Hidey ho! Hey! Cao! Bok!
Welcome to my very first and fresh blog, coming to you directly from the Balkan region of Europa :-)
I'm writing this somewhat for my own reasons, but also to keep friends and family posted about how I'm going in my travels...what I've been seeing/hearing/smelling/tasting/realising...you get it!
I'm not quite sure who exactly will be reading this so for now I'm just going to assume it's people that know me...and maybe later I'll have some new and unknown followers. Actually, I have a few aims:
- I want this to be a way to stay in touch with people...I usually personally don't like getting a group email from friends that are travelling. This is the alternative in my view! I'd rather send individual emails to people as I go!
- In a way I'd like to have flowing dialogue about what I'm experiencing and I'd like to record it using different mediums. I'll be blogging, writing a journal (which you guys will not see), record some video footage and also take photos. I'm hoping to upload some of the recording and photography as I go along....I kind of wanted to boycot Facebook in that way.
- I want to hear your thoughts too...if you have questions about the region or what I'm doing, please share! I want to learn as much as I can and take away as much as I can in terms of knowledge/experience. If you see me doing something and have tips...please comment!
Anyway...I should probably give a bit of background about this whole thing as well.
I had a colourful childhood. It was pretty different to most of the people that I know, and there are still a lot of loose ends - things that I either don't know enough about or don't understand in some way. I was born in Croatia, in a small town southwest of Zagreb, called Karlovac. Both of my parents are Bosnian, but were living there at the time because of my dad's work. We lived in Karlovac right up until the civil war in Bosnia started in 1991. My family then started to move around a lot. We went back to Bosnia and lived in various towns with different families, until we decided to escape as refugees in 1992. So we left.
We went towards Denmark, but ended up in Sweden, where we stayed in a refugee camp for about 8 months. I was 6 at the time, getting pretty close to 7. Mum had an aunt in Canberra, in the Australian Capital Territory. We got in contact with her and while we were at the camp, visas and plane tickets were organised for us to move to Australia permanently. Big move, folks!
Neither of my parents spoke English, let alone me and my sister. They had no idea what Australia looked like, only that there were kangaroos and how to say hello - thanks to an english teacher who happened to be at the camp at the same time as us.
We arrived on Australian shores in August of 1993 and we stayed in Canberra for 10 years. I know, this is the part where most of you will be starting to feel pity, but really, I'm ok. My head only just stopped spinning from all the roundabouts last year... :-)
My childhood and schooling in Canberra was pretty normal in terms of Aussie culture. Fun, even! It was a very different kind of lifestyle to what my parents knew so naturally it came with challenges. We had very little family there and very few relatives. But then a lot of mum's family started to move to Canberra as well and we felt a bit more at home. Towards the end of the 10 years that we were there though, a lot of the family we had there had decided to move to Melbourne for a number of reasons. Namely better life opportunities - more job variety, more of a Bosnian community, more exposure to the culture that was forcefully lost. So when my sister was ready for university, my family decided to move once again - ANOTHER life change.
So we've all been in Melbourne for nearly 6 years - and it's been amazing! I've made amazing friends, got a degree, moved outa home, got a job. Towards the end of uni - when I realised that I was moving into a completely different chapter of my life...work....I thought that there was something fairly major missing.
I had no idea where I was from...I only knew Bosnia and Croatia from a distance and had lived in this community vicariously through my parents - who, might I mention, had over time lost touch with what was actually going on back in ol' Europa. They only knew what they knew...and it had become less and less accurate the more time they spent away from it.
I realised that I would never really fully understand them as Bosnians, nor would I understand the Bosnian in me, unless I went back and explored. Immersed myself in the culture and just live there for a while.
It took me a couple of years to prepare...of course there was the money saving, but there was a lot of mental preparation. I needed to be sure I could be completely independant first. Then I needed to be ok with the idea of such a big undertaking. Anyway...2 and a half years later....I'm sitting in Ivanic Grad, about an hour south east of Zagreb in Croatia, writing my first ever Blog entry!
WoooHoo!
This is the beginning of many blogs, videos and photos that will appear on the net for you guys.
I hope to capture as much as I can using these mediums so that I can look back on occasion and remind myself of what I came here to do and also what actually happened!
I hope you enjoy!
Thanks for reading :-)
Hugs to you all.
Sej xo
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