DATELINE: Sarajevo, Bosnia    

Author: Natalie      

I hope you have a safe trip home, Andy. And then there were two. Sam and I switched lodgings yesterday to the vastly-more-luxurious Hotel Europe for our last two days in Sarajevo. God works in mysterious ways: Sam had been longing for a community with whom to observe shabbos, having kept the last two all by himself in, respectively, Tirana and Pristina. During our Friday afternoon tour of the city, Sam met an Israeli man in the Jewish cemetery. I especially like this story because our tour didn't even incorporate the history of the Jewish cemetery; we were just up there for the view of the city. Anyway, this Israeli dude was part of a 30-person delegation sent to Bosnia and Serbia from Israel to study the dwindling Jewish community in the Balkans. He invited us to evening services at the synagogue, and we stayed for dinner as well. They were a really friendly, intelligent, and laid-back group. It was nice to see how happy Sam was to be, at last, among like-minded religious people. He, in turn, was both amused and kind of shocked to see how very shy I get when thrown in with a group of new people. But I relaxed eventually and managed to make some friends, both on Friday evening and the next day when they invited us back to their hotel for lunch. I particularly enjoyed talking to Dorit, an Israeli woman of Lithuanian descent, who has a brother living in Wisconsin. She works as an architect and her role on the trip was to examine and attempt to reconstruct some of the really old buildings. She was a very interesting person and also really sweet. I felt like I made a friend. I also realized that I hadn't had a substantive conversation with a female since August 5th. I've just been hanging out with a bunch of dudes. :-)