A Bosnian Reunion Tour

Pardon me, it's been an unrelenting school year and burnout lurks just off stage right. Perhaps that makes the timing of a school trip to Bosnia and Croatia perfect (or perfectly mad, depending on how you swing it). 

I won't bore you with the details of quite possibly the third most challenging year of my career. But I will say that this trip looked a lot better from the vantage point of September when I signed up than it did as I rolled out of bed at 3am to head to the airport on Sunday morning. Alas. 

The trip, a four-day jaunt via flight and coach with 53, 15-year-olds in tow, promised to be a bit of a reunion tour of Jen and my trip to this beautiful part of the world in 2010. The lens of this visit is through one of 'memorialising conflict' and we've taken a whistle stop tour from Dubrovnik to Mostar and Sarajevo and to Jablanica and Srebenica and back. This has meant long days travelling through beautiful sceneries, past war-pockmarked buildings; time has not been a commodity here. 

Some things have changed: buildings have been updated; people feel more prepared to openly wear their religion; work has paid for me to stay in my own room in a hotel. There's big perks to travelling as a real life adult. 

And, charmingly, some things have stayed the same: 'vegetarian' food; old men drinking coffee in town squares; the kindness of the people we've encountered. 

Mostar 

After a journey from Dubrovnik and crossing a border with a gaggle of students in tow, we spent roughly 16-hours in Mostar. This largely involved sleeping but we squeaked out a walking tour by foot. 

The perhaps only real benefit of travelling for work, besides not paying for accommodation, is that the tours you'd normally shun are all part of the process. 

And so we shuffled along being told about Bosnia's scars, resurrection and return to new normal. 

In Mostar, that happens to be quite stunning. 

Jablanica 

The next morning, we set off roughly 45 minutes down the road to the town of Jablanica. At the memorial museum there, we learned all about the 1943 WWII Battle on the Neretva River, arguably one of the 'most humane' battles of the war. 

This involved Yugoslav partisans blowing up a bridge to fend off the coming German forces. The bridge, or an approximate replica, exists to this day. The events were also memorialised in a 1969 film, which Picasso created both a painting and artwork for. 

Next stop, Sarajevo 

One completed museum visit later, we rolled into the outskirts of Sarajevo, a breathtakingly underrated city in my humble opinion. To really understand the scope of the Bosnian War and the siege of Sarajevo that lasted from April 1992 to February 1996, we started on the outskirts of the airport. There, we visited the Sarajevo Tunnel Museum, a memorial to the tunnel that Bosnian forces dug under the airport runway and into the city itself. It became a conduit for food, supplies and humanitarian aid during Europe's longest siege. 

A small piece of the tunnel exists today and the museum's owners, a local family, hope that the tunnel's preservation reminds everyone of humanity's simultaneous worst and most hopeful moments. 

Onward to Sarajevo! The city itself has been witness to so many moments in history: from the foundations of the Ottoman Empire; to the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand that sparked the start of WWI; the Winter Olympics of 1984; and the siege that brought the city to its knees. 

And walking around, all of these things become clear. 

Unfortunately, my afternoon in the city was cut short when a student got sick. I got sent back to the hotel to let her rest and to prepare for the arrival of the hordes later. Despite my disappointment, there was a silver lining. Directly next to our slightly-out-of-town hotel was a gem of midwest days of past. 

Be still my midwest at heart soul!