Today was a very educational day for me.

Before I started my trip I knew very little about European geography and history.   I’ve very proud to say that I now know the geography quite well and am getting there on the history.

Each time I go to a new city I seek out a free walking tour.   Most of the cities have had them and they are always done by a guide working for tips at the end.   Usually I’ll drop him or her a 5 euro note as most people do.   Today I gave my tour guide 10 euros – he was that good!

The free walking tours are nice because they’re an intimate group of usually 10 or less and it has an informal feel – just a guy talking about his city and country.

Now I’ve heard history of Spain and Portugal and other countries in between but hearing the history of Bosnia and the former Yugoslavia is amazing because most of that history is very recent.   It hasn’t even been 20 years since the war ended here in Bosnia so the history is still very fresh comparatively speaking.

Our guide, Neno, grew up in the war as he was 7 when it started and 11 when it ended.   His stories were remarkable like his telling of living in the basement for over 3 years venturing out only occasionally for fear of being shot.

He toured us around the city for over three hours pointing out little pieces of Bosnia’s history here and there.   It was far and away the best tour I’ve been on and it’ll be interesting to go on a tour of Belgrade, Serbia in the coming days to hear their side of it.

The rest of my afternoon was spent on a power cord search.   I fried the power cord for my laptop by plugging it into the wrong outlet back in Dubrovnik so I had to search out a computer store to buy a new one.

In North America it’s super easy as there’s a Best Buy everywhere but here in Europe it’s all little electronics stores and most of them don’t have what you’re looking for.   Anyway, I finally did find the cord so all is good – many more blogs to come!

For dinner I stopped in a tiny little restaurant where I had a veal soup to start and then Sarajevski Sahan which was a mix of sogan dolma (onions stuffed with meat), punjene paprike (peppers stuffed with meat) and sarma (meat wrapped in cabbage).   It was all done in a tomato sauce with yogurt.   Yummy!

Oh yeah, I also spent a bit of time finalizing the reworking of my itinerary for the rest of the trip – you can find it here.