Thursday arrival in Sarajevo

Thursday Afternoon, September 17, 2009

After unloading our luggage and settling into our apartment Joe and I went to find something to eat. Sara stayed at the apartment to rest, asking that we just bring her back something.

We found a nice Bosnian restaurant that had patio seating. Since everyone smokes everywhere we thought that sitting outside would be our best bet. Our waiter brought us a menu and to our surprise we couldn’t read a word of it. It was all in Bosnian, we began looking closely and trying to translate some of the items that we were familiar with. We soon figured out that “plie” is chicken, “ribe” is fish, “meso” is meat or beef, and Joe has figured out the word for beer “pivo” very well. We informed our waiter that we couldn’t read the menu so he explained it to us and we ordered beef and vegetables and chicken and vegetables. I must say that it may not have been on the menu exactly the way we ordered it, but it was very good. The only problem I had with the meal was that a cat kept circling our table wanting our food. I’m not fond of cats, in the first place, so I kept running the cat away. We were told that there were many cats, but no “mouses!!!”

After lunch/dinner went to the local supermarket for some food for the apartment. This was quite an experience. The first section that you come to is the produce. I picked up some beautiful tomatoes and placed them in a bag not knowing that the clerk had to weigh and price for us. She quickly removed them from my cart, weighed and priced them. Once inside the store it became a “scavenger hunt” since many items are not where we would expect them to be or we couldn’t read the labels.

We stopped at what we would call the “deli” counter to purchase proscuitto “prsut“, but was informed it was in the dairy case???!!! So we go to the dairy case and looked for the items that we wanted. After about 10 minutes of searching we chose cheese and proscuitto. At the deli counter we found freshly baked bread of all kinds and shapes. We then went looking for “voda naturali” to you and me that is natural water. You have to watch the bottles of water because a lot of Europeans drink bubbly mineral water. Sara and Joe like this kind of water, but I’m not fond of it at all. When in the restaurants you ask for “still water.” I suppose that’s in contrast to “moving water?” Joe then decided that he wanted some eggs. We began looking for them in the only place we could think of and that was the dairy case. They were no where to be found, so we asked the clerk who had a very puzzled look on her face. I made an oval symbol with my hands and said, “chicken?” And she said, “Ya-Ya,” which is actually spelled “jaje.” They were located in the deli, but sitting out on the counter and not refrigerated. We wanted 6 eggs so they placed them in a paper bag. Ever tried to carry eggs in a bag and not a carton?

We finished our shopping and began the checking out procedure. It was pretty painless since our clerk spoke English and was very friendly. As we were checking out a very nice man asked us if he could help interpret for us, as I said before the Bosnians are very friendly and helpful people and we appreciated his help very much.

We bagged our groceries and started our trek to the apartment with about 5 bags. This was, of course, very new to us since we are accustomed to jumping in our car and driving home. It wasn’t too bad since our apartment was just about 3 blocks from the supermarket.

Arriving back at the apartment we unloaded our food, placing all the cold items in the very small refrigerator and finding a place for the other items. You should have seen the 3 of us trying to put everything away in the very small kitchen. We soon decided that there just wasn’t enough room for all of us.

We spent the remainder of the evening at the apartment trying many of the items that we had purchased at the grocery store. While we have had satellite TV while we have been here almost all of the channels are either in Croatian/Bosnian, German or Italian. We have watched CNN most of the time, but they repeat many of the same segments many times a day and many times a week. At about 3:00 in the morning Wolf Blitzer and Anderson Cooper and Larry King come on. Of course, this is the time of night that we are supposed to be asleep, but I usually see some of these programs since my sleeping is very irregular.

Sep 17, 2009

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