A fantastic experience in Bosnia, part 1

Hi everyone, I'd like to tell you about my experience in Bosnia! Along with some classmates I won a 5-day trip and last 8 April we set off from Turin Caselle bound for Mostar. The airport of the Bosnian city is tiny, there was only one plane, ours as it happens, and plenty of flight attendants waiting for us, almost happy to see new faces. We immediately took the coach that brought us to the hotel (we were a group of about 100 people split between 2 coaches), Hotel Ero, a good-quality 4-star that looks a bit out of place among all the old houses destroyed by the war, with the marks of gunfire still on the walls.

The old town of Mostar has been partly rebuilt after the war; the centre is small, welcoming and very characteristic, and the Neretva river flows through it; the main attraction of the little town is a magnificent bridge that links the two parts of the city and stands for union, brotherhood and friendship. The old stone bridge was destroyed during the war precisely to break this bond, and the new bridge is a faithful reconstruction. During our afternoon in Mostar we visited a music school; the headmistress welcomed us and invited us to listen to some very talented pupils playing the piano or the violin, strange how in a desolate, sad and scattered town there is still room to cultivate such talents.

The surroundings are rocky, with little greenery and lots of grey (perhaps the fault of the cloudy weather, which made everything even sadder), children playing under the porch of a destroyed house, people staring at us as if we were aliens. In the evening it was raining and we didn't wander far from the hotel; we went to a little bar. 9 April 2008: In the morning everyone onto the coach, off to Sarajevo, sad and deserted landscapes, few scattered houses. Before reaching the city we stopped near the airport, where they showed us a tunnel that passes under the runway, built during the siege of Sarajevo by the local people as their only escape route and to bring food and supplies into the city.

The hotel wasn't right in the centre but it was quite nice (Hotel Grand); first of all we had lunch, then they took us to the city centre where we visited an art school and an exhibition organised by the students; there too we met the headmistress, who explained a bit about how the courses worked and what the students did. Once outside we went to the main square, where the guide told us a little about people's lives, the various ethnic groups and religions that live side by side; we visited a magnificent Orthodox church and a Catholic church; a place that really struck me is where the assassination that later sparked the First World War took place, there are little display cases set into the walls of the nearby houses with photos and inscriptions to remember it.

Later they left us a bit free and we started shopping, the shops are the classic ones of a European city, from Mango to very elegant stores, and the prices are really very low (for example Converse cost half what they do at home), oh, by the way, the currency is the Mark and it's worth 0.50 euro cents. In the evening we took part in a meeting at the hotel with some local people who told us about the problems afflicting their country, politics, religion and security. 10 April 2008: On the coach again for another 2 hours, bound for Tuzla, again clouds and rain, again sad landscapes, again destroyed houses and for a stretch, lakes! Beautiful small, barely polluted lakes where people were fishing. This time the hotel disappointed us a bit... (Hotel Tuzla) a huge 11-storey hotel with a kind of shopping centre on the ground floor next to the lobby, a bit old but you make do...

it was a 10-minute walk from the centre, so after a very long conference and a video about young people in Bosnia we decided to set off and visit the main street; we discovered that the city basically consists only of that street, the salt square (Tuz means Salt, precisely because millions of years ago it was covered by the sea and today it's important for the production and trade of this mineral) and a few houses. In the evening, after dinner, we went out to listen to music and have a beer in a really nice place in the attic of a building, good live music; unfortunately at eleven, though, the musicians decided to pack up, and after singing (out of pity) "Laura non c'è" by Nek in perfect Italian, they closed everything.

So we decided to change venue and went to the disco pub "Roma", where you dance a bit, hang out together and have fun; then everyone back to the hotel to "rest" and prepare ourselves spiritually for the most beautiful and intense day of the whole trip.