It takes Ilidža to tango

Hi all,

It was less hot today, so the walking was a little more supportable than yesterday. I saw a lot today.

I woke up in a relatively bad temper. You just have these unfriendly people here downtown that screw some moments of your day by being lazy and sighing when you ask something, or even laugh at you in a weird way if you just try to speak a little Bosnian and do your utter best to be not that typical tourist.

But, as I said, Ilidža changed a lot. It is this nice suburb of Sarajevo, just before the Igman-Bjelašnica mountain range with that great athmosphere, noisy markets, old Ižetbegović-like people and coffee drinking Bosnians. A place where people help you and even offer you a cigarette because they are happy that they can help you and practice their English. Like Amrid, a Bosnian fellow that helped me while I was looking at the bus schedule as if it was the Rosetta stone. He even tapped me on my shoulder when I offered him a Bosnian coffee, and simply said that he was going back home to work, followed by a honest "nema na čemu" (Welcome)

You also had this guy, Islam was his name, who couldn' t stop saying that he was circumcised, pointing between his legs, and that he was proud of his name. Just to enforce his statement, he even showed it while I was sitting with my foot in hot sulphuric water. I ran away, maybe his name wasn' t Islam and maybe he was just the local fool of Ilidža, but sure this is a hell of a story.

This is the time to say goodbye for today. It was very busy and night has fallen over Sarajevo, with the Gazi Husrev Bey lighting up in all his glory, with that awkward little Turkish flag in Green and white on its top. Maybe the ghost of the Ottomans is coming back to Bosnia and Herzegovina, waken up by other ghosts in the form of bullets and bombs...

Goodnight,

Christophe