We Do Adventure

Tonight we made our first trip to a new, smallish, supermarket just around the corner from our apartment. Imagine my surprise when browsing the selection of good-looking fruit and vegetables I saw this. Pictured here is the first iceberg lettuce I have seen on sale since our arrival in Bosnia and Herzegovina almost sixteen months ago. Maybe I’ve been looking in the wrong places; now I know where to go. I’m not really a salad freak but I always a bit of extra iceberg crunch with a burger! Such luxury comes at a price. Four marks fifty-two to be precise. That’s a lot for something that’s predominantly water. For my English readers, that’s well over two quid, more than twice what you’ll be paying in Tesco . There’s always a cost to progress and my taste buds count the reintroduction of iceberg into my diet as progress. Students of economics will remember that a decrease in price should lead to an increase in demand. Maybe it can work the other way too; my increasing demand helps everyone ...

Before we left England it seemed three things dominated the average high street: estate agents, greetings card shops and coffee shops. But despite all the Starbucks, Costas and shameless imitators nothing prepared us for the sheer quantity of cafes in Bosnia Herzegovina. Here in Mostar it seems there is one on every street corner, and they are there merely to bookmark the many more in between. When it comes to a comparing them we’ve barely scraped the surface. However on Friday night we went out for coffee at the Hotel Bristol . I’d long admired their large terrace and it was one of the first evenings of the year warm enough to test it out. We sat up near the water feature on some comfortable chairs and had a very pleasant time of it. No surprise there, perhaps, but there was one in store when we looked at the bill. Here we were sitting outside one of Mostar’s top three hotels and the bill was exactly the same as it would have been in many cafes that could better be described as ‘dive...

This is not a comment on Bosnia or the Bosnian systems of administration that owe much to its communist history. Today we came up against the sharp end of the British system. For reasons too dull and long-winded to explain here we needed to get photocopies of our driving licences authenticated at the British Embassy in Sarajevo. Rowan had phoned ahead to check when and where we needed to arrive, as the Embassy has two sites. We arrived on a crisp, snowy morning after a fairy-tale train ride through a winter-wonderland of Herzegovinan and Bosnian mountains. It was a fantastic start to a day, despite needing to be up early to get the train. If there was any chance that we’d not shaken of our slumbers Her Majesty’s Government was on hand to deliver a rude awakening. It takes less than five minutes to check four photocopies against original documents and apply a stamp indicating their authenticity. For this privilege the Embassy extracted a sum of money in three figures, whether you measur...