Life Here

These goofy girls are the fine people in Intercordia with me, (left to right) Lindsey, Amanda and Vanessa. We are taking in some of the life here at a cafe in Gornji Vakuf-Uskoplje.

Life here is fairly different than Canada. Let's forget for a sec that there was no war here and the town wasn't destroyed, we have that luxury, we don't live here.

I might have said this before, the biggest industries here are cafes and construction. Cafes are busy all day, it is impossible to tell when people get off work, because there's no surge at 9:00am, or 5:00pm. I don't know what people do for jobs here, I don't think half the town works, and they just lounge around in cafes which look as if they outnumber the people.

As for construction, there are plenty of people putting up walls and houses, pouring concrete and hauling bricks. Houses are constructed differently here, they are made of a brick frame, with occasional wooden joists and spacers. They all have a certain slavic style, for some reason they haven't adopted a Canadian suburban housing style, from my count we have 5 different suburban housing layouts in Canada. Everything is deep gray brick with clay tile roofs. The bricks will later be plastered I assume, in order to match the architecture of the town, also of all towns I could see from Prague to here, as I saw from the plane.

Sadly, now we have to remember that there was a war, it's not hard, if you haven't been here...

People sit in cafes because they always have, also because they like talking to people. Young people don't have jobs, so they just sit in cafes all day, also old people don't have jobs, so they sit in cafes all day as well. Remember, there was a war here, wars only benifit the economies of the winner(s). As for the construction, this town was destroyed. I sat with a local guy yesterday and he was going through pictures of the town before the war. He didn't recognize a lot of buildings, likely cause they are all gone. A lot of the built houses are sitting and waiting for someone to add windows, doors, floors and plaster, they are simply brick skeletons, like I said before. Why brick? I think that Bosnians would see our wooden-framed, vinyl-sided houses and worry about their safety. Plaster and brick stop bullets, wood and insulation do not. Remember, there was a war here.
I said cafes outnumbered people, the same could be true for houses, it seems that every house has an empty apartment, an empty floor, or is just empty. There doesn't seem to be enough people for all the houses here, let alone the new ones. The Bosniak side of town (Gornji Vakuf) has all the apartments, and if all those rooms were full, there would be endless crowding on the streets. So there are two options, either half the town never leaves their homes, or that half the town doesn't exist and their rooms lie empty. I don't know what the answer is, maybe I'm poor at guessing population sizes. Maybe that population is gone, either they left town when the war started, or they were buried here.

Remember, there was a war here, you might have to try hard, but I know that here, everything is a reminder.