Knowing where we are

When we getting ready to come out to Bosnia we looked into the possibility of getting a GPS system for the car. Or more accurately Dave looked into it, being a fully signed up technophobe I muttered something about being able to map read just fine thank you and what a waste of money.

Anyway, at the time it turned out that Bosnia was a bit of a black hole GPS-wise. Perhaps it was the abundance of military bases which made it difficult for them to put the information on the map. Perhaps it was the mountainous terrain. I have no idea. But what happened was you would be piling along the road in Croatia with lots of info, turn right to go into Bosnia and nothing. Zip. Nada. Zilch. According to GPS when you enter Bosnia you have fallen off the end of the world.

The technophobe in me loves this. I hate GPS. I love maps. I like trying to develop my sense of direction using my own noggin. It isn't difficult in Tuzla. Tuzla is a city in a valley. You are either going east-west along the valley floor or up the hills in a northern or southerly direction. Sure the roads on the hills get a bit random and windy but you usually come out somewhere you know. As long as you don't hit the dirt tracks at which point it is time to turn around and come back down again.

Last night we went to some friends for dinner. They were fresh back from Italy bearing cheeses, wines, meats, chocolates. It was a gourmet extravaganza and we celebrated the fine foods by drinking far too much fine prosecco and chianti. Weaving our way home was taking far too long so we decided to get a cab back.

Readers, Bosnia has arrived. For the cab had GPS. And not just a GPS for show either. It worked. With all the roads and everything. Not that the journey home is especially difficult, nor I imagine are any of the routes the cabbie takes. But he had his GPS on. And Bosnia takes another step towards catching up with the rest of Europe.

Food that shouldn't taste this good

Sometimes a situation leads to something becoming so much greater, more pleasurable than it actually is. To clarify with an example: when you have spent a few hours tramping up a cold wet mountain, the piece of melted chocolate that has solidified in an odd shape with all the weird white streaks that previously melted chocolate has will be the most delicious piece of chocolate you have ever eaten. Swiss chocolates have nothing on this squashed bit of Dairy Milk.

I had an example of this the other day. I had to go to Zvornik, a town right on the border about an hour's drive from Tuzla. This isn't normally a problem; I go to Zvornik quite a lot. It is a bit like hopping on the M4 to for a couple of exits, except it is more like the B4324. It's quite a pretty route, and just before you get to Zvornik you go through a range of forested hills and then you emerge, blinking, to see the Drina river flowing gently north and the Drina Valley stretching out before you.

This week it has been snowing, as is quite normal in February here. Everyone is equipped to deal with the snow so all the cars have winter tyres and carry snow chains by law, and pretty much everyone has a couple of rugs and emergency bits of food kept around their car somewhere. Just in case. Last year we forgot about our secret stash under the passenger seat and discovered it half way through the summer when the temperatures were 40C plus and all the chocolate had melted.

On this particular evening we had been to Zvornik and were on our way home.  It had already been a long afternoon, much coffee had been drunk which was making me a little more jittery than desirable. I was looking forward to getting home for some supper and a cosy glass of wine in front of an episode of The Wire, but it had started snowing again. The road hadn't really been gritted and it was very slippery. We could barely see out of the windscreen and were having to drive at about 15 mph. We were in the hills and it was very dark. Occasionally a car would flash past, a bus even came thundering around the corner at one point, but everyone was taking it pretty carefully and there were very few cars around. It's difficult to see the lines on the road at the best of times, but covered with snow it was impossible. Couldn't see the edge of the road either. We were moving so slowly that it wasn't really scary, more an acceptance that this journey home was going to be a long, dark, snowy slog. We carried on edging our way through the mountains, right up to the point we lost our grip on the road and the car set off on a gentle pirouette and turned a graceful 360.

We were lucky, nothing was on the road and we didn't come off it. We were going so slowly that we were not physically in danger but it would have been a real disaster if we'd slipped off the road and not been able to get on it again. We edged off again, taking it really carefully. But the combination of far too much coffee earlier and a lunch time that was now a distant memory and I was starting to feel a bit faint and in dire need of some food. A search of the car proved fruitful. I had been given a few days before some zeljanica (spinach pie) made by a friend's mother, complete with feta cheese. I'd eaten them hot, they had been wonderful, but that was a couple of days earlier. Now they were freezing cold. But they were without a doubt the most wonderful, delicious, satisfying meal I'd ever eaten. A small piece of me flew to heaven for a little while as we pulled over and sat munching on our stale spinach pie.

We set off again. It took us approaching 3 hours to get home. But I will never forget how wonderful it was to be sitting on the side of the road eating good, although not quite how it should have been served, food.

How about you? What food that shouldn't be good somehow became a deliciously memorable meal because of the situation you were in?

The road outside our house

A sobering start to our day. Just as everyone was struggling out of bed (well, I was struggling out of bed, the boys were bouncing around full of the joys of a brand new day with far too much energy for my ever so slightly feeling the effects of a glass of wine too many the previous evening head) we heard shouts coming from the road outside. I looked out of the window and realised that a woman had been hit by a car. People were running to help, the driver of the car was out of his car looking shocked and slightly hysterical. An ambulance arrived in minutes, closely followed by the police and she was whisked off to the hospital, to be treated for a broken shoulder and leg. The police remained for several hours carefully photographing all aspects of the accident, circling relevant marks with chalk, placing numbered placards everywhere and interviewing witnesses.

As it turns out, she was walking to work and had just stepped off the pavement, into the path of the car. The car had not been travelling fast, there was no screeching to a halt, no skid marks on the road. She was lucky, we might live in a residential area, but the road by our house is surprisingly smooth and cars drive up it at an inappropriate speed. This being a residential area there are always children playing on the road somewhere. It is one of the things that I love about living here. The kids are outside, making up games with chalk on the road, drawing out elaborate courts for games to play with bottle tops. The girls are often to be seen with long pieces of elastic stretched between themselves playing elaborate games that the boys look at with confusion, as if the girls are practicing an advanced form of black magic. The boys go up and down on their bikes practicing wheelies and trying to look cool. It is exactly how children ought to be spending their time. It is exactly how I would want my kids to be spending their time when they are a few years older.

But this accident has really shaken me up. I grew up in London, so am no stranger to cars travelling too fast on the roads. But at least in London the pavements are wide enough to walk on. Here, the pavement which this woman stepped off is narrow, gravelled and difficult to walk along. Whenever I try to walk along it, I normally end up stepping off it and walking on the road. And I usually have 2 small children, a couple of scooters, some shopping and a dog to try and keep under control whilst I do so. The other day, I took my eye off Luke for all of 1 second and he ran across the road for no reason whatsoever. This is the first time he had ever done something like that. Usually he is pretty road aware, but for some reason this time, he simply took off. There was a car coming as well, fortunately travelling slowly and paying attention, so was able to give the rampaging 2 year old plenty of room.

I keep thinking of this woman, who was just walking to work one Thursday morning and who ended up in hospital with some fairly serious and very painful injuries. And all I can think is There, but for the grace of God, go I. And I draw my boys in towards me, kiss their heads and hold them tight.

Building Roads and Driving Trains

Can life get more heavenly if you are male and under 5? All week the road outside our house has been being bulldozed, dug-up, squashed, stones added, flattened, tarmacked and smoothed. Gone are the disintegrating cobbles with their irritating potholes and dustpatches and in its place has appeared is a sleek, smooth road. Enormous machines have been working hard all week to complete their tasks.

We, on the other hand, have not been working hard at all. Instead we grabbed a sandwich and a couple of packs of Smokis and have spent large amounts of time in the afternoons camped out under a tree watching the action. Armed with a Richard Scary book that talks about making a road, we've watched the whole process from start to finish.

By the end of the week not only were we providing most of the workmen with coffees (I tried to give them a decent cup of tea but they were having none of it), but the boys had been invited up onto a few of the machines to have a go. They pressed buttons, they moved the steering wheel. They even got a decent go at the beeping the horn until I couldn't take it any longer. Needless to say, they were thrilled, absolutely eye poppingly, grin until your head might split in two thrilled. The chance to drive a real digger, help build a real road. What a treat.

Now they've finished I've had to come up with some new afternoon activities. So yesterday we shambled down to the train tracks to pick some blackberries and coincided with the arrival of the only train of the afternoon. Within minutes the engine driver had hopped down and the next thing I knew the boys were being shown how to drive the train. There are times that I love the less than strict enforcement of the health and safety laws here which gives little boys a chance to do stuff they could only dream of.

They've now decided that they would like to try being astronauts next so if I could just find where the local space programme is then we could go and have a go next week.

Losing our parking entertainment

It can safely be said that I have truly embraced one aspect of the Bosnian culture. I love the way people park here. The rules seem to be that you can park wherever you can. Is that a piece of pavement the size of my car? Perfect. Is that a piece of pavement not quite the size of my car ? Never mind, if we put the front end of the car in that will do. I have never quite managed to reach the giddy heights of one Bosnian I saw, who parked in the middle of the one way system causing gridlock, but I was secretly impressed at the chutzpah and ability to ignore wildly honking horns.

I can't park for toffee, so to see some of the attempts of other Bosnians makes me feel right at home. To be fair, they probably half squeezed the car into a very small space, but when the neighbouring car departs, it leaves the original car looking very, um, haphazard. Drunken almost.

But all this fun has been ruined. We went into town yesterday for a saunter down the Korzo, bit of an ice-cream and a general smooch around and discovered that the authorities have discovered parking meters. I nearly cried. They've also put up big signs encouraging people to park between the lines and banned people parking on the verges. It's not very expensive (but I did grow up in London so have a distorted view about how much money parking is likely to cost) but it has spoilt all my fun.

It goes without saying it will make the city centre an easier place to negotiate on foot and is a very good thing really. Whether the Bosnians pay any attention to it remains to be seen. I'm not sure they are going to take to it, I've already had to demonstrate the automated machine to 3 Bosnians scratching their heads.

English cars, Bosnian over-taking manoeuvres

Bosnian roads merit many blog entries (let alone the driving that accompanies them). The main routes weave through the mountain ranges, are seldom more than single lane and our poor car hasn't been above 50mph since we got here. Tuzla to Sarajevo is 120km and can take 2 hours. Or, if you get stuck behind a log moving lorry, of which there many more than you might reasonably expect to come across, it can take twice as long. Particularly in a British car. Having the steering wheel on the right makes overtaking difficult and puts a particular onus upon any front seat passengers. Bosnian friends are still getting used to the concept that any lifts with us involve an important driving role. As the car edges out to see whether it is possible to overtake the beer lorry moving at 15mph, the passenger must make the decision to go or not leading to a few over-taking moments that any Bosnian driver would be proud of. The language accompanying the manoeuvre is suitably colourful and I do long, every now and then, for a good bit of peaceful motorway driving.