Lessons in Bosnian History at a "Fancy" Hotel

On our way to the hotel, our Tour Director once again reminded us that we were in Bosnia, so we had to lower our expectations a little bit when it comes to hotel amenities. He said that our hotel was not bad at all and the staff are friendly and helpful, but the rooms could be lacking in certain ways. Once we got there, we understood what he meant.

The room assigned to my roommate and I was a spacious suite in a corner of the top floor that could fit a family of five or more. There was a sitting area, a good-sized bedroom (presumably for kids as it had one double bed and one single bed), and a master bedroom with a king bed. The bathroom was equipped with a spacious fancy shower with body jets and a large tub.

My roommate got there first. She took the stairs because she only had a couple of backpacks. I had to wait for the elevator because the hotel only had one and it was so tiny that it could only fit two persons and two pieces of luggage. By the time I arrived, she had already unpacked.

“Welcome to our penthouse suite,” she said. After looking around, I said to her, “Wow, all these just for the two of us?”

She took the double bed for herself and gave me the master bedroom. She told me that I deserved a treat because this trip was my “mommy-me-time” trip. I thanked her for her generosity and promised that she’d get the next suite, if we ever get booked into a similar room in the next few days.

But there was a catch...three catches actually!

For one, our room was a suite alright, but the furniture pieces were mismatched and arranged haphazardly in the rooms, as if the suite was prepared at the last minute. The air was musty, as if the room had not been opened for a long time until recently. It smelled of cigarette smoke as well, and the weak air-conditioning did not do much to obliterate it.

My roommate and I shared the same hypothesis that this room had been used as a storage space for spare furniture and was cleared probably the day before to accommodate more guests. And it seemed the cleaning staff did not bother to go out for their cigarette breaks.

We had seen earlier at the lobby that there were a lot of Turkish guests, and one of the function rooms was being used for a traditional Turkish dance rehearsal. It looked like there was going to be a big wedding reception the following night and the guests had started to arrive. The hotel was fully booked and the staff probably decided to give our group “the royal treatment” on the top two floors.

Second, as soon as we used the sink, the faucet started to drip non-stop, which formed a small pool of water on the floor. Our only solution was to intermittently wipe it down in order to mitigate a flash flood in the bathroom. In the end, we just left a couple of towels to catch the water.

Third, we were given one key card which looked like it had seen better days during the war. When I asked for a second one at the lobby, they told me they did not have any spares. They had one key card per room, and they couldn’t produce any more since they did not have the machine. That explained the sorry condition of our key card that reminded me of a friend’s credit card that her three-year old son inserted and pulled repeatedly from their windowpane.

Since my roommate would usually go out at night to drink with her buddies from our tour group, and I would usually stay in to take long showers and sleep earlier, we had to device another method for us to come in and out without inconveniencing the other.

“Oh, this was going to be fun,” we laughed.

Before I took my shower, I went downstairs to pay for the excursions that I booked for the next few days. Our Tour Director had set-up a table at the lobby beside the bar so we could do our transactions over cocktail drinks. Hahaha!

I had the chance to get to know some more of my tour mates and I was surprised that there was another Filipina in the group. Ironically, she was one of the first persons I met at the airport with whom I shared the shuttle ride. She’s one of the Aussies working in London travelling with her boyfriend. I did not realize then that she’s Filipina.

She told me that she suspected I was Filipina but only confirmed it when we did the “introductions” on the bus at the Bosnian border crossing. I told her I thought she was either Japanese or an indigenous New Zealander, but obviously I was wrong. She said that her mom is Filipina, from the Visayan region and that she moved to Australia to marry her dad, a native Australian. She was born and raised there and never really learned her mom’s language, except for a few words and expressions, which are in Visayan. I told her I spoke Tagalog and can only understand a bit of the other dialects, mostly if spoken in context.

She also shared that her dad left them when she was still a small girl and that her mom raised her alone. She told me how much she admires her mom’s strength and resiliency and that she knows it came from a hard-up life in the Philippines. She was looking forward to her December trip to her mom’s hometown to spend Christmas with their relatives. “Oh, you will have the best Christmas,” I told her.

I also mingled with my other tour mates at the bar and we compared notes on the state of our rooms, not with disdain, but more with amusement. In general, I found everybody in the group to be down-to-earth and easy-going travelers who make the best of every situation. After all, that’s what travel adventure is all about.

When our Travel Director was done with his payment collection and paperwork, he joined our little party. He assured us that the next night’s hotel would be much better. We’d still be in Bosnia, but we’re going to the Herzegovina region, which is slightly more developed. And because we had a lot of questions, he explained that Bosnia and Herzegovina is quite a complicated nation. Over beer and cocktails, he gave us a brief history lesson.

There are three autonomous regions within the country, with an extra one to throw in the mix – Bosnia, Herzegovina, Republika Srpska (Serb Republic), and the Brcko District. The main reason for the division is based on religion. A Bosnian citizen could be a Muslim (called a Bosniak, and not to be confused with the term, Bosnian, which refers to someone living in Bosnia), Catholic (Croat), or Orthodox Christian (Serb).

Their differences led to the Bosnian Wars and in 1995, the Dayton Agreement ended this war and created a Federation between Bosnians and Croats (Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina), and a separate republic for the Serbs (Republika Srpska). Each region has a majority of ethnic groups – Bosniaks in Bosnia, Croats in Herzegovina, and Serbs in Republika Srpska. And when we say “majority,” it means other ethnicities are also present in those regions living as minorities. Politically, each region has its own representative president, but the Brcko District is altogether different.

Our heads started swimming, not because of the alcohol, but because we were trying to understand the complex structure of the Bosnia and Herzegovina society and political situation. One of my tour mates remarked that it’s easier to comprehend quantum physics than this. I couldn’t have agreed more.

Bosnia, where we were at that moment, occupies the central region and is separated by the natural borders of the Sava River in the north and the Drina River in the east. Its capital is Sarajevo, which is also the country’s official capital. Since Muslims make up the majority of the population, one could see a lot of Ottoman-style mosques here and the lifestyle is mostly governed by Islamic principles. It is also one of the reasons why we see a lot of Turkish visitors in this region, clearly evidenced by the Turkish music playing from the nearby function room and Turkish guests all around us.

Herzegovina makes up around a quarter of the country and covers the southeastern regions bordering Croatia. The population is mainly made up of Catholic Croats who live west of the Neretva River close to Croatia, also a Catholic country. But a number of Bosniaks also live here, east of the Neretva, making the region somewhat a divided country, which is what you’d exactly feel when crossing the river – church bell towers on one side and then minarets on the other.

Herzegovina’s Catholic population has a claim to fame in the Catholic world – the village of Medjugorje, the site of a Marian apparition and which has now become a major pilgrimage site. But the unofficial capital of the region is Mostar, which we were visiting the following day.

Republika Srpska, on the other hand, is a Serbian territory and covers large parts of northern Bosnia (called Bosanska Krajina), Eastern Herzegovina, and some eastern regions closer to the Serbian border (Northeastern Bosnia and Romanija).

If one looks at the map of the country, they look like patches. They are all autonomous regions separated by invisible borders. Over the years, tensions have arisen because the Serbian population wanted either complete independence, more autonomy, or reunification with Serbia.

On this trip, we got to visit the city of Trebinje in the Eastern Herzegovina part of Republika Srpska. Cool! We covered all three districts in the country!

Lastly, the Brcko District is a region in the northeast, close to Croatia and Serbia. Unlike the other parts of the country, this region has a completely mixed demographics, with no majority, and so, even after the Dayton Agreement, the leaders of the three districts fought over who should get it. In the end, they just turned it into another autonomous region to make everyone happy.

Boy, that was complicated. The Balkans itself has been divided into independent republics, mainly because of ethnicity, and each republic, in turn, is further subdivided. Yet, up to the present time, the conflicts have not been totally resolved.

Our Tour Director said that it’s not that easy. One cannot just place demarcation lines, just like how they did it between Israel and Palestine, and also between India and Pakistan, because even though there are ethnic majorities concentrated in some areas, the minorities are also spread out. Moreover, even within the same family, there could be various religious and political alliances. The Balkan region is like the human body, he said. There are main arteries, but each artery has several veins jutting out and you just cannot cut off the blood flow on any particular part. I joked that I needed to order another drink to absorb all these.