5:00 am Walks
I am not a morning person. The early bird can take as many worms as it would like, and I wouldn’t care. Which is why, this blog title is special. There has to be something special about the location or…
Category Balkans
Right Place, Right Time: The Weather
We walk thorugh photography examples of being at the right place at the right time, when it comes to weather. Photographs that get elevated because of really inclement weather.
Game of Thrones (GoT) Filming Locations
It was early summer, and we were still getting boiled by the scorching sun above and the reflections from glistening medieval stone below. There were hordes of tourist groups all around us – most of them would drop in droves…
A Not So Pedestrian Bridge (World War 1)
On the morning of June 25th 1914, Archduke Prince Franz Ferdinand, the heir-apparent of the mega Austro-Hungarian empire, arrived in Sarajevo to do what heir-apparents of mega-empires do – walk the bazaars, shop, while inaugurating a few monuments. Though there…
Soccer around the World
It is the most popular sport in the world – played by over 250 million people across more than 200 countries. And there is a simple reason for it – all you need is a spherical object which can be…
A Case for Uber (or Lyft)
It was 4:00 pm in New York on a muggy August Friday afternoon in 2014. I had a flight to catch later that evening from JFK back to San Francisco after spending a week at our NYC offices. I was…
Sarajevo Rose
It was 1993. Our dorm in India had just installed a 10 foot satellite dish to catch the US cable channels and it was welcome change from the 1.5 channels of State run Doordarshan and it’s melancholia. CNN had just become…
An Austro-Hungarian State of Mind
Our experience with Ottoman (Turkish) flags in Bosnia left us a little curious about the leanings of the people of Croatia and other Yugoslav states. Were people happier in modern day states? Did they prefer the erstwhile state of Yugoslavia?…
An Ottoman State of Mind
The tourist season had not begun yet in Mostar, and there were a sprinkling of mostly eastern European tourists getting a head start on their vacation. As we were wandering around the Kriva Cuprija, or the crooked bridge – that…
Marketing in Paradise
What do you sell when you are already in Paradise? As we crossed over the dry high plateau that covered most of the Republic of Srpska into Montenegro, all we encountered was an hour long wait, with none of the…