Comedy of Errors/It's a Long Story

            On June 26^th and 27^th, the Sarajevo Philharmonic traveled to Sibenik, a small city on the Croatian coast, to perform the children’s opera “Jezeva Kuca” (“Hedgehog House”) as part of a festival there.  The Adriatic coastline in Croatia is one of the most beautiful places I have ever been. I had a great time at the beach and walking around the old part of the city before our concert.  So, fortunately, it was worth the extremely unpleasant and tiring hours of travel it took to get from, and back to, Sarajevo.

            We traveled by buses that were chartered from the biggest regional bus company, Centrotrans.  There was one double-decker bus for the opera company and one “normal” bus for the orchestra.  I think that everything that could possibly go wrong on a bus trip went wrong!  I have not had very good experiences with Centrotrans buses (lots of delays, broken buses, disgruntled drivers, etc), but this was by far the worst experience.  At least everyone and their instruments made it there and back in one piece, I guess…

            The trip started quite well.  The orchestra met in the city center at 7am and boarded the bus.  There was plenty of room for everyone, and I got my own row to spread out.  I took a Dramamine, knowing that we had a windy trip ahead of us, and also plenty of time to sleep.  We started off by making really good time, and went all the way to the border in only a couple of hours, with a brief break in Jablanica.  I was conked out the whole time too, so it went extra fast.

            The problems began when we got to the Bosnian/Croatian border.  We stopped for about 20 minutes, and then pulled a 180, passing a sign that said “Welcome to Bosnia and Hezegovina”.  I was very sleepy, but alert enough to be alarmed.  I asked my colleague behind me what was happening, and he simply replied, “We are going back”.  I was extremely disappointed and worried that we had to go all the way back to Sarajevo.  Later, I found out that we couldn’t get through the border because the paperwork for taking our instruments across needed to be processed by a computer system, which was down.  So we were driving to a different border to try there.  We had the same problem at the second border, but at least it only took 5 minutes to realize that we couldn’t get through.

            After weaving around some back roads, we finally tried a third border crossing. (On the plus side, I got the grand tour of almost all of Herzegovina.)  Finally, the border patrol let us through!  But not without another holdup and nearly an hour’s delay.  Because of all of the problems crossing the border, we arrived in Sibenik nearly four hours behind schedule.  I was so happy when we finally pulled up near the harbor.  But, the trip still wasn’t over!  The bus driver didn’t know where he was going, and it took even more time to find our hotel.  So we didn’t walk into the lobby until nearly 5pm.  So much for our scheduled noon-2pm lunch. 

As we waited for our room keys, I felt so dizzy.  Because of all the chaos, I hadn’t had anything to drink all day, and I was so dehydrated.  There was some debate about trading rooms, and who would stay with whom, and I readily agreed to any arrangement, as long as I could put my stuff down and have some water.  When I finally got into my room, I think I chugged about six glasses of water, and instantly felt better.  Fortunately, the hotel also saved a little bit of the lunch for us, and we had about an hour to eat and walk around before getting back onto the bus to go to rehearsal.  After having some bread, cheese and fruit, I wandered down to the beach.  Five of my friends had traveled by car and had arrived much earlier that day.  They were all in their swim trunks and bikinis, having a great time, and greeted me enthusiastically.  I couldn’t help but feel a little cranky and jealous that they were swimming in the Adriatic and lounging by the pool while I was stuck on a bus all day.  But as soon as I waded into the warm seawater, I couldn’t help but relax and cheer up.

That evening, we took the bus back into the central part of Sibenik for a dress rehearsal and concert. The city is built on a hill that rises almost directly from the shore.  It is rather small, very old, and naturally quite charming.  I learned that Sibenik has a unique history because it was founded by Croats, unlike other cities on the Adriatic coast that were originally Roman, Illyrian, or Greek.  The bus dropped us off at a station near the harbor, which gave us a chance to stroll down a lovely promenade on the way to our venue.  We performed outside, in a square located right beside the church of St. James, which is Sibenik’s most famous landmark.  It was difficult to hear each other, and keep our music from blowing away in the wind, but I liked having the chance to perform at such an interesting location.

Church of St. James

Performing Jezeva Kuca

Looking up from the harbor at Sibenik's city center

We didn’t get back from the show until quite late, as the performance didn’t even start until 9pm.  Nonetheless, we only had one day in Croatia, and on top of that it was Matt’s birthday, so I was determined to celebrate.  Almost everyone in the orchestra headed down to the beach for a late night swim.  I didn’t swim because it was so dark and rocky, but I relaxed on a lounge chair and chatted with Matt and Ivana.  Later, I wandered down to a bar with Mattia to check out the resort’s nightlife.  It was pretty dead, but on the plus side the servers were drunk and didn’t charge us very much, hehe.

Even though we had a late night, I found myself waking up quite early the next day.  I think I was too excited about the prospect of my morning at the beach.  To start, I wandered down to breakfast and met up with most of my friends there.  The hotel’s breakfast was delicious; they even had pura (polenta) and palacinke (crepes), two of my favorite Bosnian (or in this case Croatian I guess) dishes.  I’m glad I took advantage of it, because it was the one good meal I had the entire trip.  After a leisurely breakfast and coffee, I walked down to the beach, and was immediately dragged into the sea by my friend Arvida.  The water is so calm and so warm…it would be easy to swim all day!  Unfortunately, we had to leave the hotel at 1pm, so we just had half of a day.  But we made the most of it: swimming in the sea, relaxing under umbrellas, walking around the resort, and last but not least having a drink in the pool bar.  That’s right, there was a bar in the swimming pool. J I had a Corona and pretended I was in Mexico!

Hotel Beach

Before driving back to Sarajevo, the orchestra went back to the old city to have lunch at a restaurant (not vegetarian—boo).  At this point, the comedy of errors resumed…  When we walked back to the bus station, the buses were not there.  I guess there was a miscommunication about where we would be picked up.  So we spent some time dashing back and forth through traffic, trying to find the correct meeting point.  When we finally boarded our bus, it was extremely hot.  The temperature outside was probably about 30 C/85 F, but inside it was more like 35/95, and even hotter near the back of the bus.  When my colleagues started complaining, we found out some very bad news…the air-conditioning had broken!  Ugh.  I joked that we should just go back to the beach all afternoon, wait for the company to send a new bus, and then return overnight.  It was joke at the time, but now I really think we should have done that.

We started the trip back to Sarajevo by just sticking it out, and suffering through the heat.  Luckily, heat doesn’t bother me that much, and I didn’t find it to be so bad.  However, some of my colleagues were completely miserable, and we were worried about our instruments.  A lot of the guys in the back stripped down to their underwear, while most of the women seemed to conveniently have fans (the non-electric kind) tucked into their purses.  The driver opened the back door as we drove to get some air flowing and people took turns standing by the door (hold on!) and getting fanned off by colleagues.  I couldn’t resist the pun, and joked that I had never seem a literal “fan club” before…

After a short drive, we got the other bus, the double-decker one with the singers, to pull over next to us.  There was some room on their bus, so most people moved.  There was some confusion about whether we could also move our instruments, and I ended up moving back and forth between buses a couple of times.  Finally, it was decided that we could ride on the singers’ bus, but we would stop at the border and move back onto the other bus with our instruments so that there wasn’t any problem with the paperwork.  We were allowed to keep our instruments with us, as long as they stayed on our laps.  So, I squeezed onto the top level of the double-decker with my big oboe/English horn case and we set off.  Unfortunately, the air-conditioning on the double-decker bus didn’t work very well on the upper level, so I was just as hot as before.  And much more squished.

Although I think we only drove for an hour or two, it felt like forever.  When we pulled over, I though it was because we had neared the border, and eagerly got off to switch buses.  I planed to just stay on the original bus, because even though it was hot, there was a lot more room to spread out.  Meanwhile, I was unaware that we were not yet close to the border, and that we had pulled over because the original bus was having even more problems.  The entire electrical system went down.  A bus mechanic took a look, and it turned out that a piece of the engine was missing!  Oh, Centrotrans…

So, after a noisy deliberation, it was decided that we could just abandon the broken bus, and everyone would squeeze onto the double-decker.  There weren’t quite enough seats, but we made it work by having a few people sit on the stairs and taking long breaks to stretch our legs.  I moved to the back of the bus, which was even hotter, but quieter and roomier.  I even found a corner for my oboe so I didn’t have to hold it the whole ride.

          Fortunately, the final stretch of the trip was pretty non-eventful, excepting some heated debate amongst the opera company about whether the bus could stop in Ilidza before arriving in city center (it was impossible, because there was too much luggage to sort through).  We held our breath at the border crossing and, miraculously, the police let us through without coming on board to check out the bus. (If they had, I think we could have been seriously held up, because there were more people than seats.)  After dinner in at Zdrava Voda, a well-known restaurant Jablanica, the bus drove directly to the theater.  By the time I caught a cab back to Otes with Matt and Ivana, it was midnight.  All in all, I spent 20 hours traveling to play a 45-minute