It’s finally over, and it’s already over: the big class trip to the Balkans. As I write this post, I’m sitting on the bus driving from Bosnia to Croatia, and wow, what I have seen since I’ve been here!
The trip started November 16, when the bus left at 7:00 in the morning! The only thing we did that day was drive to Vienna, a long but not impossible journey. The next morning we had a meeting at the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). They talked about their missions to help areas recover from conflict. We were able to attend a session of the Permanent Council, made up of ambassadors from all of their 47 member countries, including America! We met an ambassador outside the meeting who exchanged contact information with Jerry (our professor) and invited us to see his office in Sarajevo. After that, we toured the United Nations offices in Vienna. We met with the Preparatory Commission for the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO) and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) while we were there as well. The presentations focused on the safe use of nuclear energy and the ways the CTBTO tracks nuclear testing around the world. The representative from the IAEA (who was American) explained how the IAEA monitors atomic energy and how countries could potentially use atomic waste for more malicious purposes.
The next day, we went to the European Union’s Fundamental Rights Agency. They were really interesting, and a note for mom and dad: I ordered a lot of (free!) information from them, and gave them our home address. I don’t remember how many documents I ordered, but if anything comes for me from the EUFRA, it’s not spam!! Thanks! They have a wide range of projects, ranging from remembering the Holocaust to gay rights to human trafficking prevention. Its research based approach is useful to empower the other European institutions to act on preventing the worst human rights atrocities in the member states. That afternoon, we drove to Budapest.
WE INTERRUPT THIS BLOG POST FOR AN IMPORTANT WARNING TO EVERYONE WHO WILL TRAVEL TO A PLACE WITH A CURRENCY LIKE HUNGARY’S:
I pulled out money from an ATM instead of changing Euros. Jerry had told us about the exchange rate, but when I’m trying to focus at the ATM and do the math, I accidentally did something wrong. So, instead of pulling out $50, or 10.000 Hungarian Forint, I pulled out roughly $500 - 100.000 Forint. I still have a vast majority of it. Thank goodness Forint can be converted back to Euro ,but it’s been difficult for the rest of this trip as it doesn’t seem it can be converted to anything else. So, there are two lessons here. The first is not to do that, to think and plan before you even set foot near an ATM, and the second is what to do if this happens to you. Don’t panic, but instead, offer to pay for your friends with the expectation that they will pay you back in another currency. I paid for dinner for five people and was paid back mostly in Euro, and one of the girls paid me back in Serbian Dinar so I didn’t have to find a place to exchange in Belgrade. It worked out, and while I have a lot of Forint left, I can convert it tomorrow when we are in Germany.
Now back to our regularly scheduled trip summary.
Budapest was beautiful. We got a tour of the city where we could see the Austro-Hungarian empire and the Ottoman influence. Budapest has one of the oldest Turkish baths still functioning as such in the world. Food was great, especially the goulash. Hungarian goulash is better than any I have ever had, even my Aunt Terry’s - and that’s saying something pretty significant right there. Aunt Terry, we are going to have to try and find a recipe for Hungarian goulash online and make it sometime. It’s that good. The market was cool, too. It was a big warehouse type building with any and everything for sale. I bought my brother a hand-carved chess set and board for Christmas. I was reluctant to leave Budapest, as it was so beautiful. The Christmas market was already out, and it filled the air with a little bit of cheer while we moved through.
Now, as we went through one moving from Hungary to Serbia, I’ll take a minute and talk about border crossings. (This is also relevant as I am writing this sitting at a border crossing into Croatia.) I am in a class of 27. Add a professor and a bus driver and you get 29. For those of you who might not know, the reason we haven’t had to deal with this until getting into the Balkans is because of the Shengin zone and the European Union. This guarantees borderless travel - no checks, no passport stamps, just a sign. Basically like the United States. So our first border crossing was into Serbia. The guard gets on the bus, collects our passports, and leaves. He or she stamps them and returns them in a stack to Jerry who distributes them once we get going again. But we don’t have long to go! We then go to the other border, over no man’s land, and do It all again. We are lucky, we are all American - but other minorities have a difficult time at the borders, as the crossings could take hours.
We stayed in a Soviet-era hotel in Belgrade, where people were allowed to smoke in the hotel. Everything was cheap, and I was able to get everything I needed on the few Dinar my friend paid me back, with coins left over for the collection! The next morning, we went to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. We met with an official of the ministry regarding the state of Serbian affairs after the wars. Oh, forgot to mention - we had a lecture on the Balkan Wars ON THE BUS to the Balkans! Jerry taught us about the wars on the roads they happened on. It was the most engaging lesson I had ever had. We got to see more damage firsthand in Belgrade in between our appointments. We met in the afternoon with the Assistant Minister for European Integration about the steps Serbia needs to take in order to integrate and become an EU member state. We then got a fun tour of Belgrade from a local.
The next day we departed for Srebrenica, Bosnia and Herzegovina. We got another lecture on the war in Bosnia and the sad things that happened there. We went to the memorial in Srebrenica where we saw the scale of just how big the massacre was. It was disturbing to see, yet necessary. Driving through the countryside, you can see houses that are completely burned out next to perfectly normal ones - houses of Bosniacs vs houses of Serbs. We stayed the night in Srebrenica in a really cool little hotel where we took up all of the rooms. We hung out as a group and listened to Zack play guitar while we played cards, etc. The hotel staff loved us. The next morning we left for Sarajevo.
We had really interesting meetings in Sarajevo. We got a tour of the city by a Bosnian soldier named Muki who showed us where the Serbs and Bosniacs fought for Sarajevo. We walked through part of a tunnel used to transport goods into the city when it was surrounded. After that, we had a meeting at the American embassy with the Deputy Chief of Mission - basically the second in command at the embassy. He is an American University graduate who, in his own words, “took the foreign service exam, graduated from AU, walked down the street and joined the State Department.” More or less what I hope to do one day, except perhaps replace State Department with FBI. He talked to us about the United States’ role in Bosnian affairs and preparing Bosnia to function with the rest of Europe. He was really interesting and told us we might see him at our Thanksgiving dinner the next day. That night, we had a small tour of Sarajevo, including following the story of the assassination of Franz Ferdinand.
The next day, we had three meetings. We met with the EU delegation to Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Office of the High Representative, and, thanks to our dialogues in Vienna, the OSCE. All had a similar message: the EU would be the best solution for Bosnia, but Bosnia is stuck with the current system and is failing to make much progress toward that solution. That night, we had Thanksgiving dinner at a local pub. They served turkey with local vegetables. And who should show up to eat with us but the Deputy Chief of Mission from the embassy! We had thanksgiving dinner with a high ranking diplomat! The group really came together then. We all went home happy and I relaxed and packed for the trip I’m on now. On the way to Zagreb now, where we will spend tonight and leave early tomorrow morning to go to Munich to finish off our trip together. I’m glad we got to band together before we had to go home. It’s unreal to think that three weeks from today I get on a plane and go back to the United States. I miss my family, but I don’t want to leave Europe!
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