Balkan Adventures

DISCLAIMER - In this blog I refer to the area I am writing about as the former Yugoslavia region. The region is actually called the Balkans (where there are numerous small countries) but some of you may not know where that is.

So former Yugoslavia region. Ideal vacation place? Not for me. I assumed there would be sandbags on the street corners and a large military presence. Boy was I wrong. The region is beautiful but the history is sad (and oh so complicated).

Ljubljana was rainy but the downtown had some interesting structures. My favourite one was the Dragon Bridge which had dragon statues on each end and decorative lampposts across it. There was also a massive old pink church at the centre of the city with nothing very interesting inside for me. It was beautiful to walk through the old downtown at night when everything was lit up. I enjoyed seeing the mountains and lakes north of Ljubljana and had fun hiking up to see the Savica Waterfall.

Zagreb was one of my favourite cities because of the huge market in the middle of the city.  There were so many colours and smells especially in the seafood section where they were selling rays! There was an interesting church that had a brightly coloured roof that formed the country's flag. Did you know that before they had actual money in Croatia, they used pine martin fur (kuna) as their currency? When they switched over to coins, they kept the name so now their currency is called kuna.

Sarajevo was like going back in time to when we were in Istanbul. The city's history is horribly sad and I'm not going to talk about it in this blog. The old city was split into two sections - the newer Austrian section and the older Turkish section which reminded me of Istanbul with all its little cobblestone streets and shops. It was fun to walk down the streets looking into the shops and there was even a building set up like a bazaar. The Austrian and Turkish sections of the Old City met at a line with the words 'Sarajevo Meeting of Cultures' written on it. An added bonus while we were there was that we went to go see the movie 'Murder on the Orient Express' which was English with Bosnian subtitles.

We also stopped in Mostar to see the famous bridge and then we were off to Dubrovnik.

Though this region's history is very sad, it is a beautiful area to visit and people are very friendly.