This is not China

Maybe the strangest bit of culture shock I've had has been that somehow, sometimes I expect Sarajevo to be like China or my little town of Qufu in particular. It is not. No one speaks Chinese here and when I mumble a phrase in Mandarin as I walk it only makes me look more strange. Thankfully, I got a dictionary today and the first word I looked up was foreigner so that I could stop thinking of things as the "laowai price" and switch over to the "stranac price".

Also, Sarajevo is a real city, Qufu is not. Yesterday when other Fulbrighters were here and talking about how beer is so much cheaper in the town they live in or how there are no movie theaters where they live but there are in Sarajevo, I almost had to pinch myself. No, not because expensive beer and movies are all that exciting but because this past year I was on the other end of taking a two and a half hour bus to buy overpriced Land-O-Lakes cheese and complaining how expensive the fruit is compared to Qufu.

While not everyone speaks English here, there is definitely a larger chance of finding an English speaker here than in Qufu, or arguably China in general. So, I need to quit the staring habit because unlike Qufu, if you are an English speaker in Sarajevo odds are I don't know you and am making you slightly uncomfortable.