Occupied, battled over, and besieged throughout history, it has not been uncommon to find Sarajevo filled with soldiers. In 2002, I learned to recognize different countries’ peacekeeping patrols throughout town by their camouflage: Americans had big-patterned, patchy camo, Germans had tiny dots and a gold-brown hue to theirs, and someone—maybe a Bulgarian?—had geometric shapes on a beige background.

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Grocery shopping in Sarajevo means going downtown. And no matter where you are in the residential part of the city, going downtown means going precipitously downhill. Carrying your groceries back up your side of the valley to get home can be a real kicker, especially if you buy a heavy load of food. In fact, I figure my family owes any toned muscle we may have almost entirely to the fact that we don’t own a car. There’s really no avoiding the workout: many Sarajevo roads are so dramatically pitched that they simply become staircases.

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Downtown Sarajevo is the site of all the action: you go there to shop, party, eat, and people-watch. But now, climbing up out of the downtown river valley has become one of my favorite things to do. I live five minutes up the mountain, north of the Miljacka River, in a mostly residential neighborhood with one public school and way too many hair salons. As I’ve learned recently, heading straight up lifts me first to sweeping graveyards, in which every stone gives a death date between 1992 and 1996. Next come the old city boundaries—a rolling, eighteenth-century stone wall built by a protection-minded pasha.

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When I arrived at the University of Sarajevo’s Faculty of Philosophy at 1PM, an “elderly, skinny professor with gray hairs” was there to greet me, exactly as planned. When a friend of a friend found out that I study archaeology, she suggested that historian-archaeologist Dr. Imamovi? and I meet. The twinkly-eyed man who showed up had much more of a spring in his step than I’d imagined.

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A meat-lover in Sarajevo confronts only one problem: how to stop eating.

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One tiny branch of the Sarajevo public library is devoted to children’s books. It shares its cramped space with my little sister’s vrti (a Bosnian kindergarten), and a one-room library of novels and magazines in English, called the American Corner. On Thursday mornings, a little line of kids troops into the American Corner from the vrti, each with one hand on the shoulder of the kid in front of them, muttering little train noises.

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When I was eleven and new to Sarajevo, Fatima knocked on my family’s door in the Bistrik neighborhood with a knot of other kids, and asked if I wanted to play. This meant chasing games with fast counting in Bosnian,jedan-dva-tri, in the narrow, cobbled road. If anyone shouted, “Auto!”, we instinctively plastered ourselves against the walls while a little Yugo or taxi squeezed through. We lived on tiny Ulica Pastrma, Trout Street, and we all went to the school down the mountain, next to the brewery. We traded sparkly pens, ate pastry-wrapped sausages from the bakery, and stared at all the junk thrown into the Bistrik waterfall.

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