Bosnia and Herzegovina

Young women and mothers with the distinctive headscarves share the pedestrian areas with blond girls in leather jackets and jeans. Sometimes you see girlfriends walking arm in arm, one demurely wearing the headscarf and the other letting her hair go free to drive men wild with passion. Rebecca West wrote in the 1930s of the ?tranquil sensuality? of Sarajevans. Headscarves in Sarajevo tend to be very stylish or colorful. I noticed, also, that young men took less care to conceal their appraisal of passing young women than they do in Montenegro.

Yet in spite of the city‘sexoticism, I never felt easy there. I was tired from the drive and felt uncomfortably claustrophobic in the city. Clouds and fog had backed into the gorge where the city sits by the time we arrived, so we had to walk around in mist or drizzle or dreary rain. The city makes no effort to tuck away its cemeteries with white stone spikes marking graves, all the same age, all more or less new. In the gray, misty weather these seemed to stand out all the more. —John Spurlock —Bosnia and Herzegovina (The Blue Monkey Review)

A beautiful passage from a travellog posted by my truant division chair.

Okay, so he has a Fulbright, so he’s not AWOL or anything.