Monday, January 25, 2010

Day 24 - A day of relaxation!

Today, I got up at 9:15. It was really nice. We got the morning off because quite a few people were going to stay up til 5am watching the Vikings game. They lost. In the playoffs. The sun set yesterday. Hell remains firey. Anyway, so we had class for about 20 minutes this afternoon, and had the rest of the day to work on our presentations.

Tomorrow, each group gives 2 presentations. One in the morning on the relations between Bosniaks and Bosnian Serbs, and one in the afternoon about the relations between Bosniaks and Bosnian Croats. To simplify things, our group split in two to do one presentation with 3 people each.

And Wednesday and Thursday, we give individual presentations about a topic of our choice. I am doing a presenation on the amount Saudi Arabia has invested into mosques in Sarajevo. There are a lot of mosques in Sarajevo, the newer ones very large and very empty. BiH is a mostly secular state, and even though practicing religion was a fad after the fall of Yugoslavia and during and just after the war, most people are not very religious and only really celebrate major holidays. So, there are large, fancy mosques with speakers in the minarets to loudly call people to prayer. In a secular state with recent, violent ethnoreligious tension, giant fancy loud mosques are not exactly welcome by the other ethnic groups, or even some Muslims.

In any case, we had a relaxed day with minimal effort. We also got our last per diem today, so I have money. Oh! And I went shopping to buy a large purse. I have bought too much stuff to bring home easily, so I'm checking my suitcase, putting liquids and whatever dirty clothes fit in there, then putting breakables and stuff to do on the plane in the new purse, and everything else in my backpack to put in the overhead compartments. Hopefully everything gets home in one piece, eh? It's strange to think that we're leaving soon, but most people are glad to be almost done. I miss some parts of home, but I find it really exciting to be in places I've never been before. I have a lot of reasons to come back to all the places I've visited, though. Particularly the large cities where we only had an evening and early morning there.

1 comment:

  1. "They lost. In the playoffs. The sun set yesterday. Hell remains firey." You are SO FUNNY!

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