This one time, I almost woke up on fire in Sarajevo.
Well, maybe that's not completely accurate. I was in a hostel in Sarajevo where I was just about to fall asleep, and I noticed that my blanket, which had been resting on the space heater sitting against the edge of my bed, appeared to be smoking a little bit.
With a minor shriek and a quick jerk of the blanket, the potential crisis was averted. But since I'm a fan of brevity and drama, I think I'll stick with the first version.
I am studying abroad in Vienna, Austria this semester, and as the time came to plan my Spring Break, my fellow classmates were discussing places like London, Paris, Barcelona and Berlin for vacation. Eat your heart out, Panama City.
All of these cities are perfectly fine locations, and I'd be lucky to go to any of them, but as I sat there one night, literally staring at a map of Europe, I mumbled, "What if we go... east instead?" Needless to say, my friends' lack of reaction let me know that they weren't feeling quite as adventurous.
I ended up going with my best friend in my program and one of our classmates who was just as interested in doing something different. Our "rough" itinerary included Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina; Žabljak, Montenegro; and Dubrovnik, Croatia.
We had hostels booked with no idea of how we were getting there. We started with an overnight bus trip to Sarajevo, which was about as interesting and slightly terrifying as it sounds.
I had purchased a license plate-like souvenir that simply said "SARAJEVO" and had a "Bi-H" (Bosnia Herzegovina) emblem on one end. It was too long to fit in my tiny suitcase, so I simply left it hanging out of my tote for the bus ride to Montenegro.
To my surprise, I had apparently bought one that highly resembled a real Bosnian license plate, and the border patrolman who had entered the bus with his gun, seemed to think that I had stolen it.
Luckily, there was a man near me who also spoke English and explained to the patrolman that it was simply a souvenir. Eventually, he just threw it back in my bag.
The next 10 hours were spent either on a bus or in a bus station in Montenegro. We hadn't found any direct routes and ended up seeing nearly the entire nation of Montenegro.
We even spent 40 cents in the Podgorica bus station to use what we expected to be a toilet, but it turned out to literally be a hole in the ground. Needless to say, I held it. Granted that doesn't sound like a superb day, but somehow it turned out to be one of my favorite days of the entire trip.
The views from those bus-seat windows were the most beautiful things I have ever seen in my life. Each turn of the road was a new canyon, a new turquoise, sparkling lake or even a 6-year-old girl herding her 10 cows along the side of the road.
In Žabljak , we were essentially renting out two rooms in the upstairs portion of a family's home. After we finally settled in, we decided to go downstairs and ask Nicola, the only member of the family who spoke English, for advice on what we could do the next day.
We sat down next to granny, whose soap operas we were obviously interrupting as she proceeded to glare at us, and we uncomfortably waited for the mother to return.
A few minutes later, she came back inside with Nicola and we asked him some questions, most of which he just replied to with "Umm, it is... um, winter." We figured we shouldn't bother them anymore, said thank you, and headed back upstairs.
As we reached the door, however, Nicola said, "Wait, my mother says you must eat." Since we had been surviving on chips from various bus stations all day, we quickly accepted the offer.
She served us each a small plate of two long thin slices of cake that resembled lady-fingers and were filled with nuts. Nicola said that this was a very traditional Montenegrin food, and then proceeded to ask, "Do you like alcohol?"
He giggled with us and then pulled out a large, clear, label-less jug with a cork in the top. As Nicola translated to the mother and grandmother that we kept saying how good it was and thank you, he tried to get granny to say "thank you" in English. She chose to growl at us instead.
Dubrovnik, our final stop, was the most touristy of our three locations, and was a close second to the beauty we had seen in Montenegro. We stayed in a hostel in the Old Town portion of the city, where we immediately felt at home with our sarcastic and awkwardly wonderful hostel-owner from New York. There was endless history, ice cream and even a restaurant that sold "nuggets," so naturally, it was wonderful.
The typical study abroad "big cities" of western Europe are always enjoyable to visit, but my unusual Spring Break truly made me realize what a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that I have over here.
I got to stand on the bridge that Archduke Franz Ferdinand was shot on in 1914, provoking the first world war. I overlooked the second longest canyon on the planet. I ate cake with granny, snuck food to six stray cats in an alley in Sarajevo and learned Serbish from a Bosnian girl on an overnight bus.
During our trip, we would always jokingly say, "do it for the story," but truthfully, I am certain that I now have countless stories of my adventures that I will enjoy sharing for years.
- Freestone is a junior biology/history double major from Brownsville, Ind. studying in Vienna, Austria.