(Kingston, Ontario, Canada)

Cleaning and organizing have been occupying more of my time lately. In the process, I have found a lot of “souvenirs” from my past travels. Today’s post focuses on some interesting ephemera from my April 2014 trip to Bosnia & Herzegovina.

The Hotel Konak was almost perfectly located in downtown Sarajevo. I could easily walk to everything. The hotel facade was a little unusual, but it was quite nice inside. It was a very comfortable place to sleep off my jet lag and adjust to my new surroundings. I had a long trip from Kingston to Toronto to Vienna to Sarajevo, and I appreciated the quiet room.

The next day, I went on a guided “Siege of Sarajevo” tour, and it was an excellent (if sobering) introduction to the relatively recent conflict in this historic city. You can read more about the siege here, including the still “bullet-holed” tunnel entrance. The “Tunnel of Hope” was my first direct introduction to the impact of the war on Sarajevo…although the ruins of the Olympic complex also made a deep impression. I later wrote about a very close encounter with a land mine in Sarajevo.

My next stop was the city of Mostar. As I noted in the blog entry I posted shortly after arrival in Mostar, the wounds of war were even more apparent here. But it was also a beautiful city, and my first meal was in a garden-like setting near Mostar’s famous and historic bridge. The photo at the very top of this post is actually a postcard from the Restoran Šadrvan in Mostar (my table was right by the fountain), and the picture above shows some of their specialties. My main course was stuffed peppers, but I also had a pickled vegetable salad…and I’m sure I had dessert too. After all, I was doing a lot of walking!

I visited the local museum in Mostar primarily to see a video. They have a small theatre inside the museum where you can watch footage from the conflict that took place in Mostar. The footage of the destruction of the bridge was especially sad. I crossed that rebuilt bridge many times during my stay, and it is easily the most emotional bridge I have ever crossed. I also visited the Koski Mehmed Pasha Mosque, which is now a National Monument. Ascending the minaret was particularly memorable: you can read about it here.

My next stop was not very far geographically, but it felt very different in every other respect. Trebinje is located in the Republika Srpska: it’s still in Bosnia & Herzegovina, but it is also governed separately from the “Federation” part of Bosnia & Herzegovina. You can read about that in more detail in my Trebinje post from 2014. The Serbian influence is much stronger here, as you can see from the above invoice from my hotel. The top of the invoice says “Hotel Platani” and “Trebinje” in the Cyrillic alphabet.

The receipt above is from my meal in the hotel restaurant on my first night in Trebinje. While the form is all in Cyrillic, my waiter used the Roman alphabet to record my meal. I had a Capricciosa pizza, a glass of local red wine, and a decadent dessert. It was a palačinka … basically a stuffed crepe. But this one was the house specialty: it had an enormous amount of cherries and much more ice cream than usual. (You’ll notice that all prices in this post are in “KM”. This stands for “convertible marks”. The Bosnian currency was pegged to the German mark, and theoretically still is…even though Germany no longer uses the deutschmark.)

I enjoyed reliving my Bosnian trip through these items. Who knows what I will uncover next?