I have never actually seen anyone digging a grave before, so I stop for a moment to watch the burly old man with grey hair and suspenders cut into the earth with his pick axe. I remember how hard it was to dig trenches when I was young and in the army. This man is quite old, strong, and doesn’t seem to be perspiring much. He notices me, smiles, and waves. I wave back, noticing that he isn’t even breathing hard from his physical labour.
As I climb the steep streets to the old abandoned bobsled track from the 1984 Olympics, sweating profusely from my effort, I pass a little boy standing in a doorway. He says something, ‘zdravo’ it sounds like, hello. Then he holds out his hand, not for money, but for a high five. I give him a high five with a clammy hand and his mother behind shares a smile with me as the boy giggles from the interaction.
At the patio restaurant, I see a boy drop his fork on the pavement. His father nods at him to get another, but the boy is nervous. He speaks English, not Bosnian. He hesitantly steps into the restaurant and asks the gentleman server for a new fork, which the gentleman server happily provides. The boy rushes out to his family, enthusiastically exclaiming, “I got a new fork! I got a new fork!” His slightly younger sister takes her mother’s cell phone and skips around the plaza, taking photographs of almost everything, laughing, then racing back to her table to show her mother the pictures. A happy English-speaking family on vacation.
I am approaching a couple in the market. While looking into a store, she pulls out a cigarette and hands it to her partner, but he is looking the other way. Her hand lingers there for a few seconds, the cigarette between her fingers, but when he doesn’t take it, she turns to him, gives him a dirty look, and whacks him on the chest. He looks down, takes the cigarette, sees that she is not happy and gives the male-perfected shrug that means, “What did I do?”
