Builders Paradise
Trip Start
Aug 09, 2004
1
9
13
Trip End
Oct 08, 2004
Sarejavo, Bosnia and Herzegovina
Saturday, September 18, 2004
Sarejavo was an interesting city. On our way to finding accommodation, this guy stop us saying he had accommodation (I think that he was desperate for some tenants), we had heard of his place in the Lonely Planet so we thought that we would check it out. He was going on how the rooms were fantastic and very comfortable and keep saying "Lonely Planet Happy, everyone happy, no black market". What do they say those who doth protest to much?!? Needless to say when he opened the door and showed us a pull out sofa bed etc (all of which were about 20 or so years old) we had to keep a straight face. The place seemed clean and had hot water, the 2 most important things we decided why not. From there we cruised around the city to see the infamous Holiday Inn, and some of the streets with a lot of gun shot damage, from there we went into the city area to check out the Bizare (shopping area). Is a beautiful city considering.....and very cheap which is always a good thing. Unfortunately we were only going to stay one night but could of ended up being longer as we missed our bus....Finally we missed a bus. Wasn't really our fault as no one seemed to mentioned that the bus that we were asking about the day before at the tourist office actually leaves from a different bus station to the one that we came in at. About 15 minutes away in a cab. The cabbie was glad to see us as since we were in a dilemma to get to this bus station he could charge us what ever he wanted as we were running late. Have you ever seen the movie "Driving Miss Daisy", well that was our cab driver. Chrissy was telling the guy to hurry up but he was shrugging his shoulders and after a little while when he realised that we really wanted to hurry up, he finally speed up and indicated that if we get pulled over by the police we were to pay. Well we'll see, we could just say that we didn't know what he was talking about. But to no avail, no matter how fast he went we still missed the bus. Damn!! And we didn't get a ticker which was good. Well we were not going to be beaten so I was trying to figure out anyway we could move on, so after about 5 times asking the lady behind the counter (who spoke no english) by showing a map of Serbia and circling trying to say "any buses going near here" and hitting my head on here booth window every time....we finally found a bus that was leaving in about 2 hours to Nics in Serbia. Another 6-7 hour bus ride. We finally arrived in this small town just outside of Nics (about an hour away), at about 11 at night and there was a bus leaving for Nics in half an hour and I must say it was the most interesting experience ever. What I mean by that we ran into some crusaders (well I'm sure they think they are). These 2 Americans were in Serbia spreading the word of god to the Serbians, at first we didn't know this and we were just chatting away to this one guy at the novelty that we both spoke English. Then his friend came over and started to do the big sell - kind of good cop, bad cop routine. At this moment we were going woooooo, hold on, but they did offer us this really nice local speciality meat sandwich to try and since we were quite hungry we politely accepted and the fact that they wouldn't take no for an answer. Once we got into Nics we wanted to thank the guys for the sandwich and then they revealed that on the trip that they were worrying about us and wanted to bless us. So at 1:00 in the morning we had these 3 guys standing around us in a circle holding hands blessing us - very strange and surreal....Chrissy and I were trying very hard not to laugh. But I suppose they only had the very best of intentions. Now that we were blessed - bring on the world!!!
