Sarajevo

Finally I'll post a few pictures from my trip. This week in Sarajevo I've been doing a little sightseeing / research, with a bit of a focus on sites that somehow I've never managed to visit in all these years of coming here.

I took a "Times of Misfortune" tour the other day as "research" for a project I'm contemplated that compares popular and tourist-focused histories of Sarajevo with academic histories with "what really happened." As part of that tour I finally visited the Tunnel that was used during the siege to sneak food and weapons into the city. Its been open for tourists for about ten years, and Miran and I tried only once to go, but it was closed.  It was kind of kitchy, but interesting. I didn't manage to take a picture while actually going through the 60 feet of tunnel they have reopened, but here is the outside of the building and one of the exhibits inside the museum part (showing how goods were transported through after a track was built).

Today was lovely, in the 50s and sunny and I spent most of the day touring cemeteries. It sound morbib, but there were a couple that are interesting that I've meant to visit.

First I went to the Jewish cemetery, which claims to be the second largest in Europe (after Prague). I don't know if thats true, but it was definitely huge. It has a fancy gate and chapel that have recently been restored.

The oldest graves are from the 17th century when it opened.

There was a little holocaust memorial as well as memorials for World War I and the ashkenazi. I'm not sure, but I think it is unusual for sefardi and ashkenazi to share a cemetery. Here are two shots of the Holocaust memorial.

Then I went all the way across town to visit Bare Cemetery, which was built in the 1960s and is still the main active cemetery in the city. It was cut off from the city during the war, so is a very normal cemetery, not a war one. What is interesting about it is that at the time it was built, at the height of socialist "brotherhood and unity" it had a central complex with 5 chapels - for Orthodox, Catholics, Jews, Muslims, and Atheists. And within the graveyard there are sections set aside for each of those "faiths" as well as for Evangalists. So a nice example of multiculturalism. Plus the architecture is interesting.

In this shot you can see the tall skinny, white Muslim nisani gravestones in the background, and orthodox graves in the foreground.

And I ended the day by actually going into St. Mark's Cemetery, which I've passed a hundred times to take a picture of the chapel built in 1939 and dedicated to Gavirlo Princip and friends who assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand. There graves are also there, but I'm not sure if they are in the chapel or somewhere nearby, I couldn't tell.

I also checked up the other day on the Austro-Hungarian Town Hall, which was being used as the National and University Library at the time of the war and which was so notoriously burnt. Its been being restored the past few years and it seems they still aren't done but the exterior looks really nicely done. Very colorful in any case. Someone very patient must have painted it!

international fest

Here are some more pictures from the day before I left for Bosnia. It was the annual international festival at UNC Charlotte and this year Miran volunteered for a few hours at the Bosnian exhibit. He served cevapi to customers. I showed up a few hours later and ate lunch, then we watched some Bosnian folk dancing, and walked around a bit.

new floor in our old bedroom

I'm in Sarajevo now, but wanted to post some pictures from the project Miran and I started the night before I left. I had picked up the laminate flooring from lumber liquidators earlier in the week, and we both really wanted to get it started before I left. We thought maybe if it was started, Miran could finish it while I was gone, but we decided you really need two people. It helped for me to hold boards while he knocked them into place.

So here is the room cleared of furniture and ready to go ...

 us at work ...

I'm not sure waht Miran is doing in this picture, but this is about the moment we gave up for the night.

Me resting after we had stopped ...

And a detail because I'm particularly proud of how neat we were around all the door moldings. I really wasn't expecting much considering we've never done this before and we bought the cheapest laminate possible, but it is turning out really well. Now I want to do the kitchen downstairs!

blood work

This is just a quick note to record the blood work I've had this week and last.

Last Tuesday (the 10th), I had an HCG pregnancy hormone test that day that came back at 161. I retested that this Tuesday and it is down to 72. They want me to come back next Tuesday to test again. I guess they really like to see it go all the way to zero.

Also last week I had a CA-125 test that tests for the correlation with endometriosis. That number was 34. So has gone up a little since I last tested in the summer. Dr. Teaff started me on the medication for that again so we can try to bring it down a little (she hopes to get it back under 30) before the next embryo transfer.

I also did a battery of other blood tests last week (15 test tubes full! my arm  was like a spicket!) looking for any possible explanations for the miscarriage. This is the panel that is typically ordered after multiple losses, but Dr. Teaff went ahead and ordered it for me. Probably it will come back and say they don't know why it happened, which is the case for most miscarriages, but these tests will look for thyroid problems or thrombosis or other things known to increase risk. I won't get that blood work back for another week or two.

In the meantime Miran and I are thinking about returning to Brno together to transfer the final two embryos around New Year's. I wrote the clinic to be sure they'd be open on January 3, which would be the ideal day for us for the transfer. We are thinking to combine the trip with a bit of fun and to fly in and out of Munich this time and spend a few days beforehand (including New Year's Eve) with Miran's best friend Albert. Then we'll rent a car and drive over (about 5 hours) to Brno for the transfer. So its a little further than Prague or Vienna airports, but we have a place to stay in Munich and direct flights from Charlotte so it should make for a nice trip.

new bedroom ... aka distracting myself

This week-end I have spent a lot of time organizing my new closet in our moved bedroom. But I should back up to last week-end when Mom and Dad were here and we actually moved the rooms.

First, they brought and installed the lovely new coffee table dad made, which is just beautiful and perfect in the room ...

Then after emptying the guest room, Dad and Miran built a two-piece wardrobe with accessories as well as a thin new dresser for Miran (because his low one didn't fit in the new room). Here they are at work on the first piece and the new wardrobe / dresser wall. The big empty space over the dressors is waiting for a television. I think the plan is to move the one from downstairs up to our room and get a bigger (and easier to use, i.e. internet ready) one for the family room.

Then they moved our bed into place - it comes into a lot of pieces. This week-end I hung the pictures and the Roman shades - which Mommy made years ago and I moved up from the family room.

While they were here Mom and Dad also ripped up the carpet in the former master bedroom and set up the guest bed in there. You can see that 90% of the hardwood floor has been ripped up and replaced with floor underlay boards. Our plan is to just install a floating laminate or engineered wood floor on top. I think its beyond our capabilities to "fix" this floor. And it will be extremely difficult and expensive to match the wood anyway.

So this week-end I distracted myself from being sad by doing some major organizing in my dresser and closet. Things that usually make me happy. And introducing order in a part of my life I can actually control. Some details including the cool jewelry drawers at the top of the new dresser, the slide-out shoe rack, underwear organizing boxes, and my 2-finger-width-apart spaced hangers ... something I've missed for the past ten years!

Today Miran tried to help me install a ceiling bar so that I could hang some sliding panel curtains in front of the wardrobe. However we were completely incapable of finding an rafters. Miran got frustrated and kept drilling holes trying to find something, but had no luck. Now we need to come up with another solution and fix our ceiling.