A Balkan came to town: A Croatian friend of mine came for a visit last weekend. At his request, I took him to San Francisco to see the city. As I had expected, this European became smitten by the lively and liberal atmosphere in San Francisco. SF’s architecture and sporadic narrow alleys reminded him of [...]
Read the rest of this entry »Archive for the 'Culture & Society' Category
Learning Bosnian
One reader sent me an email asking me for tips in learning Bosnian as well as recommend books, software to download. Well, I’m not a very good person to ask because I didn’t make any progress with my Bosnian. To summarize, I sucked! However, I can write about how I actually learned Bosnian, what I [...]
Read the rest of this entry »Video: Welcome to Bosnia
Bosnia’s tourism promotion ad. Have you enjoyed the video? Ok, good! Now seat back, relax and get ready for a dose of reality as “Bosnia and Herzegovina is not as singularly idyllic as the video below shown,” said another blogger who happened to blog this same video. There is nothing wrong with canoeing along the [...]
Read the rest of this entry »Official Seal
Official Seal Generator -The default blue and yellow color is a perfect match for Bosnian flag -The moon and star symbol might look cliche at first, but Sarajevo’s population is mostly Bosniaks and my experience was enriched living almost exclusively with the Muslims. In addition, it was the first time in my life that I [...]
Read the rest of this entry »Arkan: a Serbian patriot or…?
Unlike Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic whose names were mentioned often during one of those popcorn political interrogations I had for the Bosniaks, I never heard of Arkan. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t talk politics all the time. When I have time I listened to…Turbo folk, a cheap cheesy Serbian pop which many Bosnians [...]
Read the rest of this entry »The city Mostar
The background song in this video is “Mostarska” written and composed by Dino Merlin. Scroll down to see the lyrics in Bosnian. I don’t have the English translation at the moment. When I complained to the sister of one of my roommate about the lack of Christmas spirit in Sarajevo, she said, “you should have [...]
Read the rest of this entry »Jenny from the mahala
I don’t remember much about a conversation I had with a Croatian friend of mine. We were chatting about one of her musical favorites, JLo. Briefly, as she said: "The Bosnians have this one song called ‘Jenny from the mahala’, the Bosnian version of the original ‘Jenny from the block’." And she started humming the [...]
Read the rest of this entry »Ethnic groups
There are three main groups who inhabit this country: Bosniaks, Croats, and Serbs. The Bosniaks are mainly Muslims, the Croats are Catholic and the Serbs, exclusively Orthodox. There is a small fraction of the Bosnians who are not affiliated with any religious group, which is inordinary. A Bosniak friend of mine has an uncle who [...]
Read the rest of this entry »Facts and myths
1. Is there still war? No. It ended in 1995. 2. So now you live in Yugoslavia? No. Yugoslavia is the old name of the 6-state union before they broke up and declared independent. Montenegro is the last. Yugoslavia is still used though, mostly to refer the country Serbia. 3. How do the Bosnians look [...]
Read the rest of this entry »Sarajevo football’ team’ fans
This is a match between Sarajevo and Zeljo (also the name of the most famous cevapi eating house in Sarajevo) By the way, I don’t understand heck what they are saying! The reason for this post, I guess, is to present a normal daily life of Bosnians or in this case, Bosniaks. Navijanje sa derbija [...]
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