Mostar sacred space and castle

 11/28: 

So our first night we couldn’t get the heat to turn on, and last night we couldn’t turn it off! Argh! More communication between Bob and the owner. Thankfully he has been super responsive. It’s crazy though - there are control panels all over our 2 bed 2 bath place. It is so incredibly complex for such a small apartment! I think there are 6 thermostats, and it’s impossible to just set a temperature and have them adjust!

Today we saw Blagaj Tekke (important site in Islam and where you can see dervishes do their dance). It’s an important site to visit for followers of Mevlana (we heard of him back in Konya, Türkiye).

Charcot likes it!

We also saw the Blagaj Fortress. It was a 20 minute hike and was unbelievable at the top!

We were the only people here! It was also free to visit, and it was SO cool!

Simone having fun with Bob pausing the pano photo for her to run to different spots

Our host felt terrible about the problems we’re having with the heat at our place, so he offered to send dinner to us from his favorite restaurant. A bunch of good lookin meat and 4 Liters of Coke. Yum!

Our Thanksgiving dinner - we enjoyed this treat from our host! We’ll cook our meal tomorrow 😀

Mostar exploration

 11/27: 

Quinn standing in front of the building across the street from our place. Looks pretty rough - the sign on it is advertising a hyperbaric oxygen place. Is that what’s going to replace this structure??

Wow. The destruction on so many of these buildings is incredible. Part of the building behind her is completely missing. 

Copper is a big craft here, and we found a shop where the artist was pounding a piece of copper. This sums up so much of the culture: cigarettes and coffee.

He was a really nice guy, and we enjoyed chatting with him. We picked out this copper plate and two bracelets, and he engraved them both for us. We loved it!

Don’t be fooled by the Turkish flag - we’re in Bosnia!🇧🇦 

The Old Bridge/Mostar Bridge

The Beastie Boys 😀

The Crooked bridge

The Bosnian flag and the flag/crest for this region of Bosnia

A break at a riverside restaurant 

Chicken skewers and cevapi 

Huge cross on the hill, minaret at a mosque on the right. 30 years after the war different religions living in (mostly) harmony side by side again. We did learn from Janana that in Sarajevo the city is informally divided into 3 sections, and she feels awkward/uneasy wearing her headscarf in certain sections. As with so many things, the history and current culture is complicated.

War torn buildings all over. Incredible. 

The ‘Abandoned building’ aka Sniper Tower. The tallest building in town (an old bank) gave snipers a view of most of the city.

We had an easy dinner and watched The Cable Guy because the kids got such a kick out of Jim Carrey in Ace Ventura…but we all thought this movie was terrible! The surprise of the evening was our host having someone deliver a large bag of Nespresso pods to us (the only coffee making option in our place). Bob had asked him where to buy these as we had gone to 3 different grocery stores and couldn’t find them. It was super thoughtful of him to have them brought to us - we know he felt badly after the heat wouldn’t work appropriately last night!