4/18: Sam Knows a Guy

I have some good news and some bad news. The good news is that I did not light the kitchen on fire. The bad news is that I blew 7+ hours on a bus yesterday and didn't get an interview. More on both in a minute.

Okay, let's try to piece together the last two days:

Yesterday: I got up at fuck-all-thirty to head for the bus station. The plan, according to my adviser, was to jump a bus to Tusla, to jump a bus to Bijeljiena (go ahead. Try to pronounce it. I dare ya.) to meet with members of an NGO she's friends with. It was to be, in her words, "an adventure". So I got out of bed and suited up at around 7:30 (middle school flashbacks abound) and trekked out into the brisk morning dew, bound for the traffika for a tram ticket. I picked it up and stood at the stop, waiting for the number one to come along.

The three comes.

The two comes.

The three comes again.

It's been about four threes, five twos, and a five now, and it's about 8:10. The bus to Tusla departs at 8:30. Shrugging, I hop on the next three and hope for the best.

I get off at the junction outside the castle-like US embassy, and start the walk to the train station (which was about three minutes long, really rendering the number one an exercise in laziness). I manage to find my way to the station, pick up a ticket to Tusla, and get on the bus four minutes before it departs. So far, so good.

On the road to Tusla, I determined a few interesting things:

• This section of Bosnia looks like Coal Country, PA, or maybe VA, or KY, or really anywhere they've ever blown up a chunk of mountain to drag out coal. There's some serious dilapidation, pieces of a freshly-deceased industry starting to decompose and return the space to nature, that resonate pretty strongly with places I've seen on the road to Pittsburgh or Charlottesville.
• The villages in between these rotting plants and quarries are phenomenally isolated little patches of life--almost what you'd expect to see if those industrial scars had never been inflicted. Terraced farming, patchy little herds of sheep, and hard work on both dominated the hamlets we passed, and in which we occasionally stopped. That fascinated me, as well--for a big-city Sarajevo to (sort of) big-city Tusla, we had a lot of stops. I wish they'd do more things like this on MegaBus or BoltBus back home--it'd make life easier for a lot of people.
• There wasn't a chance in hell I was going to make it to Tusla on time.

That third one being the most salient detail, I arrived in the bus terminal at 12:30 (four hours, compared to the supposed two) and tried to order my ticket. I gave him my best Bosnian (which, according to others, is at least coherent), and after several attempts he gestured to get out of his line, muttering something about "fucking Russians". That...was strange. I guess my accent's still on the "chyeh" vs. "teh" side.

I soon figured out at least part of his frustration (I guess somebody pissed in his Froot Loops this morning to compound it)--the next bus to Bijeljiena was at three--an hour after my interview. It was then that I discovered that I had no cell phone reception. Combining all of these factors and my assured lack of desire to sleep under a bridge in Bijeljiena or Tusla, decided to head back. For impressions as to what that was like. start from the end of bullet #2 above and work backwards. 

I was exhausted at the end of the day, but decided to not make it a total loss and got some further bearings of the city by knocking out some errands. Stumbling back to the apartment, I recuperated by lounging around the house, doing some research, and enjoying some wonderful cooking. I'd say I rounded off the day pretty well.

Today: I got up, ran, shot around some emails, and went out for lunch where I impressed a shop owner by knowing how to say "cabbage" in Bosnian, which let me tell you, is a blazing hallmark of some seriously advanced skills in this language. Five whole letters, man.

Much more impressively, I, Samuel Rapine, displayed my cooking prowess by making myself and my roommates bananas foster. What's more, I did not kill anybody, be it through rum-turned-napalm or instant Type VII Diabetes (that's the kind that looks like ebola)! Although I'll tweak the recipe next time, I'm proud to say that everybody enjoyed it and I did it without measuring cups. Job well done.

1. One of my roommates brought home a Jaeger knockoff. I think it's called Jaegerdulan. We're scared.
2. That said, it's hardly the scariest thing in the freezer. The previous residents here left several lovely items in the freezer, such as half of a tomato, a calcified loaf of pita (it didn't crack when I took a hammer to it), and a suspicious bag with a picture of a chicken on it and some kind of stump that I didn't stick around long enough to identify coming out of the opening. I'll stick to the fridge, thank you.
3. Speaking of bluntly packaged hazards to public health, they also sell Jack Daniels in a can here, with the label "the perfect mix of cola and Jack!" Given the content of the rest of that shelf, I'd stake money that it's pretty much an even ratio.
4. Our balcony has a light. I can't accurately convey the sense of peace I felt reading a book, feet up, with the moon shining off of the river as the city twinkled all around me, but maybe I'll get better at it because I'm damn sure doing that on a regular basis.

I'm off to bed. Full day tomorrow! Hopefully I'll survive any latent poisoning/bad hoodoo from the bananas foster.