Mohsen Nosratinia

Saturday, August 29, 2009

Well, now we are in fight JA405 from Gothenburg to Sarajevo. It´s a Boeing 737-400 tail numbered TC-JDH. Surprisingly, captain inroduced the flight as a Turkish Airlines flight not a BH Airlines flight. That actually answered my curiousity about a small turkih flag painted on the plane. The crew were also half turkish, half Bosnian.

It was the first time that I paid for my reserved ticket in airport. Probably they never think that a flight can be fully booked. I understood this when we encountered a not so crowded check-in desk. And when we checked in 50 minutes before the flight, the clerk mentioned on the phone that the last passengers checked in. I was getting the feeling that we are going to be in very small plane with a lot of jolts and jerks. After buying 200 euros from forex office (just in case, because we are told all major credit cards can be used in Bosnia) we headed to the gate to see that it is behind the passport control gates. Bingo, BH is not a member of schengen neither it is a member of European Union, something the consulate of BH in Stockholm mentioned regretfully when we met him for visa.
Only 33 passengers sparesly occupying 150 available seats. Well if all of them had paid just 110 dollars for this flight as I paid, they only receive around $3600 which barely covers the airport fees and fuel costs for a three-hour flight.
When I asked the crew member if the meat in our lunch is pork or not I received the answer with a Turkish accent that “It is turkey, this is Turkish airlines”. I don’t know if he was aware of the pun!
The plane landed in a very short runway with a very hard braking. It is a very small airport. You get directly from the international arrivals gate to customs and exit. That’s all. Plane landed at 1400 and we were in a taxi at 1410 including the time for collecting the luggage and passport control. That was a record.
The first thing that I noticed when we got to the airport building was the smell of cigarettes. Well, when you come from Sweden, so many places smell like that.
The taxi costs 15 euros for any place in the city. We fasten our seat belts while apparantly driver didn’t care much about his. We paid in euros but received the change in Marks (Convertible Marks is the currency here, which is roughly equal to 0.5 euros). On our way to hotel the sight of bullet-holes on the walls, tall minarets of mosques, deep contrast between old and new building kept us wondering how different this part of Europe actually is.
Our destination is Hotel Europe. A five star hotel just next to the old town in central Sarajevo. The main venue for MIE2009 conference that my love is attending is Holiday Inn. Though it also sports five stars, most reviews rated Hotel Europe higher. Well the website was more appealing and honestly the 30% discount they are currently offering is really tempting. A standard double room that normally costs 123 euros is now 86 euris where the Holiday Inn offers the same room for 111 euros. After all, this hotel is so close to central parts of the city. The hotel is generally clean and seems to be recently renovated. The room they offered was room 709. Well I knew that from the invoice they sent to me and obviously I was happy that we will be staying in seventh floor. But the fact is the seventh floor is sort of an attic and the room only had a long and narrow window on the sloping roof. Well, what you could see was the clouds and stars.
After paying a 10 marks tip to the bell boy, we immediately went down to reception asking for a better room. They showed us two rooms, with very odd views, one with windows close to the roof and another one with a window that was obscured by a wall. Well we chose the former (room 002), that sound much larger. Anyhow, it appears if you really want everything in place you have to ask for a Deluxe room. Well, it doesn’t really makes sense to me. Why should you waste your resources building some rooms that turns down the guests? A nice view would be a plus, but we are not going to spend so much time indoors.
There is both wifi and ethernet jack (both thankfully free!). There is no cables around so you should have yours if you don’t want to encounter the occasional signal loss. The connection is strange since the upload speed is 70% higher than download speed that hardly exceeds 2Mbps, but I just tested with a server in Mostar. The access points are Cisco that is promising. The speed occasionally goes down to 220kbps perhaps because of setting up two networks on the same channel 11!
There is a PC connected to the TV that you have to switch the TV input to PC to have access to it. There is a IPTV programme running on it that delivers you a wide selection of mostly european channels using VLC. Actually the concole is a 1GHz Pentium III with 256MB of RAM that couldn’t handle a fullscreen HD youtube video but IPTV application runs smoothly. There is bluetooth keyboard available and you can easily take control of the Windows XP installed on the PC and take off.

We started to explore the neigbouthood of the hotel starting from the small cafes and kebaberias (is that a real word? they just sell different kinds of kebab – cevapi – anyway) that they call “cevabdžinica”. We choose to have lunch in one of these kebaberias. The food was similar to what we call koobideh kebab in Iran but in small sausage-like pieces wrapped in one big loaf of bread.

The old town carries a nostalgic feeling. Narrow passages with cafes and stores selling crafts and antiques. A great part of town is occupied by copper crafts sellers. Really nice stuff with reasonably good price. You can also find some good leather products. ATMs are available everywhere accepting all kinds of creditcards with interface available in six european languages that only gives you weary bills.

People are generally talkative and loud (comparing to Swedish people) and the shopwoners find it hard to welcome you by a smile.

There are so many words resembling Arabic and Turkish and even Persian. We found DVDs of the Iranian series about Jesus Christ on sale in front of a mosque. Well you can see the name of actors all written in Persian.

Despite the visible traces of bullets and shell all over the city, there is a sense of freshness in the city, especially in old town. It is great to see that no matter how old or damaged a building is, it is quite likely that the balcony or the window is decorated by lots of flowers. This assures you that down inside there is a recovery going on.

We were feeling so stuffed by our really fatty lunch that we just had some milk and pastry for dinner. Actually we have to try other places to see if it is part of their cuisine to make stuff we so much fat. Actually our cevap was served by some sour cream on top.

PS: This post despite being ready by the end of Day 1, is posted late because of my struggling with a nice way of putting images in my drupal site. Well, apparently I have to forget about it being perfect and just put some stuff here.