It's a beautiful day in the neighbourhood

I'm sitting at a computer (Athelon 2200+!1!) at the Omledinski Centar in lovely downtown Gornji-Vakuf/Uskopija. The centar is an old building, with a massive facade, and i think we only use the third floor. This town looks like it has been doubly scouraged by the war, first it was hit hard, there are still more than a couple of destroyed buildings, then they haven't had the money to repair everything. We heard that an NGO reparied and resurfaced a number of buildings, certainly not all though. There are a lot of buildings that are freshly framed and bricked, but there is nothing inside, they are just brick skeletons.

There's a lightpost in front of the centar (which is the centre of town, the town is split between the croatian side and the muslim side) which is completely shot through with bullet holes. I'm pretty sure a lot of the bullet holes were just target practice, though from some pictures of the war's aftermath, some weren't.

We took a walk around town yesterday, some parts are sketchy, more sketchy then Cambridge (McNaughton and Spruce...). We stayed away from those areas. Everyone in the town must know each other, for better or worse, as we got a lot of strange looks. I don't know how non-slav I look, but it must be enough to warrent those looks. I'm glad we have something to do all week (work at the centar) as it's really tough to fill time when all I can do is read or watch Bosnia TV. As a side note, i hope driving ms Daisy won no awards, we watched it Saturday night(with bosnian subtitles). Also, I'm not sure how the message of tolerance over prejudice was recieved by my family, as in, I don't think they got it. We watched a movie about the partisans and Tito (who fought the German and Croatian Nazis) last night. I didn't understand anything, but my family said "Ustaša" a number of times, I don't think they are fans. I don't know enough to say who hates who, or what the social dynamics are, but I'm sure they'll become apparent.

(PS for Dan, go to google.com, type Canada and hit i'm feeling luckey (osjećam se sretnim). it took me 20 seconds to load the page, that's how fast we have it. This computer has a hacked version of CS 1.6, but I'd worry about teams too much to play. I think Bosnia needs less Counter-Strike and more Sim City. I'll have more about social and physical infrastructure latter.)