BiH

I Returned to Beirut last week. I had been incarcerated in Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina (Bosna I Hercegovina (BiH)) for 2 months because of the ongoing war in Lebanon. In these two months I had forgotten what I hated about Beirut and more generally, Lebanon. Gone were the annoying sounds of honking cars every hour of the day. Gone were the infernal traffic jams, the car fumes, the stifling heat and humidity. Gone was the inferiority complex that every Lebanese suffers from and which makes him/her want to buy the latest car or phone, or both. Tranquility and peace at last! Of course, there remains the language barrier to overcome. Here, in BiH, only recently are people trying to learn English to facilitate their interaction with foreigners. The first two words I learned were Dobar Dan, ‘good day’. But I learned that I could that I could just as well say ‘Assalamu ‘aleikum’: the official greeting of Islam, and gotten a favorable response. To say your farewells, you could just say: ‘Allahimanet’ a perversion of the Arabic phrase for: ‘God be with you’. Or you could just settle for the common ‘Ciao’. Here, paradise is not the heaven we know but ordinary tomatoes: the word that sounds like the English word ‘paradise’ is spelled paradajz. I learned how to count from one to ten but that did not help me when I needed directions to my uncle’s house since he lived at 19 Hasana Bibera street. I later learned that nineteen is devetneset in Bosnian. Another pitfall for foreigners is the difference between the languages of the states of the former Yugoslavia. In Serbian, bread is ‘Hleb’ but in Croatian and Bosnian it is ‘Hljeb’. Also, most Bosnians use other names for their varieties of bread and thus saying to a baker that you želim kupiti hljeb, might just draw blank stares. The food is real cheap. It might be cheaper to eat out than to prepare food in your house. Börek and sausages are the most commonly consumed foods. Cafes and the bistros in downtown Sarajevo are always full at every hour of the day. Bosnians consume huge amounts of coffee (kafa) and smoke a lot. One popular way of drinking coffee is dunking sugar (šečer) cubes in coffee and eating them, although I haven’t seen that in my current visit.
In the end, I left BiH to go back to Lebanon with plenty of enjoyable memories. I haven’t said everything I have to say on Bosnia to keep this short. I will come back to it soon.
So, remember: this is not a closed country which still resides in the Middle Ages but a rapidly developing country with roots in the past. Coffee comes in a čaša (derived from Ca’s, a cup in Arabic), an airplane is an ‘avion’ (like in French). To invite someone in you can say ‘borjum’ (taken from Turkish) or ‘zvolte’. Ciao.