Michael Totten is my favorite on line writer. Why? He constantly goes places that you and I would love to see but either don't have the cohones or the drive to get there. And once he's in these places that you and I would love to visit, he writes the most informative, beautiful articles that make me jealous as a writer and joyful as a reader.

Totten is just back from the Balkans - and not the nice, safe touristy Balkans but the places that are still seething from the ethnic and religious confrontations of the 1990's.

Like Bosnia:

Outer New Belgrade looks more or less like what I expected in a post-communist city in Eastern Europe, but Old Belgrade is beautiful, sophisticated, stylish, and fun. Neither Sean nor I had any idea what to expect from Serb villages aside from the fact that they're in no way cosmopolitan as the capital is. Small Serb towns and villages - especially in the Republica Srpska - were also the least friendly places for any Americans brave enough to visit the former Yugoslavia as it violently came apart at the seams in the 1990s. Serbian-American relations are tense again since American-backed Kosovo declared independence from Serbia in February this year. Extremists in the capital responded by firebombing the American Embassy and a McDonald's.

The countryside beyond the city limits was flat agricultural land that looked more or less like the American Midwest. Sean and I could have been in Iowa or Illinois. Bosnia, we knew, is famously much more rugged, and we'd be there in less than two hours.