Mixed up muddled up shook up world

Lola is a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend. He (yeah, he) is also my tour guide. He came highly recommended. He's a historian. He was also a translator for the UN and NATO during the war here. He started out as some kind of gunner, but the gun broke (something broke, anyway) and while it was being fixed the UN guys somehow borrowed him from the army for the rest of the war. He showed up to work the next day with his Kalashnikov and got yelled at by the UN guys. "What the fuck, man? You're not a soldier anymore!" And so he translated for pretty much the entire war.

He has a house on the outskirts of the city, where he lived with his Dutch wife throughout the war. ("I told her 'Go back to Holland.' She said 'I am your wife, I'm staying.' I told her 'If you ever win the lottery you better be saying the same thing.') When the war started he decided that, times being uncertain, he better drink all his alcohol. ("At the beginning, every day I'm drunk at work. After that, I had to drink moonshine.") I'm not trying to make light of anything, but I do appreciate that he's kept a sense of humor.

Anyway, he showed me bombed-out buildings, of course. He took me out near the airport where fighting was really heavy (lots of snipers), and he kept pointing. "This was Serb territory; this was Muslim territory; over there, Serb territory." It all looked the same to me: indistinguishable and full of holes. (For a lot of the war, the only way out of the city that wasn't through Serb forces was through an 800-meter tunnel dug under the airport runway. That tunnel is a museum now, but with odd hours. While Lola was figuring out it was closed, I made friends with the cutest, tiniest, sweetest little cat ever. I couldn't even get a good photo, because he kept climbing on me.) I asked if the state gave any help to the people whose homes had been destroyed and he laughed a little bitterly. "State. State is only for politicians, not for people."

The war was complicated. After telling me about it for a while he said "It is too confusing--we go back to history," and took me to the ruins of some thousands-of-years old Roman baths (there are hot springs nearby). They were pretty neglected, and full of beer bottles. "If this was in France it would be national monument," he said. "But look at how we treat history. Like shit." He also showed me Kirk Douglas's Olympic residence and the former NATO headquarters, in a beautiful old building that's still abandoned over a decade later (as is Kirk's old house). Nearby, the empty hotels Austria and Hungary stare each other down like some kind of bad sad joke. Lola says they will all eventually be renovated and used again, but that bureaucracy plus the mafia makes things slow. "Slow as cancer," he kept saying.

From there we started going up (Sarajevo is in a valley). We stopped for coffee in a little village at a little restaurant where there was another little cat. I'm pretty sure Lola was rolling his eyes at me. From there we want waaay up, so far up that there was still snow and my teeth chattered, to Hotel Rajska Dolina which is where Ratko Mladić (former Bosnian Serb commander, current international fugitive) stayed during the war and where Lola translated when Ratko met with NATO people. Lola talked his way into Ratko's old room, 104, and I sat on his former bed. From there we went to Pale which is where Radovan Karadžić, the other big bad Bosnian Serb, was headquartered during the war. ("Now he lives in Hague.") Lola showed me where Radovan stayed, and where he and Wesley Clark traded hats, and "the bridge to which he chained the people so that NATO would not bomb it." Joder.

Oh, and he also showed me the US Embassy, known here as Guantanamo. It really does look like a big scary prison.