We don’t have much planned for the
day, so we walk up the avenue to the newer side of the city. There’s a modern
building complex that has a shopping mall and a multiplex cinema. There’s a
book fair going on at the plaza in front, lots of English authors, but no
English-language available. We browse through the mall, where there are the
same sorts of shops we’d find at home: eyewear and accessories, sneakers, jeans
and t-shirts, dresses, cosmetics, food court, kid’s clothes, electronics, etc. But
there’s a lot less of the brand-name franchise shopping, no Abercrombie, Gap or
Nike stores. Everything seems more individual and boutique-y. It’s not the
feeling that all the stores have the same merchandise that you’d often see at
home.
After
a coffee on the plaza, we go to Cinema City and see World War Z. It’s
tolerable. We meet a couple of guys from Brooklyn in the theater.
Back
at the apartment, the eleven of us are having an evening of ice-cold showers.
It’s like hiking, but without the forest views.
Through the day, we’re joined by a
couple of young women from Denmark, and a group of five, guys and girls, from
Turkey, students travelling through Europe on their summer break.
We
plan a walking tour though the old city to follow a sight-seeing path on our
tourist map. The first stop is the Cathedral on our corner. The interior is
beautiful, with the columns and arches built with the banded stone design
that’s typical of Eastern architecture. There’s a nun at the doorway turning
anyone away wearing a tank top or overly revealing clothes.
We
go to the large Gazi-Husrev Bey mosque at the center of the city, where we can visit
the adjacent madrassa for an historical exhibit. This is also the site of a
gorgeous new library, holding a collection of historical manuscripts, books and
documents originally established in 1537. The exhibit in the madrassa rooms tells
the history of Gazi-Husrev Bey, a military leader, scholar and benefactor who
was influential in developing Sarajevo as an important center of commerce and
culture in the Ottoman Empire. We meet a nice man from Kuwait, an architect
with his degrees from the University of Miami, who explains some of the Arabic
terminology for us.
Our
walk continues through the metal-workers alley, where the workshops are full of
intricate and beautiful coffee services, trays, water jugs and more, copper and
silver shining in the afternoon sun.
The
tour is suddenly derailed as we pass a little restaurant, sort of a diner,
where the food is all displayed at a counter and you can pick out what you
want. There’s a platter of roast chicken and potatoes calling out to Bob “WAIT,
DON’T LEAVE ME!!” So we have a bite for lunch. The waitress is understandably
grumpy, working in the kitchen with an open oven of charcoal fires.
Our
next stop is the Assassination Museum, or Museum of the City of Sarajevo,
depending on your guidebook. It’s a one-room exhibit in the building right at
the spot where an assassin killed the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne,Archduke Franz Ferdinandand his wife, Sophie, an event that essentially
caused WWI. The museum chronicles the events of the assassination, displays
some photos and artifacts, and also describes the early transformation of the
city, languishing despite its former glory under the Ottoman Empire to a newly
revived industrialized capital under the Austro-Hungarian government. It’s all
very interesting, and makes us want to learn more about the history.
From
here, we leave the Old City for a climb up the surrounding streets to the old
fortress. Not much is left but a wall, but everyone comes up for the fort view,
overlooking the whole city and its valley. It’s quite striking. We can see
fields of tombstones all throughout the city, many of them from the recent war
years.
We
can also see our next stop, the Sarajevska Pivara, the Brewery. When the Austro-Hungary
government acquired Sarajevo from the Ottoman Empire in the 1860’s, they began
a campaign of industrialization throughout the city, bringing in the
afore-mentioned tram system, a brickyard, tobacco factory, and this brewery.
The brewery was one of a few businesses that sort-of functioned during the
siege, but when people would wait in lines to get some water from the brewery’s
source, they were often struck by mortar fire.
The
brewery pub is just as it should be: dark wood beams, high brick vaulted
ceilings, elaborate chandeliers, low lighting. It’s just quitting time as we
walk up, and the brewery workers are leaving for the day. I ask for a beer
menu, and the waiter says “This is Sarajevska Brewery, we have Sarajevska
Beer.” So I gathered. They brew light, unfiltered light, and dark. We have a
light lager and one unfiltered lager. Then we sit back to enjoy the beers and
the atmosphere.
On
our way home, we pass a few street cleaners. Everywhere we’ve been in these
Eastern European cities, there’s been a lot of effort put into keeping the streets
clean. There were small street vacuum trucks running through the streets of
Prague, and shopkeepers sweeping off their storefront sidewalks. City workers
trim the hedges and rosebushes and plant decorative flower beds. What’s strange
to see are the sweeper’s brooms. They are actual bunches of branches, just like
Cinderella’s. We wonder if they make their own, or if there’s a city
broom-maker somewhere.
We
have our Lonely Planet directions to get to the Tunnel Museum, an essential
site to visit. The No.3 tram stops right at our block, and travels through what’s
called the New City along the open river flatland between the mountains that
frame the city. We rattle our way down the tracks for 40 minutes or so, past
the airport to the end of the line. There’s a bus station nearby, where we need
to find the No.32 bus to the Tunnel street. There are several buses waiting,
but none of them are right. We ask people at the bus info office, and at some
of the bakeries and coffee shops, but nobody can understand us. Someone makes a
vague gesture to one of the stops, so that’s our best hope. A bus comes in with
no numbers on it, but it does have the name of the stop that we need, so we get
on, and ask the driver “Tunnel?” He says “Ya, ya, tunnel.”
The
bus goes through the residential neighborhood, with small farms all along the
way growing corn, melons, squash. The homes are built in a style that looks
similar to those in the Alsace or Swiss hills. We stop at a turn-around, with
nothing much around us. The driver points down a small street, showing us where
to walk. We walk about for a half mile, with one other couple following us, no
signs or any other evidence of a museum, no people, just an occasional bicycler
or passing car. The homes have neat, fenced yards with gardens and fruit trees.
The
museum is just another one of these farmhomes, with an entry portal to the
courtyard. Here, we see a narrow entry into the tunnel. The story is laid out
in a small museum in the house, and with news stories and photos along the
walls around the tunnel. A side room, with ammo crates for seats, shows an
unnarrated video documenting the building of the tunnel, and some scenes of the
siege. The family of the farm couple who gave their home over to the tunnel,
and also gave some care and comfort to the solders building it, run the museum
to keep their legacy alive. The story is all very dramatic, and brings some the
reality of the war to life.
The
tunnel extended for 800 meters beneath the runways of the airport, providing a
safe corridor, primarily for the soldiers, but also for some civilians, to
bring communications, weapons and food into the city during the four year
siege. The Yugoslavian and Serbian armies were installed in the mountains all
around the city, subjecting the people to daily shelling and indiscriminate
sniper fire. The UN nominally held the small region of the airport as neutral
ground, but no one was safe at any time or place. The hand-dug tunnel, about a
meter wide and 1 ½ meters high, usually half full of water, was the solution.
Now,
the museum maintains about 20 meters of the tunnel that visitors can actually
walk through. It’s an eerie, unsettling experience. The video is also
disturbing, showing some of the buildings in the city that we’ve just ridden
past being bombed, on fire, women clutching babies running through gunfire,
soldiers in the streets.
The
evidence of the war is all around us. We have bullet holes in the glass wall of
our terrace, and a clear view of a mortar blast in the apartment building
across the courtyard. Our host, Adnan, has the kind of survivalist mentality
that comes from growing up in a war, with a garden, water storage and heavy
doors to his home compound.
We
get some salad fixings and go back to the compound to eat in. Adnan comes up
with a block of toilet paper, asks how everything is going, and tells us that
for the next few days, we’ll have a full house.
Our
apartment is fine so far. The couple in “our” room departs, leaving for
Dubrovnik. We chat for a bit, telling some of our experience there. Adnan’s
wife comes up to clean the room for us, and we can move in. It’s big and
comfortable, with a sofa, coffee table and terrace. Not long after, we are
joined by a young couple from the UK, here for a few days, then going on to
Dubrovnik, just as the others did. We note the fact that with the four
bedrooms, there is actually room for eleven people here, so at least we don’t
have a full house.We want to organize our next trip to
Belgrade, so we take a walk to the bus station, about two miles away, and an
interesting city tour along the shops and parks. We pass the green market on
the way, where a suicide bomber killed a couple dozen people in 1994,
triggering UN action against the aggressive Yugoslav army. Bob tries to buy a bag of walnuts, but his first vendor doesn't understand and really doesn’t want to deal with him. A second woman understands, and lets
him buy a bagful.
At another block along the way there
is an old building housing the meat and dairy market, so we stop in for a look.
The place is full of counters with chicken, beef, eggs and cheeses in all their
old-world glory. We buy some sheep cheese and some cured beef for lunch. We
feel a little guilty buying our small portions; all the vendors are proffering
samples and seem so disappointed in us when we make our meager order. Our
snacks are incredibly delicious, though, so we manage to console ourselves.
At
the bus station, we’re told that there’s only one bus to Belgrade, leaving at
6am, not an easy time for us. We walk over to the nearby train station to check
our options there. It’s bizarrely empty, post-apocalypse empty. Have you ever
seen an empty train station? Does not bode well for our train plans, and sure
enough, the lonely ticket clerk barks, “No train to Belgrade!” when we ask. Back to the bus
station for our tickets. Next, we head over to the tram stop to find out if
there are any trams running at 5am, so we can get a ride to the bus. No luck, we’ll
have to make sure we can get a cab. We wait for a tram back into town, finding
the schedule somewhat less agreeable than in Dubrovnik. After a half hour wait,
thinking we should have just walked, our tram arrives. Sarajevo had one of the
first tram lines in Eastern Europe, “Before Vienna,” as Adnan has told us. It’s
possible that this is the very same track as our car bounces and shrugs along
the rails.
Now
we’re ready for dinner, and some pizza is what we want. As we stroll through
the old town, we can’t seem to find any of the dozens of restaurants we’ve seen
before. We pass shops and coffee bars, no restaurants. Finally we see a big
Coca-cola banner with pictures of pizza hanging over the entry to a very nice
garden café plaza. We go in and ask for a table, saying we’d like to order
pizza. The waiter looks confused. “Pizza?” he calls over to a co-worker,
“Pizza?” He tells us, “No pizza, just drinks.” Ok, we can’t argue about the
signs, we just continue our search. Another place has an actual menu on their
door, listing different pizzas, so we stop and ask for a table and pizza. Again
the waiter says, “No pizza, just drinks.” We look confused, so he adds,
“Kitchen fire.” Ok. Next!
Finally,
we walk down a street that’s filled with canopies covering café tables, dozens
of people, tv screens at each section and loud music. It’s like a nightclub,
but with everyone sitting and talking at the tables. Along the street we find
an actual little restaurant and get a table just inside, since there’s a lot of
smoking going on at the outdoor tables. We’re rewarded with a nice dinner of
pizza and salad.
Moving day. We walk down the hill to
the bus station in the cool of early morning. Our bus to Sarajevo will make
three border crossings: along the coastal road into Bosnia-H for about 30
miles, back into Croatia, then into Bosnia-H again as we head inland. The last
crossing is a real pile-up, a two-lane highway with a couple of booths in a
small town. Part of the log jam of cars and tour buses is caused by the regular
coffee break going on, as we see three customs agents enjoying their espressos
while we wait.
We’re finally through, and in our
fifth country. It’s different almost immediately, as we see minarets alongside
the church steeples in the towns as we pass. Almost every quarter mile, there’s
a fruit and vegetable stand, selling watermelons, plums, peppers, tomatoes,
wines and grapes from the small farms and vineyards all along the way.
The
landscape becomes mountainous, although we’re following the flat passage along
the Nerevta River. We have a brief stop in Mostar, a popular destination for
the tours. The historic, medieval old city was terribly destroyed in 1992, bombed
by the Yugoslavian and Croatian armies. Many of it’s treasured monuments were
lost: the bridge, cathedral, mosques, the ancient library and more. As we drive
through the streets, we can still see buildings riddled with bullet holes,
blackened shells of hotels or apartments, war scars very much in evidence
everywhere. It’s also very disturbing to
see that so much of the damage is in what are clearly residential parts of the
city, that the fighting was right on everyone’s very doorstep.
The bus continues through a
landscape that reminds us of Colorado or New Mexico, high granite
ridges, bright blue river, mixed forests of pines and hardwoods on the
mountainsides. The towns are more alpine than Mediterranean. In the pastures,
there are structure that look like hay teepees, about six or eight feet high,
all along the farmlands. Instead of fruits, the roadsides vendors offer jars of
honey, stacked on plank saw-horse tables, gold to dark amber. I wonder if the
haystacks are giant beehives, but I can’t find any information on it…yet.
We make a twenty minute stop at a
restaurant, but it’s strange because it’s a nice, sit-down tourist spot,
nothing at all for quick sales to a bus group, not even a soda machine. It’s ok
for a bathroom break. All the diners are enjoying their dinners while the bus
riders are milling around the parking lot. They have lot valets with big hoses
spraying water over the asphalt to cool the place down. We wish we did have time to eat, though,
because the specialty is traditional roast lamb. They have great coal fire
pits, each with a waterwheel working a set of spits over the fire, each spit
holding an entire lamb, in progressive stages of roasty doneness. It’s quite a
sight, and everyone takes photos and videos. The patrons are all served great
platters of chunks of meat. The restaurant is situated on a high ridge looking
over the river, open-air and sheltered by leafy trees. It’s very nice. We have
a suspicion that the bus drivers are at a secret table having a nice lamb lunch
while we wait.
We arrive in Sarajevo along a parkway
stretch of modern malls, car dealerships, office buildings, typical commercial
sprawl. Our host, Adnan picks us up at the bus station and takes us to his
apartments. We go upstairs, and he tells us he has small problem. And so do we.
Although we make our bookings for whole apartments only, this is obviously an
apartment of several rooms with a shared dining room, kitchen and bathroom. His
problem is that someone booked our room on another site before he accepted our
booking, so we need to stay in a twin bed room with no balcony for tonight,
then we move to our double bed, balcony room tomorrow.
OK, so these things happen. Adnan makes an effort to appease us, giving
us a key to one bathroom for ourselves, and jars of homemade apricot jam and
ajvar.
The old city is just two blocks or
so away, an easy 5 minutes walk. The diversity of the people here is
immediately evident. Tall, short, dark,
fair, old young, covered, uncovered, any other opposite combinations you could
think of. It seems there are dozens of mosques in the area. A couple are quite
large and obviously important sites for the tourists. We look into the grounds
but don’t enter. There a avenues of shops with a broader selection of tourist
knick-knacks and quality items, jewelry, textiles, metalwork. Some of it is
really beautiful. I have a hard time walking past a man selling lovely goat and
sheepskins, gorgeously wooly, but Bob gives me a Look.
We stop for dinner at a popular spot
for the regional specialty,ćevapi, which is minced beef and spices
rolled into little hot dog shapes and roasted or grilled. That’s pretty much
all that’s on the menu here, and the waiter just brings out the same plates to
set up each tableful of diners. The choice is just how many pieces do you want,
5, 10 or 15. We sit down, and our table is shared by a young couple from
Toronto. Her family is from Bosnia, taking her to Canada at the age of two,
escaping from the war.
We get the dinner, ćevapi, with a
big soft pita, diced onions, and a cream cheese spread in a side dish. The
drink we have is a kefir yogurt. Our Toronto friend, the guy, gets an order
with 15 pieces. It’s quite a dishful.
As we walk home, the evening has set
in, cooling everything down. The streets are decorated with strings of lights,
and lots of people are out walking and sitting in the cafes.
It’s an official Beach Day! We take
the bus to the resorts, planning to return to the President Beach. When we
arrive, we find the chairs and umbrellas fully booked, none available. So, we
walk through the grounds back towards Copacabana, but see signs to Cava Beach, a
new spot for us. We head down a steep stone road, leading to a steeper, narrow
stone stairway, thinking that it’s going to be a real pain if this doesn’t work
out. But it’s beautiful and perfect, a rocky cove, not at all crowded, no kids,
with chairs and showers and deep water.
One thing we like about getting a
tourist pass is that you have an easy directory to the major sites, some you
might not visit otherwise, like the Marin
DržićHouse. So we have a few more admissions included that we’ll finish off today.
The Museum of Modern Art is housed
in a great villa, the residential mansion of Božo Banac, overlooking the coast
just a block away from the fortress walls. The villa is huge and impressive in
itself, with great high ceilings, modern wrought iron railings and chandeliers,
and a gigantic terrace that serves as the sculpture garden. It’s difficult to
imagine anyone just living here, even Božo. The exhibit is a retrospective of a
Dubrovnik artist, fauve-flavored landscapes and floral still lifes. It’s very
enjoyable.
We
have one more gallery on our ticket, in the city center. It’s a small
townhouse. At the entry is a room memorializing Ron Brown, Secretary of Commerce
under Clinton, who was killed with 34 others in a plane crash coming into
Dubrovnik’s airport while on a mission to support post-war economic
development. This event continues to feed numerous conspiracy theory
enterprises. The room is locked, though, so we continue upstairs to see the
small but elegant gallery showing a modern photo-realist artist.
Our obligations
to our tourist card complete, we pick up our bus to the beach, heading back to
the resort area for a different hotel beach. The Dubrovnik President is a four
star hotel, and the beach area is really nice. We have a pleasant spot near a
cement pier, looking out to the channel and islands around us. Soon, we realize
that we’re at the hang-out spot for the local kids, and our view is filled with
about fifteen or more teenagers.
The group
ranges from very young teens to young adults, mostly boys. They immediately
start up a fairly predictable male hierarchy behavior pattern of harassing and
bothering one another. A round of spitting at each other starts up, and they
all start chasing and spitting until one pushes the limits against another,
over-spits, and the offended party leaves the group. The rest gather around to
chastise the offender, while an ambassador goes off to placate the offended. Soon
they’re all reconciled, and the offended party rejoins with a free punch
allowed on the offender to restore equilibrium. It’s like watching social behavior on Animal
Planet.
They start up a
game of using a towel like a slingshot to launch each other off the pier. Two
guys are designated launchers and the rest line up like at a waterpark ride,
going over an over. A couple of the older guys are serious athletes, making
complicated twisting back flip summersaults off the pier. They are all pretty
entertaining.
If we’re going to walk the City
walls, today’s the day to get it done. We start out relatively early to avoid
the afternoon sun and crowds, but it’s going to be hot and crowded no matter
what. It’s still a great site to visit. There are about two miles of walls
around the town, with turrets and lookouts, occasional small shops, and lots of
photo opportunities. At one spot, there’s a young guy with a speaker set and
videographer, doing a wild dub-step routine. He runs though it several times,
getting hotter and more exhausted for each take. He is a fun sight, though. We
take about two hours to make the route, enjoying it very much.
We
wind our way through the crowds to go out, stopping at the fountains to fill
our water bottles with cold spring water, one of the fun activities available
for free. Our bus comes right along. We see that the city puts the effort into
managing the crowds. The buses run every ten or fifteen minutes, so we don’t
wait at all. We have a tour to another side of the city, on the hills beyond
the harbor at our apartment, where there are large resort hotels and condos.
We
walk through park-like grounds to the Copacabana beach. It’s a crowded swim
park, with water toys, inflated climbing walls and bouncy rafts for kids.
Still, we manage to find a good spot. We commence with our business of swimming
and relaxing.
We grab a bus to the city again,
where our first stop is the Marin
DržićHouse, an
impossible to pronounce Renaissance writer considered the “Shakespeare of
Croatia.” His former home is a small museum. It contains some costumes and
posters from recent productions of his plays, and a long, plaster-walled room
decorated with plaques of award-winning writers, leading to a mounted tv screen
and six folding chairs. The video is a 60 Minutes style show led by a reporter
literally wearing a trenchcoat, talking into a microphone as he stands in front
of irrelevant locations. If they tweaked it a bit, they could actually make it
more boring. And yet, even though there’s no English translation, we sit and
watch it for half an hour.
Next,
we give the Natural History Museum a try. It’s a private collection of oneAntun Drobac, donated to the city, and
also set in the donor’s former home. It’s a fun walk through the four floors,
with lots of child-friendly exhibits. We’re always in the mood for a nice
hippopotamus skull.
A
short walk through the stone lanes gets us to the Ethnographic, or Cultural
Museum. This is housed in a huge building that was used for storing the city’s
supply of grain. There are exhibits of daily life, traditional clothing, scenes
of work and home. We had just enough time to walk through before it closed for
the day.
Now
we’re ready for a swim. Just outside of the fortress walls is Banje beach,
popular with the tourists for its location. It’s run by an adjacent nightclub, the chairs and umbrellas are pricey, and we only have a couple of hours. Instead, we do as the locals do and
find a shady spot along the rocks for our towels. Swimming is fine, with a
great view of the city walls and the sailboats coming into the harbor.
We’re visiting the Maritime Museum, always
a favorite with Bob. It’s also inside the fortress walls, very cool. The sea
plays a vital role in Croatia’s history, and the stories of the master sailors
and shipbuilders are really interesting. There are lots of model ships and
maps, which Bob thoroughly examines.
We
stop for lunch at a restaurant with a garden terrace tucked away from the
crowds. We share a simple plate of stuffed calamari and have a pleasant break.
After
lunch, we visit the city museum, in the former Rector’s Palace, which was the
city’s seat of government. The story of the early government of Dubrovnik is
interesting. Slavery was abolished in the 15th century. There was a
prominent politician and diplomat, Stjepan Gradić, considered the Father of the
Homeland, who endorsed a philosophy of inclusion, that all the citizens should
be invested in the city, emotionally, economically and politically, so that
everyone contributed to the protection and prosperity of the city, for the
benefit of all. The best way to achieve this was to educate and care for all
the citizens, so they established some of the first public schools, orphanages,
a pharmacy and almshouse. When an earthquake destroyed the city in 1613, he was
in Italy creating a plan to bring foreign investors to the city, to purchase
food, building materials and tools to sell cheaply to the people of Dubrovnik
so they could rebuild their homes as quickly as possible.
We use our bus tickets to ride home,
saving ourselves from a long walk in the hot sun. We have our zucchini and
eggplant dinner on the terrace again, watching the moon come up over the
harbor.
We take a walk into Dubrovnik’s Old
Town, the fortress city. On the way, we stop at a pharmacy. I need Tylenol for
my cold, ibuprofen for my achy bones, and we’re running out of vitamins. We
learn that acetaminophen isn’t sold in Croatia, though we don’t know why. We
buy 12 non-aspirin pills, 24 ibuprofen tablets and 60 Centrum multivitamins for
$38! None of these things are sold through the regular stores. The pharmacies
also sell what we would consider cosmetics, like Eucerin or Roc skin care
creams, and we need a prescription for simple hydrocortisone. Almost everything
is behind the counter, so you need to ask the pharmacist for anything you want.
Sometimes you just want a CVS.
We
have about two miles to walk, along a busy street, but with some nice views of
the waters. We cross a bridge full of love locks, overlooking a swimming spot
off the rock cliffs. The University of Dubrovnik is on the way, with a
beautiful garden that we pass through for a cool and quiet break.We arrive at the city walls to see a plaza full
of tourists. The cruise ships all have a shuttle bus station near the entrance
to the city. Doesn’t look like a lot of fun, although the city does a good job
of keeping things well organized for these big groups.
The
city is interesting, with a wide avenue of ancient, polished stone that is the
main passage. Narrow little streets lead off to the sides, filled with banners
and signs for boutiques and restaurants. Tourists are all filling the shady
side of the street and sitting in huddles wherever the shadows fall on the
fountains or stairways. Most seem to be from the UK. There are passing tours, grim
groups shuffling along in the sun with numbered stickers on their chests,
following a leader with a numbered paddle in the air. Most look like they would
really enjoy sitting in a café with a beer instead. The Japanese tourists are bundled up with
sunbonnets, parasols and knitted arm-mittens to keep the sun off them.
We
walk though the town and around the walls at the inner harbors, where we find
an aquarium to visit. It’s all in the inner walls of the fortress, with arching
barrel-vaulted stone ceilings. It’s cool and dark and practically empty. The
small exhibits show mostly local fish, the types I can see while swimming. They
play soft classical music that fills the tunnels. We give a little extra time
to the octopus, piled against his glass wall, so tender and delicious.
We
stop for just a shared sandwich lunch, sitting under a canopy on the main
street, watching the tour groups pass. Everything is much pricier here, and it
takes some of the fun out of it to pay $12 for a small sandwich. But, oh well,
it’s Dubrovnik after all.
The
entry fees for some of the attractions are fairly high, walking along the fortress
walls costs about $15 each. We decide to buy a Dubrovnik pass back at the
tourist office, which includes a week of bus fares, so we plan for more touring
tomorrow, and walk back to our place.
We
have a dinner of salad, eggplant, zucchini and tuna on our apartment terrace. The
zucchini is practically free at the grocery, about $0.25 each. There are three
big cruise ships at the piers. We can see the flashing neon lights of the disco,
with music carrying over the hills to serenade us.