by No shortage of work on my return to Timișoara, and it feels good to have some money in my pocket again. My worst lesson was my first of two with the six-year-old boy. I couldn’t connect to their wi-fi, and I was hopelessly unprepared for that scenario. The second time I was armed with colouring-in sheets (colour the roof red, the chimney orange, the door green…) which he really enjoyed. We practised numbers a bit; he knows 1 to 12, and 20, so I’m trying to get him up to speed on the teens. Other than that, I had eight hours with the Cîrciumaru family, nearly a third of my total for the week (26).
I’ll now give a run-down of the second half of my trip, starting in Mostar. At 5:10 on Sunday morning (the 18th) I was woken by a call to prayer at one of the nearby mosques. A bit later I got up and negotiated the rabbit warren of side streets to end up in the middle of town, where I had breakfast. I met a woman of about 30 from the Basque part of Spain; she told me that a tip-based tour of the city would be starting from where we happened to be, in a few minutes. I’m very glad I did join the tour, because it taught me so much about the war and its aftermath. Before our guide went on to the serious stuff, we first saw somebody jump 22 metres from the Old Bridge into the river. The beautiful bridge isn’t old anymore, sadly: it stood for more than four centuries before being destroyed in the war. Reconstruction was completed in 2004.
We then watched some coppersmithing (a dying art), and then things did get fairly heavy. Our guide was 43; he and his family survived the war, which is still so recent and so raw. (Saying that, most of the people on the tour were under 30 and had no recollection of the war, or of a country called Yugoslavia.) He described the gruesome events of the early 1990s in vivid detail, and explained that although the fighting stopped a quarter-century ago, the hatred most definitely hasn’t. This I found hard to get my head around. I’m just me. I could be in Romania or New Zealand or anywhere. The idea of despising a whole group, race, nationality, ethnicity, call it what you will, is totally alien to me. But as far as I can see, unlike in Tito’s time, the three main groups in Bosnia – Serbs, Croats and Bosniaks (Muslims) – hardly mix at all these days. There are three prime ministers (who must all agree in order to pass legislation, but never can), three school systems with their three separate truths about their recent history, separate hospitals, and so on. I soon found out why a city as small as Mostar had two bus stations: one was for the Bosniaks, the other for the Croats.
After our three-hour tour, I had an enjoyable lunch (a big platter of traditional Bosnian fare and some Bosnian beer) with three of the others. Paying for our meal was interesting. In Mostar, although the Bosnian convertible mark (abbreviated KM) is the official currency, they also accept euros (which I had) and Croatian kuna. We paid using a mixture of all three. Next stop was a Bosnian coffee demonstration, and after that we went our separate ways.
In the afternoon I didn’t do a whole lot. It was 37 degrees, although if I’d been there the week before it would have been even hotter. In the evening I had another big mish-mash of Bosnian food, and later I met the Spanish woman again, with a friend she was staying with at a hostel, and we tried some craft beer. Her friend was an English teacher from somewhere near Swindon. She’s a nomad: she travels from place to place, giving Skype lessons. I think I’d tire of that – not having my own bed – pretty quickly. Meeting her gave me a rare opportunity to talk about linguistics and teaching methods. She said speaking the student’s first language, which I sometimes do here in Romania, is a no-no. (For children and beginners I’m not convinced. For kids in particular, being able to speak their language a bit seems to help gain their trust. She doesn’t teach kids.)
The next morning I bought my ticket at the train station. I wouldn’t be leaving until around 8pm, not 5 as I’d thought. I visited two museums, including one showing a young New Zealander’s quite moving photographs of the war. There I also chatted to some English people, partly about Brexit, which never goes away. After bumping into the Basque woman once more (she was catching a bus), I arrived at the stark-looking train station very early, and somewhat eerily, nobody else was there. Then people suddenly showed up, seemingly out of nowhere. I spoke to a young Bosnian chap who was travelling to play football, then I had a really strange conversation with a woman from Hong Kong. After some confusion (is this the right train?) I was on a surprisingly smart Spanish Talgo train, on my way to Sarajevo. Mostar is a very picturesque city, and I enjoyed my time there, despite the spectre of war that looms large.
