A trip

I figured that I needed to put down a few thoughts on my trip to the Balkans before I take another fabulous trip to Mexico with the fam in a week (I know you're jealous, but this is likely the last time I'll use my passport this year).

This was the view from my window in Sarajevo the afternoon that I arrived. Sarajevo was an amazingly charming little mountain city. I don't know what I was expecting, maybe bullet holes and bombed out buildings, but that wasn't what I found at all. I think I need to head back here for a ski vacation sometime.

Belgrade was a beautiful city, much larger than Sarajevo. This is a view from the office where we did the interviews, and you can see the bridges over the Danube off in the distance. My favorite part of Belgrade was meeting the in country coordinator, Jelena. She was delightful and I hope that I'll get to visit her again someday.

I know you'll be shocked when I tell you, but this is not a scene from "The Empire Strikes Back," this is the university library in Prishtina. Kosovo was a fascinating place, partly because the country is incredibly isolated, and because you can tell the people are hungry to reach out and show the world that they have worth and legitimacy. And on top of that, I don't know why, but Kosovans are really quite an attractive bunch.

Tirana was our last stop, and it was so nice to not be freezing for a day or two. The city was incredibly colorful; these are some of the old communist style apartment buildings that a former mayor of the city decided to paint as his legacy to beautify the city. I was also shocked to find that Albania had such big mountains. I had already heard that they had beautiful beaches, but there was a huge mountain wall bordering the city that reminded me a lot of Mt. Timpanogos.

I slept in five countries in seven nights- it was a bit of a whirlwind- there was hardly any time for sight-seeing. But, on the other side of that, I got to really talk to the people that lived there- from the students we were interviewing to the in-country coordinators and interviewers. It was a great opportunity to see how similar the problems are that we all face. This area just has an added layer of very, very complicated political tension and history that underlies the daily lives of the people.