A friend of mine visited Sarajevo during her Europe’s tour last year. She stayed at Hostel Haris and wrote a short review about it after much “pressure” from me.
H’s review
Four astronauts land on the moon. An American, a German and two Serbs.
The American jumps out and plants a flag on the surface exclaiming that US derring-do and money made their mission possible so the moon will belong to America.
The German pulled out the flag and stuck in a flag from his country proclaiming that it was German scientific knowledge and technological precision that made the landing possible, so the moon was Germany’s.
The Balkan border is a disputing issue as Slovenia is included on some maps and not on the other, and the part of Romania which belongs to this region is unclear.
Balkan Scissors blogs a short but fairly detailed post describing the Balkan:
As of January 1st, 2008, Slovenia becomes the first new EU member (countries which join the EU in 2004) to resume the 6-month EU presidency.
Under no circumstance that I want to insult your sense of living. I encourage you to get a life. Sniffing through a long post about language is not a recommended weekend’s pastime. However, this article presents many interesting facts about the language. Hard but good to read.
One characteristic word you’ll hear among Serbs where I come from, even from Serbs who don’t speak their parents’/grandparents’ dialect but rather a more standard language, is “?e” (pronounced like the “je” in Jerry) in place of “gdje” (if you Anglophones can manage it!, with “g” as in goat, “d” as in date, pronounced together in that order in front of the “ye” in yes), meaning where.
At my colleague’s farewell party last night, I met a friend of her who was Macedonian. With little knowledge about Macedonia, I asked her if they spoke the same language as Serbia, then I said “Kako si!” That was it for our initial conversation.
Thanks a blog reader for this video link.
In this short clip, Richard Gere promotes his newest movie “The Hunting Party” in which he plays a journalist returning to Bosnia after the war to search for one of the two most wanted war criminal. This movie was released in September 2007.
Dr. Svetlana Broz, grand-daughter of Josip Broz Tito of the former Yugoslavia, will speak at San Jose State University, California. Topics include affairs in Bosnia and Herzegovina, recent developments in the European Union, as well as the future of the Balkans.
A comment from a frequent reader of this blog:
A quite famous Italian rock band wrote, in the 90s, a whole album on the bosnian conflict. They recorded an impressive live concert in a cd entitled “La guerra, la terra” (the war, the earth), and the most touching song is indeed “Cupe vampe” (gloomy flames). I watched them playing it in Banja Luka, but the public was expecting the typical italian melodic pop and were not prepared to this, so it wasn’t that successful. But I still listen to it in the nights spent driving through the Balkans, and sometimes it makes me cry.
My name is Cindy, also rhymes with travel junkie. A friend said I was probably a gipsy in my previous life. One of my many secret missions in life is to convert you to run off every once in awhile.
