One of Austin's sisters has a coworker in Sarajevo so we got connected with him, his name is Adnan. We ended up spending a couple of days walking around and exploring the city with him and we learned SO much about the country and city itself, wow. There is so much dense and heart-breaking history there.

The city itself was fascinating because it is split into the "east" and the "west". The west area feels very European whereas the east still has the Turkish architecture / style from when the Ottomans were ruling there.

In 1992, Serbia tried to take over the city of Sarajevo and surrounded the city (the city is pretty much in a valley). During the 4 years that Serbia was trying to take over, the Bosnians living in Sarajevo came together to build their own informal army mainly consisting of gangsters, students, and football fans. These were the people that brought out their own guns and were fighting the Serbians to protect Sarajevo.

The Serbians had snipers on the hills so the Bosnians had put up huge canvases between buildings to block the sights of the snipers but there is one part of the city that had no buildings so they called it "Sniper alley". In this area, people would have to sprint across the open area to go to work, go grocery shopping, go get food, etc. How insane is that, phew..and that was happening in the 90s, like in my lifetime!

Another interesting fact is that the people of Sarajevo dug huge tunnels to import all of the food and supplies in from. So everything during the four year war was brought into the city via tunnels! Wow!!

Showing Adnan Domino:

Split in the city:

Eternal flame monument honoring victims of WWII:

Cool ceiling of their library:

We had some Bosnian coffee (similar to Turkish coffee):