The fish doesn't think because the fish knows... everything

I'm not sure how I feel about the fact that I've basically hired a driver. It's not how I usually operate. But Lola isn't just some chauffer I hired to make my life easier--it's more like I'm taking a short class in Balkan history and culture (or has he calls it, "our unculture") that meets in different places and the teacher happens to double as interpreter and also has a car. That's what I'm telling myself, anyway.

I could have made it to the tunnel museum on my own (the little cat was there again, and the manager/curator/whatever looks disconcertingly like Dennis Hopper--"He is Muslim, I am Serb, we are friends."), but I would not have made it to Lola's bombed-out former office at the huge park that's home to Sarajevo's World War II memorial. You know how the ruins of, say, medieval castles are nothing but stone and rocks? It's like that.

The southern part of Bosnia (when I say Bosnia I really mean Bosnia and Herzegovina, but I am a lazy writer) is Herzegovina. Sarajevo is in the mountains, but going south it gets reeeallly mountainy and, on my own, I would not have driven all through the mountains to see caves and waterfalls and cute little tiny towns and rivers that you can drink from. (Also, the tap water here is as good as in New York.) I'm a shitty driver and I would have spent the whole day lost or stalled. Also, I would not have had anyone to point out that the Croatian-looking flags flying from houses near the Croatian border are not really Croatian flags because there is no crown on the checkerboard, or to tell me that Bosnian Croats near the border want be part of Croatia but that flying a Croatian flag would piss off the government (somehow expressing the same sentiment without the crown on the checkerboard is ok), and that relations between Muslims and Croats are much worse than relations between Muslims and Serbs. And, I definitely would not have ended up with two CDs of pirated Balkan music, including Lola's favorite song, which is about a dramatic relationship between a man and a fish.

I think I've done ok for myself.