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(the article below accompanies this video)
Today began at 5:30 am: Masayo and I had to catch a train at 7:04 to Sarajevo, one of only two daily trains to the capital of Bosnia.
My BG at 5:30 was 180, and breakfast was the rest of the cinnamon cereal and some yogurt. The owner of the apartment came to pick us up at 6:30 and drove us to the station, a very nice bonus feature of staying at Little Rock Apartments.
We bought the tickets at the window, in the still-dark morning. The train arrived mostly on time: our first Bosnian train, and first since northern Croatia, actually. It arrived on the same platform as shown in Michael Palin’s New Europe, incidentally.
The train was not very packed, and Masayo and I had a six-seat compartment all to ourselves the whole way. The train seemed a little old and dirty, but not too bad. And anyway, it quickly got light outside, and the whole trip to Sarajevo was full of amazing views. Snowy mountains, picturesque valleys, and dramatic blue rivers cutting through the hills.
Somehow, by 7:45 my BG was an equally mountainous 343! I have no idea why; if I ate too much cereal, I didn’t eat that much. I hate it when it doesn’t make sense. I took a Humalog shot without any food. The scenery took my mind off of BG though.
We arrived in Sarajevo at 9:45, an especially early time for us to get to a new place. We took a tram into Old Town and got off at the Baščaršija area. After stumbling around some wrong roads for a few minutes, we found our way up a big snowy hill to the apartment we’d reserved, Guest House Kofrc. It was early and the lady wasn’t ready to let us in so we left our bags and walked back down to town to get some Bosnian coffee at a Turkish cafe called Osmanli Pide Döner.
We checked in properly, and by noon my BG was 137. Much better than the 343 it had been. Then we headed out to see some of Sarajevo.
The first thing we saw was the street corner where Gavrilo Princip, a 20-year old Serbian nationalist, shot the heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire as he rode with his wife Sophia in an open car. There is a plaque just outside of a museum about that period of Bosnian history.
The whole day, I had various songs by Franz Ferdinand (the band) in my head, especially one of their early ones, “All For You, Sophia”, which is all about Gavrilo Princip particularly. It was impossible not to, loving the band’s music as much as I do.
After seeing the museum (and taking the audio tour) we trudged through the snowy mush to visit some nice churches and mosques and other places, plus an eternal flame on another street corner. I checked my BG here, which was 97, as a guy warmed himself with the eternal flame behind me. It may be symbolic, but I guess it can be practical as well!
We went back up the hill to the apartment to rest a while, and then went back to town for dinner. We found a small place that sold ćevapi; we were told in Mostar to try Sarajevo’s ćevapi specifically.
The restaurant was an unexpected surprise: it had two booths and one table only, and we got the table. The other guests and the owner, all older, were listening to a guy playing the accordion. He was just friends with them, as far as we could tell, but everyone was singing along to the traditional songs with feeling, sipping their bottles of beer.
We ordered our food (I got a Sarajevsko beer and a sausage/bread dish called sudžukice) and listened to the live performance. Occasionally the owner lady would come put another piece of firewood in a little stove in the corner. The light was dim, and the whole thing was extremely charming and unusual (for us). This is the kind of thing you could never get without traveling!
We stopped by a supermarket on the way back to get some carbonated water (as we always do), and I got a thick chocolate cake from a bakery, which I took insulin for when we got back to the room. Unfortunately it wasn’t enough: at 11 pm I was over the dreaded 300 mark: 319. SIGH. More Humalog and an early sleep followed.
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