First we have the new favorite dessert of everyone on our trip – fruit salad with vanilla ice cream and whipped cream. Yum!

Here is Lauren and I trying out the Bosnian coffee. It is a lot like Turkish coffee, only not quite as strong. Before you get your hopes up Joel, I am not bringing home any coffee as I don’t have enough room to carry it. I will, however, be requiring an espresso machine when I arrive home as we tend to have cappucinos for breakfast, lunch and dinner here. Without an espresso machine (or an espresso intraveneous line), I’m afraid I may go through some kind of major caffeine withdrawal.
There is room in my luggage for more earrings – plenty of room for those. And I found a great bookstore with a huge selection of English books (even new Science Fiction), so I’m afraid I broke down and bought three new books. We’ll be at a monestary tomorrow in Montenegro, so I will need something to read. My guess is that there will not be Internet access at the monestary, but I’ve been surprised before.
Here is a view of the market streets.

I also purchased a shell casing that was removed from one of the buildings and then decorated by a local artisan using a tin point and a hammer. It is really cool, but I’m a little worried that I will set off the explosives detector on the airplanes. We’ll see. I’ll make sure to take a picture of it in case it doesn’t make it through the airports.

And we did visit one of the Mosques this morning – the Gayi Husrebvey Mosque, which had a beautiful dome and half dome.

This is another mosque in the city, one I could capture with the digital camera I have. I really might have to purchase a digital SLR for the next trip – one with an 18-55mm lens to avoid this 2-camera thing.

One funny story from yesterday. All the tram and bus tickets here are purchased and validated on the honor system. But there are roving ticket checkers who will fine you on the spot if you get caught riding public transportation without a validated ticket. On the tram we took yesterday, the validation machine was not working. You put the ticket in, it made an appropriate validation-like noise, but then it did not print the validation on the ticket. So our trip leader collected all the non-validated tickets and took them to another machine to do the appropriate validation. But one group member (Shell, from Norway) did not realize that he needed to give Gorana the ticket. Sure enough, the ticket checkers came and kicked him off the tram (along with some other english-speaking tourists). We think it is kind of a scam, as they seemed relatively unconcerned that the validation machine was not working. Later in the day, Gorana saw some more people having the exact same problem, and again, the ticket checkers did not want to listen to any “stories” about what happened – they just want their money.

Possibly Related Posts: