waking up in the morning with ethan singing songs, jamie and i cutting veggies and fruit for breakfast and drinking coffee brings me back almost 2 years to the days of yore at mt. hermon. we picked up like cogs in a well-oiled machine, talking politics, literature and other dorky topics while we are pizza on a river barge the first night. last saturday we awoke to a blizzard that didn't abate until monday, cancelling belgrade international school and fostering snow hikes, sledding, "ghetto" skiing (on beer crate handles), snowman building and kuvino vino (hot, spiced wine) consumption. on monday night we staged a belgrade thanksgiving blowout, complete with a christmas tree, homeade pumpkin pie, rudolph the red-nosed reindeer and the charlie brown christmas.
after ethan and i patroned "grill uno" and consumed the "inevitable" gigantic beef patty, we took a snoring, freezing, boiling overnight bus to sarajevo on thanksgiving. sarajevo and belgrade are both cities i could not get my head around until visiting them. the site of the assassination of archduke franz ferdinand by a serb in sarajevo, resulting in world war i. the sites of two of the most recent confirmations of ethnic cleansing. and the dying battles of yugoslavia/ "a greater serbia" involving serbs, bosnians, croats, muslims, catholics and orthodox christians. countries where people my age lived through a war whose mark is still made clear in the bombed-out skeletons and bullet-pocked exteriors of buildings. during a tour of sarajevo we heard tales of the almost-four-year seige of sarajevo from our twenty-three year old tour guide- men who left the city to fight against the bosnians returning post-war, sniper alley, civilians darting across streets to avoid fire, underground tunnels burrowing to the airport to move supplies, 5 euros for a single egg, a grenade exploding on her pregnant mother in her backyard (but who was only slightly injured), the two million books burnt in the bosnian national library, whole cemetaries dedicated to the 1992 and 1993 deaths of muslims in mostar, bosnia. but, despite everything, as seems to be the consistent case, the people remain kind, helpful and friendly in the face of the worst possible scenarios. men play chess with gigantic pieces in a sarajevo square. a rowdy cigarette-smoking crowd forms around the two players, yelling advice at every turn. others greet us and chat in whatever english they grasp.
somehow the sadness of the war in the 90s is heightened by the fact that sarajevo was home to the olympics in 1984. jamie, ethan and i spent a day skiing at jahorina, the site of olympic skiing events.
the mountains and countryside in bosnia are incredible. and of course, the skiing is outstanding. driving to mostar from jahorina we happened upon the shell of a building on the hill. against the warnings of the lonely planet (which we only read later) we walked through the crumbling structure. we found geometry and physics equations in the walls and graffitti of jesus on the cross on others. houses like these were typically used to denote the bosnian serb enemy lines and inhabited by snipers who fired at sarajevo below. as i left the building on the dilapatated stairway, i happened upon this little tree, rising out of the rubble. take from it what is to be taken. hopefully that's hope. 
oh! also, thanks to jamie and ethan for a fab time in the east side (of europe, that is). you two are the craziest cats i know. i only aspire to your greatness.
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