buried its tiny bonnet into the other’s door. Air bags had deployed but it didn’t look like anyone had been hurt. For the first time I took a right turn in Neum and headed home up over the mountains. I had heard various reports about the road. I don’t know what I expected but what I got was a pay-attention drive that would have served well as a stage on Sega Rally. A Hyundai Matrix is not a rally car – nor do I ...

We went for coffee with a couple of new friends from the United World College in Mostar today. I mention this for two reasons. First, because this only happened because one of them saw this blog and sent us an email. I thought I should mark that occasion as a tribute to this technology. The second reason is they passed on an interesting analogy they'd been told that I'll take the liberty of retelling here! United World College draws students from around the world, 200 in all from about 35 nations. Many of these find life in Bosnia Herzegovina very different from the country they've come from. One of our new friends was told by a student in the year above her that Mostar was like a cigarette. You don't like it the first time, but the more you have you become addicted! That made me smile, partly because the amount of smoking that goes on here is one of the noticeable things we've had to adjust to, and partly because it made me think about just how we feel about being...