A Nice Day for a Walk

It literally rained everyday for the past three and a half weeks.  Yesterday was nice and sunny but I got busy doing some other stuff, so when I saw that it was sunny again today I thought it would be a good idea to go for a walk.

I was walking down a nice scenic street next to a small river and I saw this in an open lot.  It reminded me of Andy Warhol but I have no idea who made it or why it was where it was

This is the next street over from where I live.  I think the houses are neat because they're not at street level.  The grass is street level and if you live down stairs there are steps going down, but if you live in the upstairs unit you have steps that are sort of like a bridge.

This is a statue of Josip Tito outside of the University of Sarajevo which is housed in what used to be a military base/barracks.

According to wikipedia:

Tito was a Yugoslav revolutionary and statesman, serving in various roles from 1943 until his death in 1980. During World War II he was the leader of the Partisans, often regarded as the most effective resistance movement in occupied Europe. While his presidency has been criticized as authoritarian, Tito was "seen by most as a benevolent dictator" due to his successful economic and diplomatic policies and was a popular public figure both in Yugoslavia and abroad.  Viewed as a unifying symbol,his internal policies successfully maintained the peaceful coexistence of the nations of the Yugoslav federation. He gained international attention as the chief leader of the Non-Aligned Movement, working with Jawaharlal Nehru of India, Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt and Sukarno of Indonesia.

The people that I know often talk about how great Tito was.

A guy on the street selling popcorn

This is a really big apartment building that I tried to take a picture of while crossing the street

This is a bank that I thought looked neat.  There are a few buildings here in the city that used to look like drab office or apartment buildings (similar to the one to the right) that have then been remodeled.  The whole building basically just had a metal frame built around it and attached to it and then these panels are "snapped" in to give it a modern look.  These aren't even painted.  Basically the panels have been shrink rapped in plastic or vinyl because as I walked up the street I could see where some of the red up at the top is pealing off because we had some bad storms last week.  There is another one in another part of the city where the whole outside was done with windows and on the side is a large TV screen like you would see in time square.  

Just a country road

Spelunking

We have been having really nice spring weather so today I decided to go with some people and do a little spelunking.  We went to the Bijambare caves which are about 30-40 minutes outside of Sarajevo.  It was a real nice area, very scenic.  The first cave was up high in the mountain and even though there were some steps it was a heck of a hike to get up to it.  The second cave was on what I call the first summit and we were able to take a tour and go deep inside of it.  According to the different placards bones have been found in there that belong to a species of bear that went extinct about 10,000 years ago.  They also have found man made stone age tools that date back to the cave man days.

I wanted to get a picture of the giant cave opening in the center but there was another bench off to the left with a bunch of people sitting and standing around it so I had to take a picture off center in order to cut them out of my picture

Konjic Pictures

I keep reading on the news how New Jersey and Philadelphia keep getting hit with snow yet here it has been in the 50's for the last two weeks and really all winter has been pretty mild.  Today I was asked if I wanted to go for a walk and I thought they said they were going to Old Town which is about 5 minutes by car.  Instead we drove about an hour or so and went to the town of Konjic.  Here are just a few of the pictures I took while I was there.

Anti-Government Unrest in Bosnia

Going back to November I would see small protest outside of the one Government building that I would walk past on my way to work.  The first day I saw it I asked a cop what was going on.  He told me it was a protest.  Since then I have learned that there are a lot of people who are unhappy with the government.  Then yesterday, while I was at school, I was told that there had been larger anti-government protest in the northern part of Bosnia and that now there was a big protest down town (which is technically down the street) as kind of a sign of solidarity with the protesters in the north.  They showed me the story on the internet and people were pushing dumpsters into the streets and lighting them on fire.  I commented that it is getting like Los Angeles after the Lakers win a championship.    

Here is a link to some articles along with the comment that I posted:

http://news.yahoo.com/protesters-set-fire-government-building-bosnian-town-125408004--finance.html

http://news.yahoo.com/photos/anti-government-unrest-in-bosnia-slideshow/


I am currently working in Sarajevo. while there is high unemployment the bigger problem is gov't corruption. One example is the politicians keep getting paid but public workers aren't. I teach at a private school but some of the teachers in the public schools haven't been paid since October. The gov't just borrowed (or is in the process of borrowing) money from the international monetary fund to pay some of their bills. What adds fuel to the fire is the average teacher gets paid 1200Km a month (equal to $800 US) Here in Sarajevo the one politician said there is no money to pay the teachers and yet his salary is 40,000Km per month. 

Taxes is also a problem. Really the only tax that is paid is a 17% sales tax on everything. There is only property tax if you own more than one property and I have been told no such thing as income tax, state or local tax or payroll tax exist. So the gov't gets the sales tax, pays themselves and then pays whatever bills they can with what is left over. A friend of mine who is from here said the problem is the country is still in transition from a communist country to a capitalist country. The joke being communism fell over 20 years ago.