Balkan Bound: Greetings from Sarajevo!

A five hour bus ride later and we have arrived in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina! The view on the bus ride was incredible as you can see pictured below! I thought the mountains in Dubrovnik were

impressive, but I have to say the ones we saw on our way to Sarajevo took the cake. As we got out of the mountains and began driving through cities the bullet holes in the side of buildings were absolutely jaw-dropping, they were literally covering the buildings. This was unlike anything I have ever seen before and was incredibly gut-wrenching thinking back to the horror the people that lived in these areas had to go through during the war. After this eerie scenery we approached Sarajevo and drove through "Sniper Alley" which was the area snipers preyed on innocent civilians of Sarajevo. It was incredible that a mere twenty years later all evidence of this happening was erased and is now no different than any other road one can drive on around Sarajevo. The final main thing we saw on our ride into Sarajevo was the infamous bridge that Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated on leading to the start of WWI. At this sighting the history nerd in me literally jumped with excitement, I have seen countless pictures of this bridge in history textbooks growing up and never in my life did I think I would actually see it in real life. Unfortunately, my camera ran out of battery as we drove past it so there is no picture, but don't worry I will definitely be visiting it in person later this week so there will be some posted eventually!

After what I would consider a very interesting bus ride we finally arrived at our hotel! We were all starving so we unpacked and immediately hit the streets of Sarajevo to find some dinner. This is when it hit us, we were no longer in a tourist town and not everyone speaks English like they do in Dubrovnik. So we chose a random restaurant that looked nice and it turned out our waiter spoke zero English and the menu was entirely in Bosnian. I immediately grew very nervous, as a picky eater this was going to be a real struggle. So after hopelessly examining the menu we all decided to just point to the one picture on the menu because this food at least looked edible so all ten of us there got the exact same thing. Culture shock had hit us like a brick! When the food came out, it turned out to be a pita pocket with sausage and feta cheese and was delicious! We certainly got lucky on that one.

I called it a night after this experience so I could get up early the next morning to do some more exploring. This morning some of us girls decided to hit up the Old Town market and go shopping galore! The scarves and trinkets available are endless I could literally have gone shopping all day long. While exploring the city the stark contrasts between the older part of the city and the more modern shopping area was astonishing as well as the intermix of the religious buildings found all over. For lunch we found an awesome place that had the menu in English so that made things a lot easier from the night before. And yes for those of you that know me as a picky eater I have had to branch out while on this trip but this lunch was so good we all actually ended up going back here for dinner too!