We Do Adventure

Browse any magazine, or magazine-style web-site, these days and you’re not going to get far without stumbling over a list. Lists are the authoritative way to dispense information in the modern age. Who hasn’t fallen for teasers such as ‘The Ten Things You Never Knew About...’ or ‘Five Ways To Better...’? Putting as few half-baked thoughts into bullet points seems a sure-fire way to imply infallibility. This being our one-hundred-and-first blog post it seems only right we jump on this band wagon and present ‘Bosnia 101: what list?!’ Who cares we’ve only been in the country five minutes; it’s a list, it must be good! · WHAT COUNTRY? Say ‘Bosnia Herzegovina’, or ‘BiH’ (bay-ha) for short; to just say ‘Bosnia’ when referring to the whole country is to Herzegovinans like saying ‘England’ to the Scots or the Welsh, when you really mean Great Britain. · WHAT HISTORY? Don’t expect to understand local history, and be wary of anyone who claims they do. The region’s rich tapestry, ...

I made a couple of time related observations today that I thought were worth relating. The first being my encounter with possibly the world’s slowest petrol pump. The old Toyota combi needed fuel – or ‘oil’ as it is often translated – so before my usual home-time run after Klub I popped out to fill it up. The two inaccuracies in that last statement are very few petrol stations are self service, so someone else does the filling, and ‘popped’ implies it was quick. I was pleased that I got things in progress using my best local language but there was no way I was about to strike up casual conversation to while the hours away. Perhaps my silence translated as impatience, I did get an apologetic explanation on the state of the pump, the details of which were, sadly, lost on me. I do quite a bit of driving around Mostar and I’ve crossed Spanish Square more times than I can remember but I’ve noticed what I saw tonight. I’ve been in London, New York, Paris, Rome, Madrid and never seen this par...

It was strange to read headlines about events in India and on the same day read a blog post from a student at United World College in Mostar saying they had their classes cancelled yesterday because of a bomb scare. ‘Strange’ is, of course, a vague, perhaps euphemistic, term that could cover a range of emotions. Predominately, the juxtaposition of the two events left me thoughtful. I read about Andreas Liveras , who was shot, it seems, for carrying a British passport. Had he been carrying his Cypriot one he might be alive today. I don’t imagine I’ll end up in a scenario like that, for one I don’t frequent expensive hotels, but then I don’t imagine any of the victims in Bombay anticipated the events that unfolded. So life remains a journey of faith; a journey that in this life requires me to carry a British passport.

Most nights we wake, albeit momentarily, at some unearthly hour as the garbage truck rumbles under our bedroom window. Last night we did not wake as Mostar experienced an earthquake ! I am somewhat disappointed about this. We have a friend in another former communist country who was living seven or eight floors up a crumbling apartment block when a sizable earthquake struck the area she was in. She emailed me about people running down the stairs and out into the street as the building swayed sympathetically. I have no such stories to tell. I could talk about a friend who woke thinking it might be the end of the world but that is their story not mine. Earthquakes are a lot more common here than they are in England, where noticeable ones are not common at all, or at least that’s my perception. There was one a month or so before we left England that dislodged a chimney pot or two in our town. I slept through that one too. Although the night after I had a very vivid dream about an earthqua...

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...

Somewhere, buried in a file of photos from a trip to the States is a photo of Rowan and Jackie Chan. OK, I lie. However, I have a photo of Rowan standing by Jackie Chan’s star on the Walk of Fame on Hollywood Boulevard. She picked his star to be photographed next to because she’s a fan of his movies. Not the ones he’s famous for but the cheesy American ones like The Tuxedo or The Medallion, in which he smiles a lot and speaks English in a particularly appealing fashion. The appeal is not the action, so I was somewhat surprised when Rowan started talking about Bruce Lee the other day. Bruce Lee it seems is, or was, something of a unifying force in post-conflict Mostar, not that to our knowledge he ever visited the region. Nevertheless, what he represented resonated so much with the different sides, she read on the internet , that a life-size statue of the man himself was erected in the park here. It stood there until, six months after its installation, someone stole his nunchucks! All o...

This post will be shamelessly devoted to the humble USB stick. The purchase that provoked this praise of data portability was not a particularly considered one. It was just an opportune, impulse buy, courtesy of a perfectly placed dump bin of discounted merchandise when we were shopping for storages boxes for our move. Today it was the brain for my synth, holding all the data for the tracks we were recording, and it was the uncomplaining go-between a Mac and a PC. It never once complained that it couldn’t work with one or the other, unlike a few humans I know! I found myself telling someone, ‘funny that this is the most important bit of equipment here’, pointing to the little black thing sticking out from the back of the keyboard. And isn’t that always the way. The flashy-looking silver synth might get the attention because it’s new and shiny but without this quiet and unassuming accomplice it wouldn’t be able to deliver what was required. It’s too is to be attracted to the big, the bo...