Let It Snow

Two weeks ago everyone was saying we were supposed to get snow and then it was in the 50's.  Then everyone said we were going to get snow this week but all last week it was in the 50's so I didn't think much about it.  Then yesterday we had flurries on and off in the morning for a few hours.  Then last night before I went to bed I looked outside and we had a dusting covering the ground.  Then I woke up this morning and we have about 5-6 inches and I hear we might get up to 18 inches by the time it stops late tonight or early tomorrow morning.  I don't remember getting any real snow the last two years in Jersey, except for a dusting or two, so to commemorate seeing snow, which may become more rare as I get older, I went out and just walked around my building and took a few pictures.

Just Some More Random Pictures

Last week was in the 70's again so when I would walk to work I would take my camera with me and take a few pictures along the way.

Conspiracy Theories

Over the last month or so I have heard some outlandish conspiracy theories.  At first I thought it was maybe just the ideas of a few people but as time went on I would bring it up in conversation and other people would tell me no, this is what they believe.  I spoke with some of the teachers I work with and they have told me they have heard some of the same crazy things.  All I can think of as a way to explain this is that up through the mid 1990's this was a communist country and the communist weren't exactly known for having freedom of information and almost everything that was on the news or made it into textbooks was controlled and censored by the government.  So these old ideas and beliefs die hard.  Also, school is not conducted the same way as in the US.  What I have found is that for grades K-8 things are fairly similar except they have a shorter school day.  However, for high school, most people go to a school that is structured for what you want to do after graduation.  There is a high school for art, business, education etc.  Once you finish high school you can then get a job and I am told few people (only the wealthy) go on to college because it is expensive and there is no such thing as grants or student loans.  To become a teacher you only need to finish high school.  So you have people teaching who barely have a grasp of the content, have never studied it in much depth and know nothing about how to actually teach.  Then, in their high schools students are not required to take things like history, or science or some math classes.  I know in Pennsylvania where I had been teaching, every student was required to take 4 years of social studies, 4 years of English, 2 years of a foreign language, and I think 3 years of math and science.  Here there is no such thing so many people have nothing more than a middle school education for many subjects.  So it is for these reasons why I think some of these conspiracy theories tend to persist.

The first conspiracy is the Pyramids that I talked about in a previous posting.  Now, the people I am staying with when I asked if they heard anything about them told me they were fake and then they took me a few weeks later to see for myself.  After that, just our of curiosity, I looked them up on the internet and there are websites for and against them being real.  The websites against have the more scientifically credible evidence.  I then came across a documentary (The Biggest Hoax in History) that offered definitive proof that they aren't real.  In the documentary they said that it's really only the people in that town, which I think might be like 20 miles from Sarajevo, who still say it is real but kind of do it with a wink and a nob for tourism just like the Alien spaceship that crashed in Roswell, New Mexico.  Anyway, I am in class one night and the topic for discussion is myths and legends.  So I told them about the New Jersey Devil and then I asked if they had any local myths or legends and they said no.  So to try and start a conversation I said, "What about the Pyramid?"  They got very defensive that I would say that this is fake.  I said that it was largely known that all scientific excavation and analysis show that it is a natural formation and was not built by man.  They told me that is just lies that the "West" puts out to discredit it and to deny Bosnia and its people a place in history.  After this I will make sure I don't mention it anymore.

Another conspiracy theory that I heard was that Einstein was a fraud.  The belief is that his first wife (who he divorced, they say is Serbian but I haven't bothered to check; all I know is after they divorced she moved to Switzerland with their kids) was the one who really had all of the ideas and she gave them to him.  I said lets look at things in reverse.  He won a noble prize after many years because it took a long time for his theories to be properly vetted.  They also did not like the fact that he was Jewish so the scientific community would have loved to prove the theories were not his but they couldn't.  In the years that passed since his first theories were published, he gave probably hundreds if not thousands of speeches and wrote many papers supporting/defending his claims.  Physicists from all over the world worked to prove or disprove his theories before they would be accepted by the scientific community.  If he was a fraud he wouldn't have been able to defend his work and believe it or not he wrote a lot more than just his E=MC2 (I don't know how to do notation on my computer for squared)  Because his theory of relativity was controversial and for many other reasons (again, he was Jewish) even though he had been nominated many times for the Nobel Prize he was not awarded the award until 1922 (in 1921 they couldn't decide on who should get it and some on the committee did not want to accept relativity and some were anti Semitic so it took them until 1922 to decide who should have won the award in 1921 and then they gave it to him for his explanation of the photoelectric effect, a phenomenon in which electrons are emitted from a metal sheet only under certain illuminations and that work had been published back in 1905.)  But when I asked how if he was a fraud he would have been able to write so much, defend his works, give lectures on his works, taught at multiple Universities, how would he be able to fake his way through all of that?  They basically just laughed and rolled their eyes at me like I was the one who was talking crazy.

I forget how I got on the topic of space travel with my one class but it was at this time that I was told that man has never been to the moon.  Now, I know this is a somewhat popular conspiracy theory and have heard it in the US, but it is just not true.  First, the belief is that Russia was beating us every step of the way when it came to space exploration and therefore if they couldn't put a man on the moon then no one could.  They then also cite that according to experts if we wanted to return a man to the moon it would probably take close to ten years for us to do that.  Ok, forget about if we wanted to do it today and it taking ten years, even though I have heard some say we would be able to do it in about two.  Why even that long?  Because it takes time to build stuff.  It's not a car, it is a specialized vehicle where everything from the launch pad to the vehicle itself needs to be custom made and isn't something that will just roll off of an assembly line.  But anyway, just look at us not going there.  They said we put a few men into space and while they orbited around the Earth a film crew out in the desert was filming and that is what was broadcast on TV.  Ok, even a low budget film crew will have a few dozen camera men, actors, set directors, director, and a producer.  Then lets add to it the hundreds of people who worked for mission control and the actual astronauts them self and multiply that by the six missions that had gone to the moon (because there was more than one) and when you pull away the lawyers there would have been, at minimum, hundreds of people in on the hoax.  Common sense would tell you that many people wouldn't be able to keep their mouths shut.  The theory falls apart when you look at how many people you would need to be involved to pull it off and to do it not once but six times.  They then cited some stuff about pictures, the flag waving and all of that.  Photography 101, if you are taking a picture and your subject is in the foreground and you focus on that everything in the background will be blurry. Also, there is no atmosphere to be illuminated by light passing through it.  That is why in the middle of the day on the moon the sky is dark.  The ground is illuminated because of the composition of the dirt on the moon is reflective.  Then the stars in the sky even at night here on earth are faint and that is with our atmosphere.  If you wanted the stars to show up you would have had to do a long exposure picture which means the astronauts would have been blurry.  If you want to see how and why the flag moved then watch the episode of Myth Busters where they tested their conspiracy theories and busted them.  Then again that is a TV show and could also have been faked just adding more people to those who are perpetrating the myth.  The bit of evidence they seemed to get mad at is when I said, you do know that they left a lot of stuff up there.  One item we left is basically a metal reflecting disk that we beam lasers off of so we can measure how close the moon is to Earth and have been able to calculate from this that the moon is actually moving closer to Earth.  It also isn't NASA that does this but a number of Universities?  Also, we left all kinds of other stuff behind on the moon and with our modern powerful telescopes you can actually look at the moon and see these things.  You can actually see the tracks left by the land rovers.  So we can basically just look up and see the signs that men have been there.

One of my favorite conspiracy theories that I have heard is that the US is currently planning to invade Russia.  I don't know the full history of the war that took place here back in the '90's.  One of the issues was that of Kosovo.  I think Serbia claims it as part of their country however, now it is currently majority Muslim and wants its independence.  According to Wikipedia, 108 countries support Kosovo's independence.  If you want to know a full breakdown of those countries just check out the Wikipedia page.  Anyway, they told me the only reason why those countries support Kosovo is because the US put them up to it.  Why?  Because the US wants to set up military bases in Kosovo so we can launch an invasion of Russia.  I don't even no where to begin with this one.  First, Kosovo doesn't border Russia so we would have to also invade or at the very least cross other sovereign countries to get to Russia.  Second, Russia is a member of the UN and while we have strained relations they are considered an ally of the US.  Third, if we wanted to invade Russia (or the former USSR) we would have done it after WWII, during the Korean War, Bay of Pigs, Cuban Missile crisis, or Vietnam War when maybe....maybe an argument could have been made to do it.  One of the big reasons why we didn't do it?  Because they have a thing called nuclear bombs.  I know for a fact that in the 1950's Eisenhower was briefed on a report that was written by a young man named Henry Kissinger that basically said we would not be able to face off in a direct war against the Soviets because they had the bomb but that what was likely to happen (and history shows us it did happen) is that we would be in a power struggle with the USSR that would cause us to be pulled into "Proxy" wars hence Korea, Vietnam and heck, we even supported the Afghans when they were fighting the Russians.  I concluded by saying the US is tired of wars.  If we weren't we would be in Syria right now but since that hasn't happened yet, and hopefully it will stay that way, why would we then go start a war with Russia?

They then told me that the US wants Kosovo for other reasons....Organ trafficking.  They were specific, they didn't say the rank and file citizens but that the US government wants to steal peoples organs from Kosovo and transplant them into wealthy US citizens and politicians who need them.  I told them first off, if you are a politician or other wealthy American you will have good health insurance and receive preferential treatment and be able to get an organ in the US.  Then, for people who are poor it is subsidized by the government.  Now yes, there is a long waiting list and not everyone who needs an organ gets one and there have been cases where people have offered to sell an organ (and have gotten in trouble for it) but to then make the leap that the US supports a countries independence so the government can establish some kind of organ trafficking ring is crazy.  If we wanted to do that we would do it with Mexico and South America and not some country 5000 miles away.  Then I told them to look at the logistics.  To take someones organ and transplant it to someone else you need surgeons and a hospital.  This is not an easy thing to do where you can do it in a basement or hotel room as the urban legends contend.  Once an organ is removed from the body it has to be transplanted in a relatively short amount of time.  You cannot keep it in a freezer for days or weeks to allow you to find someone, "a buyer" to transplant it into.  Then if you do find someone willing to buy the organ they have to be a match which isn't as easy as many people think.  I could go on about the logistical issues but I think you get the point.  One surprising thing of note with this conspiracy is there was an ounce of truth to it...just an ounce.  A year or two ago five surgeons at a charity hospital in Kosovo were found guilty of trying to traffic organs.  What they tried to do was find wealthy people from throughout Europe and North American and then offer them an organ like a kidney for something like $100,000.  They would then try to recruit poor people from the region to come to their hospital and say they were a family member so they could donate their organ.  For this they would be paid $26,000 and the surgeons would split the $74,000 profit.  Each of the five surgeons plead guilty and received 5-9 years, and at no time did they say the US was behind it.  In fact from what I read there was only one confirmed case.  Authorities found a man at an airport who looked pretty sick.  He told them what happened and was mad because he never got paid his $26,000.  When the authorities went to the hospital they found the person who was to receive it, and they were from Israel.  So I said, in this case it was basically an inside job.  It was the surgeons who were running the scam and they were using the hospital they worked in.  It would have been easy to blame it on the US as many things that happen around the world are, even when there is no US involvement but at no time did they say the US was behind it.  However, to them the lack of evidence is evidence because the US must have paid them off to keep them quiet.

Another conspiracy that I heard, and have no idea where it comes from, is I was told that there is no such thing as mental illness.  I don't think they are scientologist but I also don't know what they meant by this because they didn't elaborate as to what mental illness they were talking about but I said, no, there is some pretty good scientific research to suggest the opposite.  If you just look at schizophrenia, I read about a year or two ago that they don't have a definitive cause but they have found that people who suffer from it have literally dead spots in their brain.  That they believe the initial symptoms are actually caused by parts of your brain dying off and this usually progress for about 5 years and then plateaus off.  

One other theory that I heard is that cigarettes have no impact on your health.  As I said before, people here smoke a lot and everywhere.  I asked someone why is it so popular and they didn't really have an answer but when I said do people know it is bad for their health I was told I was wrong.  Now I’ll dismiss everything every health expert and surgeon general has said and just point out the studies that big tobacco did in the late ‘50’s and early ‘60’s that showed smoking causes serious health problems.  Of course they didn’t publish their findings but these reports were uncovered I believe in the ‘90’s and lead to subsequent lawsuits where they lost and were ordered to pay millions of dollars in retribution, even though I do not know if they ever paid because you know how they can tie things up for years with appeals.  

Now I know there are people in the US that have all sorts of conspiracy theories, however, when they spout them off they are usually looked at as crazy and a part of a minority of people who believe such a thing.  Here, while I only speak to a few people, these tend to be large held beliefs.  I know my government has done some pretty shady and unethical things basically from the time of its inception and there are a lot of foreign policies that I disagree with and things the US does do overseas (for quite a long time) that don't get reported in the US media, but these things can be found out with a little research.  However, some of the things that I have heard recently just makes me wonder WTF.        

Just a Few Pictures

The last couple of weeks it has been in the 70's here or if you use Celsius like they do here then it has been in the 20's.  So the other day I actually got to go for a walk.  I haven't done much walking around or taking pictures lately because I have been busy with work and continuing my graduate work.

Just a Few Pictures of My School and Classroom

Here are just a few pictures of the outside of the school and my classroom that is basically a livingroom

Teaching and School

I have now been teaching for a few weeks at a private school where they only teach languages.  It actually isn’t what we would think of as a school, it is actually an apartment.  There are only 4 rooms.  3 have a table with chairs and a blackboard.  The room I am in most of the time is more like a living room.  There are 2 couches a soft chair and then two regular chairs with only a coffee table if you need something to lean on.  The primary language taught is English but they also have classes for German, Turkish and Bosnian.  I obviously only teach English.

There are a number of different levels of English:

Beginner 1, 2, 3

Elementary 1, 2, 3

Pre Intermediate 1, 2, 3

Intermediate 1, 2, 3

Upper Intermediate 1, 2, 3

Advanced 1, 2, 3

Each class is only 8 weeks long and meets just twice a week.  At the end of the 8 weeks the students take a test and if they pass they are allowed to advance to the next level class.  Currently I teach Pre-Intermediate 2 and 3, Intermediate 3 and Upper Intermediate 1.  I also tutor a few other students throughout the week.  My students range in age from 12 to mid 40’s all in the same class.  My younger students are still students but the adults are a diverse group.  I have law, psychology and engineering students, I have doctors, business owners, accountants etc.  My classes run from early evening to about 8:30 or 9:30pm.  

Besides the age of my students there are a few big differences between teaching and school here versus the US.  First, for the younger students, there actually aren’t enough schools for all of them.  This causes them to have some odd schedules.  The schools run on split shifts.  One group of students go to school until 12 or 1 or 2 in the afternoon and then the second shift comes in and they go to school until 7, 8 or 9 at night.  To be fair they then rotate every other week as to what group comes in the morning and which group comes in late afternoon.  

Here in Bosnia it is still legal to smoke almost everywhere.  If you go in an office, doctors office, place to eat you will see or at least smell cigarettes.  My school isn’t really an exception.  The rule is you’re not supposed to smoke inside after 4pm but since the owner is rarely there they usually do.  They’ll sit in the one little office or kitchen and smoke.  So I don’t like leaving and stinking like cigarettes but it beats working in Philly and having kids curse at me everyday and threaten to kill me.

Bosnian Pyramid?

Before I left to come to Bosnia I was watching a TV show that was talking about mysteries of the ancient world.  They were talking about these large stone spheres that had been found in Costa Rica.  According to their legend they were cannon balls used by the gods.  Anyway, they then mentioned that the only other place these have been found is in Banja LuKa, Bosnia.

picture of one of the spheres found in Costa Rica

you can do a google search if you want to see more

I did some more research and found that stone spheres have been found in a number of places around the country.  Anyway, while looking up more information on this I found that some believe that there are also pyramids in Bosnia.  When I got here I asked the people if they have ever heard of these.  They said they never heard of the stone spheres but have heard of the Pyramids but that they were fake.  They said National Geographic came here a few years back and said they were just natural mountains that happened to look like pyramids.  At first I didn't want to believe them.  I figured if there are stone spheres that date back thousands of years and evidence shows that they were man made and actually made from molten rock in some type of mold and not hand chiseled then who says that there couldn't also be pyramids.  I didn't say anything else about it but I got teased a little bit for bringing it up and then one day they asked me if I wanted to go see the pyramid.  So I said sure.     

Now, I thought at the very least the pyramid would be a stand alone structure, but it wasn't.  From a distance it definitely looks like it has three sides but the fourth side just goes into another mountain.  Then I was at the base of this "pyramid" and even though I have never been to the Pyramids in Egypt or South America I could tell this would have been much bigger making it all the more unbelievable (I later did look up the dimensions of this "pyramid" and it is much bigger than those of Egypt and South America.)  

I did more research once I got home about the pyramid being a hoax and the evidence disproving it is much more scientific and, well, true.  Basically the guy who started everything, really does believe it is a pyramid.  However, he only excavates in certain areas that reveal natural geological formations that he tries to say resemble the large building blocks or paver stones that would have been used to build it.  There was a documentary called The Biggest Hoax in History (or something like that) and this guy comes across a little crazy which doesn't help his case.  Scientist say that because of the way he is excavating the mountain, that he is going to be the one who shapes the mountain into a pyramid and not men 10,000 years ago.  I wanted to believe that this could have been real but instead I can say I saw a neat looking mountain that looked like a pyramid, however, I still would like to see the stone spheres.      

'84 Olympics

First, I should note that these pictures have been taken at different times from multiple locations in and around Sarajevo ie: these things are not all in the same place.

I have heard two different stories about the ‘84 Olympics.  First, Sarajevo I am told gets a lot of snow.  From where I am staying to the mountains is about a 40 minute drive and they say that usually by the beginning of November there is snow and skiing.  One person I was talking to was saying that back in ‘84 in the weeks leading up to the Olympics there hadn't been any snow.  He said that the whole city was excited to be hosting the Olympics but they feared that it might not snow and that that may interfere with the games. He said it wasn't until the end of January, just about 2 weeks before opening ceremonies, that it finally snowed.

The other story that I heard is a little funnier.  A woman I know was working at the Olympics as a French guide and interpreter.  She was at one of the pavilions and Prince Albert II of Monaco showed up.  He said he wanted all of the people in the pavilion to leave so he could be there by himself.  They told him they couldn't make all of the people leave.  Then somewhere he got some paper (or it could have been a napkin) and drew a picture of Yugoslavia in the shape of a falice and said that was his opinion of the country.  So the people working there then got everyone to leave.

It is custom here that when you enter someone's home you take off your shoes and they will often give you a pair of slippers to wear.  So when Prince Albert enter the pavilion they told him he had to take off his shoes.  He did this and then went about whatever it is you do at the Olympic village.  However, while he was doing his thing they took his shoes and hid them.  Then when he went to leave he asked where are his shoes and everyone pretended like they didn't know.  They said he got really mad at this but they kept laughing.  Then finally they told him if he wanted his shoes back he would have to get down on his knees and beg for them.  At first he refused but then eventually he relented and after a little begging they gave him back his shoes.

These pictures of the tower are basically right up the street from where I live and in the city of Sarajevo.  The rest of the pictures have been taken up in the mountains and are about a 40 minute drive out of the city.

A billboard that (if you could see it) has the different events color coded.  One color showed where the downhill skiing would be, another color shows where the bobsleds would be etc.

I am told that this is literally all that is left of the bobsled track

The sight of the ski jump.  At the base of the hill there are a number of people camping in tents.

The two ski jumps.  At first I thought those brown things were the end of the ramp (these pictures were taken with my zoom and I couldn't see all of the detail from where I was at) however, when I got closer I could see these were put in afterwards to stop people from trying to use them as jumps.

The winners circle/platform.  You can't see it in this picture but the orange piece in the center still has the remnants of the Olympic torch that was burning there back in '84

This picture I took at the end of the ski jump ramp looking down.  

The sketchy steps I walked up to get to the bottom of the jump ramp