No 13

Balkan Tour 2004.

Like you already know, Meeting of styles is international festival which is annualy being organized in numerous cities around Europe as well as few cities in North America. Last year I had an accident so we had to cancel our trip to Holland and Switzerland. But inspite of lots of work this year we decided to hit the road and visit few of those that are in schedule this season. It's not really our style to sit on the plane and fly directly to the spot, so with my good friend from Mostar and our frequent guest here in Zagreb (and frequent host, too, in both, Mostar and Sarajevo), Rea One I arranged the meeting in Sarajevo. After few of our guys got outta plan, Saint and me sat on the bus to Sarajevo on thurday 10 p.m. and came to Sarajevo 6 a.m. the following day. First we found out that caravan we wanted to rent crashed the night before, so Rea arranged new one: Hyundai H-100, a monovolumen for 9 passengers and we felt sorry that more people didn't come along. We got infos from different people who already drove that way we made decision to drive all the way up north to Belgrade and take the highway to Skopje, the capital of Macedonia. It seemed to be longer way but finally it's the same when you compare the safety and quickness, as we took the highway almost all the way and shortcut was the road which seemed to be not so good. Tuzla was our first stop; We stopped to take some photos from our mates Aorta and Sale, eat Cevapi at , had a beer and continued our trip when Saint took few shots of pieces from locals and after we visited local pirate cd shop. In Skopje we had a deal with my man Davor who invited us for a lunch, but we were so late that we passed Macedonian border by 11 p.m. cause we started our trip at 11 a.m., lost some time in Tuzla and in Belgrade cause there was a terrible rush hour on the highway through the city. Saint and me never left a mark in Skopje so we had to do it now; till tommorow noon we did two pieces each of us three + Davor and after some local beers we went on highway to southern border. Jam already begun as we arrived but our friend Liv reserved us nice wall and left us pretty much spraycans. We had some sandwiches and few beers, did the wall, and had tasty dinner (local specialty, musaka) after driving all the way through beautiful 1,5 million city and most of the street led us right next to the coast with shitloads of bars and clubs crowded. After dinner our younger members, Rea and Saint made our host Liv and his girlfriend Christina to take them out to the city, so together with Manuel, main MOS organizer from Germany, they partied till early morning hours. I placed myself at Lue's place, as he was tired same as I were. I slept like I baby and woke up at 8 in the morning, came to Liv's place and found my guys sleeping like they were dead. So I decided to go to rock the oldest hall of fame in the city together with Liv, but they heard me so they all joined and we did a nice colorful wall while Liv went to his shop to place Saint's photos from his camera to cd so he can continue shooting. After the noon we jumped in our vehicle for hard workers and Rea did incredibly 16 hours driving to Sarajevo without no stopping for taking rest. We took the shortcut and it was much harder route than the first one. On our way we stopped few times to tank the gas and to tank ourselves with beer and we curved down to Niš to check local graffs as I was invited there for a jam last year the same day I organized MOS in Zagreb. I can tell we found there some really good walls, mostly illegally done. After crossing the border of Bosnia, literally in the middle of deep forest in the mountains (+middle of the night+raining all the time, imagine that) we drove some time and came to Višegrad and made a stop to check and photograph famous Bridge which is described in book of Ivo Andrić. Croatian writer who won a Nobel Prize for this book. 5 o'clock we came to Rea's flat in Sarajevo, slept a little while and woke up at 8 to make one more color wall. Did it and met two younger locals, Orne and Patu. All in all, we had 4 days and one night of travelling, meeting people, painting and having fun in 2500 kilometres. A bit hard but fun, no doubt about it and I can't wait for another possibility for similar scenario!

Lunar