Grocery shopping in Sarajevo means going downtown. And no matter where you are in the residential part of the city, going downtown means going precipitously downhill. Carrying your groceries back up your side of the valley to get home can be a real kicker, especially if you buy a heavy load of food. In fact, I figure my family owes any toned muscle we may have almost entirely to the fact that we don’t own a car. There’s really no avoiding the workout: many Sarajevo roads are so dramatically pitched that they simply become staircases.
My mom and I were trying to compare steep Bosnian roads to American ones, and eventually got curious enough to take a tape measure and hit the town in a light snowstorm. Our methods were not especially precise, but we did our jerry-rigged best. Picking the steepest streets we could think of, we took tiny rise-over-run measurements at the edges of doorways and on particularly grid-like stone walls.
I haven’t figured out how to interpret our quantitative data yet. The steepest street we measured was about a 20% grade—where does one go from there? Our qualitative data, though, speaks loud and clear: the pedestrians and security guards in this neighborhood think my mom and I are certifiable nuts.
At least we’re muscular ones.