Back in The Canada

I'm Home! Even though my plane was late and baggage took forever, I found heather circling like a crow outside and all was good. She drove me to camp and we got here last night. Everyone was so surprised when they saw me, it was great. I missed camp a lot this summer, its such a great place.

This is a short post sadly, theres only one computer and I'm going home tomorrow, so I can't be greedy. A big post will happen monday I hope.

Not Dead, In Half-Sketchy Prague Hostel!

Well, Just yesterday I was in Paris, London and Prague, all in one Day! What a jet-setter I am. The Day before I was in Normandy, what a trip. Allen and I took a Band of Brothers tour, learning about the American Beach landings and Airborn landings. It was a really cool tour, we even went to Brecourt manor. If any of you have seen Band of Brothers, you might remember the second episode, where Winters leads an attack against a battery of Artillery, we toured the field where that happened. Really cool.

We took the chunnel Train to London yesterday, walked around for a bit andwhile Allen went back to his 4 star hotel, I got on the subway for Heathrow. I figured it would be really hard to get to my flight through heathrow, but things moved surprisingly quick. there was a lot of staff around to make sure things went well, intimidating, but helpful.

The flight was delayed a total of 50 minutes, but the flight was quick and smooth. I had a whole row to myself. I got to my hostel easily, as I already knew a bit of the city and had a decent sleep.

Today I will be back in Canada, a weird feeling. After such a long absence, I'm not sure what it will be like. I'm meeting heather at the airport and going to camp this weekend, hopefully helping my reintroduction to Canadian life. I have a couple of nights at home this coming week, then off to school for Don Training. It certainly hasn't been a normal summer, but what can I expect? It's strange to be going back to school, but it has to happen regardless.

I've got to go pack now. Make sure to check back for photos when I get the chance to upload them. I have about a half gig of photos, which is about enough. Bye All!

In Paris, Not Dead!

Paris is great! But I hardly care, I can't really explain why, and the fact that I have to get off this computer in a minute is a factor. All the buildings are old, Allen has a view of the Eiffle tower from his balcony, somehow I got stuck facing a streetlight...

I'm looking forward to home, and it looks like my camp adventure will work out well after all. I'm going to go explore some more of the city now, cheers!

Not Dead! In Berlin!

Allen and I have a lovely apartment in East Berlin, a little walk away from the longest remaining streatch of the Wall. We´ve walked a fair bit around this city, and have been making great use of the fantastic transportation system here. Berlin is fantastic, but really spread out, there are so many city centres, not like Toronto at all.

I was also able to see Prague, which is so beautful you stop caring. It´s too much to take in! I was only there for a couple hours, but somehow found the time to run along, in between and then across a freeway, eat a delicious pork dinner and find my way though a massive train station.

We head for Paris tomorrow, which will be great. We have an overnight train and have reserved a couple beds, so hopefully we will be well rested. The only problem with our apartment (which is entirly IKEA) is the size of the bed.

I´m going to go now, as we have a long S-Bahn ride to our apartment and it´s getting dark. Auf Wiedersehen!

Summer-end Wrap up

Well, I never actually assumed that I would survive long enough to write this email. In other ways, I always thought that this point was so far off, that to think of it would be foolish. I kept saying this week, "A week from now I'll be in Germany, or on a train or in the air", much the same as I was before I came here, "A week from now I'll be in Bosnia, or in the air, or in bed or all three!". At the same time this week, I kept telling myself that now was the time that mattered, and thinking about the future will only keep me from thinking about now.

So, I put off thinking about what was happening next week, with the result that I somewhat feel unprepared. There are a couple CDs I need to burn, of pictures and such, I need to write this, I need to make sure everything is going to go well when I get to Prague and I need to pack. I packed half of my backpack for Europe today, I fit a fair amount in. I have an ingenious idea to wash my clothes in the bath of our hotel room. All I need is some hot water, some detergent, a stirring pole and confidence. I'll be so clean! If it doesn't work, I have a bunch of clothes I can just through out, raggy shirts and underwear, that kind of stuff.
The rest of my clothes will easily fit my other suitcases. My small suitcase is packed full of clothes, my big one is sitting empty right now, I'll put the rest of my stuff in it by Sunday.

Well, what has changed in these three months? I honestly don't know. I certainly understand this little part of the world a lot better, and I have a new understanding of conflict. I really think it's impossible for me to understand how I'm different, because I really don't remember being any different than I am right now, so comparisons are difficult.

I hope that you have all learned a bit about Bosnia, as it's a complicated place. I know I have. I've really enjoyed the support that I received from everyone, it was great knowing that people were interested in what I was doing. I can't wait to see the before and afters of the people who go away for Intercordia next year. I think that will be a really cool experience for me.

As for everything else, I'm only going to be home for a little bit, there is a reintegration seminar for all the Intercordia students on the 22nd. I have a feeling the whole thing will be lame, but I'm looking forward to seeing some old friends. My good friend Dave will be headed to UT to do his Masters, so I won't get to see him much next year, I'll see him on the 22nd though.

I start Don Training on the 26th, summer's over I suppose then. I'm looking forward to school and all that, but I have no idea how I'll ever be able to get down to work. Writing papers and all that stuff just seems so weird.

At any rate, I hope you all have a fantastic August. I'll try to keep this blog up to date when I'm travelling in Germany, so check back by Wednesday or Thursday, I'll at least try to have a note here saying I'm not lost in Bohemia. I'll likely be changing the name and address of the site to something like Mike in Canada . Blogspot.com, but that's in the future.

And as we say here in Bosnia-Herzegovina Vidimo Se!

The Bosnian Pyramid

On our way to dropping the Americans off at the airport, we stopped in Visoko,a city about a half hour's drive from Sarajevo. IF you where unaware, a Pyramid has reportedly been discovered in Visoko, on one of the many mountains in the area. When we got off the bus, everyone was looking around wondering where it was. It certainly doesn't look like much of a pyramid up close, but we were about to get closer.

We hiked up the steep streets for about 10 minutes till the pavement stopped, then started climbing up the mountain. The stairs up the mountain are simply cut out from the hill. they were pretty big steps, and some of the older people in our group thought that it could have been more accessible.

Here we see a lot of rocks. In fact, the whole thing seemed to be layers of layers of broken up Concrete. Yellow concrete yes, but the engineer in our group had some theories involving concrete. I'm not sure what I think about the whole thing


One of the workers there explained some of the work they were doing with the pyramid. They aren't allowed to excavate the whole thing, because there's a historic city at the top of the mountian. He was explaining why this pyramid didn't look like the ones in Egypt and what they are doing to find out what the nature of it is. Obviously pyramids differ across the world according to building materials. This pyramid was likely made out of clay and rock. I didn't catch all of what he was saying, but it seemed reasonable.

All the yellow tape made it look pretty scientific, so I was impressed. I don't really know if it's an actual pyramid. My guess is that the builders built upon the mountian, with layers of whatever building material they used. We might never know, but what's known for certain, is that the lead excavator is a crazy guy, and this pyramid will never get academic acceptance as long as he is in charge.

I saw some more excavating on TV last night, they must have been working on a different side of the mountain, because the stuff on TV didn't look lame like the stuff we saw. The crazy guy was standing in a square hole they carved out. It seems that the pyramid is made of many layers going fairly far down. The stuff on TV looked fairly impressive, I guess it wasn't open to the public yet. 

Week-End Update

I know, I know, I'm a day late with this update. I must admit that I've been quite lazy this week. I had meant to write all about our trip to see the waterfall, which took place last Sunday, but I simply never got around to it.

Yesterday Mediha, who works here at the centar, found out that she had a lot of Viruses, Trojans and Spybots on her computer, so I spent the day wrestling control away from the bad stuff. I think I'm winning the battle. It took about an hour or so to run the anti-virus software (avast, sigh). I had to install FireFox and Spybot in safe mode, it seems her computer was living in the middle ages without them. Let that be a lesson to all of you! I'm also going to install ad-aware and Super Anti-Spyware (if it can download faster than .3 KB/s). Zone Alert Firewall is also doing it's job, so overall, this thing should be a fortress when I'm done.

Other than that, we're almost done here. We've got just over a week left, we leave on Aug 7. After that I travel with Allen, check the bottom of this page for more details.

The Americans are leaving on Sunday. I'm sad to see them go, as for the most part they are really good people. They're friendly as anything, and they really enjoy coming here. They drink, smoke and swear a bit too much for my liking, but that's not really a factor. They live a busy lifestyle though, going out almost every night and plenty of travel.
We're going to see them off at the airport tomorrow, after seeing the Pyramid in Visoko and travelling around Sarajevo. The weather looks clear, so maybe I'll have some good pictures on Monday.

It seems that my computer at home has stopped working. While this fills me with unmeasurable sadness, I have begun planning a new computer, which has filled me with unmeasurable excitement.
The best case scenario is that I have an awesome computer up to current standards and I can fix my current computer and give it to my brother.
The worst case scenario is that I some how catch fire.
The Likely scenario is that I'll fix my current computer, not have the money for the new one, my brother will get some eMachine from bestbuy and that computer (and possibly my brother) will catch on fire. That situation would fill me with a manageable amount of sadness. At least I'll have a computer though.

There have been complications with my camp visit, so if anyone feels like driving up to muskoka one day, go ahead and send me a email. I actually think things will work out well, so I'm not too worried.

Thanks everyone for the comments, I love reading them.