How much can happen to one person in 48 hours? A lot. Saturday, Nadir came and picked me up at my hostel and we headed out to the country side for the party at Nedims. Sarajevo is almost completely surrounded by mountains so it was really nice to be in the car and to see more of the countryside. Nedims "cottage" house (by which I mean a ballin house on top of a mountain), is close to the town he grew up in and it is only 40 kilometers from Sarajevo so it was an ...

Ahh Sarajevo, quite a journey.... Thursday, Nedim and his cousin met me in town and took me up to a cafe where you could see all of the city and the mountains, it was so nice! Sarajevo is a really beautiful city, but you can definitely tell it would be pretty easy to put under a siege. That night, we went out to watch the soccer games and we met up with some friends of theirs in the old Turkish part of the city. Bosnia still has a strong Turkish-Muslim populatio...

I have arrived in Sarajevo! But I almost didn't. Tuesday, the Irish girl and i were at the hostel in the afternoon escaping the insane heat (Its been high 90s each day in Belgrade) and we were talking with the girl that runs the hostel, Yelena, who we had gotten really close with. Yelena says that because it is our last night in Belgrade, she wants to take us out to her favorite bar and have fun, but her shift doesnt end until midnight. I was a little like ehhh....

I knew ahead of time that travelling in the former Yugoslavia would be an interesting challenge for several reasons, but, the fact that the country SO recently was at the center of a horrendous war seemed to be the trickiest one. On the way here, I thought about my experiences in other post-conflict or in-conflict countries and what I had learned there. Russia, of course, has a similar past in that it quickly transitioned to capitalism, and the effects of that tr...

Hello from Belgrade! It is nothing like I thought it would be (common theme in my trip). It is brutally hott, the city is huge, diverse and absolutely stunning and the men are gorgeous so there is constantly something fun to look at. But, we will come back to that later. So as usual, leaving a country is never as easy as getting into one. I call it the Cinncinnati connundrum-beeches and tyler addison will know what im talking about. Countries tend to welcome yo...