pristina to mostar- catchup post

So i've been busy, and with people, so haven't blogged much. Now i'm more or less on my own again, so i have time to sit in a cafe and write.
Quick summary: the day i left prishtina i went to Prizren by bus with some polish people i met in the professor's guesthouse, and spent the morning wandering around in the rain. In prizren i also bought a recorder, so i finally have a portable instrument, even if it is one people don't want to hear too much of... At least it's a wooden one and isn't too shrill. In the afternoon i said goodbye and went off to find the highway back to Skopje, as i needed to enter serbia through a border point that wasn't in kosova. A million short rides later and i was back in Skopje. After One night at the creatively named hostel-hostel), i went to find the highway to Nis. Half an hour wait at a petrol station and i had a reasonably easy series of rides to nis, with the last one being right to the door of my hostel, which was rather nice! I spent the evening with other couchsurfers and locals, which was fun, but meant i didn't get such an early start the next morning...
Leaving Nis i walked through the fortress and then past the local concentration camp. I got to the highway, and went most of the way to belgrade with Yet Another turkish truck driver. I'm very glad i can communicate in turkish. That and german are the most common languages of the people who pick me up!
Belgrade was interesting, but i didn't do much outside the queer festival, which i will write about separately. I stayed with a wonderful couchsurfer host who lived in a delightful rundown old house, where the window was my most common means of leaving or entering. Even if i had had a key, the door was somewhat temperamental!
In Belgrade heard about the Sarajevo queer festival, and decided to in there next, rather than Zagreb as planned. I also met Solene, who had the same idea, and together we hitched to Sarajevo on Tuesday. After a latish start, we ended up just past the wonderfully mountainous border in the town of Visegrad as night was falling, and were concerned that we would spend the night there, when a lovely guy who lives in Austria but was visiting family picked us up, drove us all the way to Sarajevo, and let us sleep in his house for the night. He and i communicated in german, and with Solene he spoke Bosnian while she spoke czech, turning to me for translation through english and german when necessary. And then together Solene and i would speak english, except if we wanted to be sure our friend didn't understand, when we spoke french. See, this is why i travel. I average 3 or 4 languages a day!
The next morning he drove us into town and, miraculously, we ran into the very people we were looking for a net cafe to contact (friends from the Belgrade fest) in the main square of the old town.
Sarajevo is a lovely place. Despite the festival problems (more later), i really like it, and i met lots of lovely local people who made of feel very welcome- something i didn't really get in Belgrade. So even though the festival ended up cancelled, i stayed nearly a week, mostly staying in the office-apartment of an organisation that helps people get out of military service. Or something. And yesterday, before i left, i contacted an english school that is looking for teachers. I think i could quite happily spend the winter here...
Yesterday, after my first lovely sunny day in weeks, i set off in the late afternoon to come to Mostar. The plan was to meet Anthea, who i last say in Montreal, but it didn't quite work out, so i'm here alone. I had the address of a good place here though- a youth centre sort of community place called Abrasevic. I had no idea what i would find there, or if i would find it at all, as i only had a street name, but i did, and found a bunch of nice people, including, by chance, the one guy from here i had met in Sarajevo, still sporting an impressively bandaged broken nose from the queer festival violence. And it's right on the 1995 front line. I'm told that the building on one side of the courtyard was occupied by Croats, and the other by the muslims. Certainly both are pretty thoroughly destroyed. The building that houses most of the youth centre was also destroyed, but has been partially restored.
In Sarajevo there were signs of the war all over the place, if you opened your eyes and looked. i think more money has been put into restoring the capital. Here, the signs are really impossible to miss, with bombed shells of buildings everywhere, as are the tell-tale skeletal rose indentations in the pavements from shell explosions. Every building, except the few that have been re-plastered or are new, is pocked with bullet wounds.
Last night the abrasevic people let me put my tent on the roof, and i'm told that tonight i can sleep on a sofa or something. The roof was ok, but a sofa will be luxury! In the mean time, i'm out exploring Mostar, and tomorrow i.ll head either to Banja Luka or Zagreb, depending on couchsurfing and hitchhiking luck!