On the road again. August 8

 I am sitting here in our hotel room in Sarajevo.  Liz and I have always been fans of the Olympic Games, and we remember the Winter Olympics in 1984, in Sarajevo.  Of course hosting countries do their best to spiffy everything up and make it look as good as possible, but even so, it seemed like a sparkling, fun city.

   Six years later it was the scene of the some of the most horrific events in a World that has seen horrific in spades, and nowhere more so than here.  I took a panoramic photo from the window of our room.

This is a scan from the window edge on the left, to the window edge on the right.  To the left of the tree there are seven mosques with prayer towers - one of them only 1 block from here  (and there is one right across the street from the hotel, but we can't see it from our window).  Liz woke up when they called the muslims to prayer this morning, but I slept through it.  To the right is a bridge over the river.  On all sides you can see there are mountains.  The photo makes them look distant, but they are all within artillery and/or sniper range of the City Centar.  During the Yugoslav Civil War, Serbian and Chetnik snipers were always in those hills, and many more positioned themselves in buildings in the city.  They shot anybody they saw - simple execution of all people.  People huddled down and tried to stay out of sight, but the city water supply was bombed out and people had to go to the few places where clean water could be had (the best place was the beer brewery which had large quanitites of good water).  Same with food.  Many people died trying to cross the bridges over the river.  There have been many books written about this, such as The Cellist of Sarajevo.

To get here, we crossed over the mountains between here and the Dalmatian Coast.  In one little town, we were the third car to stop when a police car pulled across the road and turned on his lights.  A procession of people in costumes filed out behind him and marched down the street.  There were several hundred of them.  At first I thought there were a lot of nuns, but it was girls with white scarves.  There was a file of young men, flanked by a girl on one or both arms, and all in traditional costumes.  Then hundreds of people marching beside them.   Liz got out of the car and went up to take some photos.

There were a few extra girls at the back.

These guys look pretty happy, but the girls - - - not so much.

I pity these guys for their pants.  That is just embarassing!

We had to follow the procession at walking pace down the street for a quarter mile or more.  Of course there was a huge backup of cars behind us.  I noticed on maps that the road curved back and there were back streets that cut the corner.  So we got ahead of the procession and escaped.

  But the road after that moved extremely slowly.  It was just a 2 lane road with heavy traffic in both directions, so there was no passing.   We had no choice but to creep along.

We went over a mountain that was very steep, and down at the bottom we could see a mosque.

We thought it was just a very pretty building.  We were about half way down the mountain when we took this shot, and it was all so steep it was barely a slope instead of a cliff.

It is still nice up close.  Good job my Muslim brothers!

The slow traffic and one time I missed a turn, made us kind of late.  It was full dark by the time we got to a tollway, but it was worth waiting for - 4 lanes, smooth, new pavement, and 130 kph speedlimit.   It ended abruptly at the edge of Sarajevo at a traffic circle.  The circle was one lane, and led to your choice of one lane roads.  So, it was back to creeping along.  By then it was almost 10:00 pm, but the roads were crammed with cars.  We finally reached our hotel and crashed.

We completed the Zadar audit before coming here, and tomorrow I will do the Sarajevo audit.  After that, we are on vacation!  We plan to tour Dubrovnik, Split, and Rijeka before going back to Slovenia and the Senior Missionary Conference next week in the Julian Alps.