At Sarajevo hostel, live like you’re in a war zone (though you can leave any time)

A hostel in Bosnia is offering visitors a unique experience: the opportunity to live like civilians in a war zone.

But at the Sarajevo War Hostel, guests have the luxury of knowing they won’t be killed, starved or lose family or friends. And unlike the Sarajevans who actually endured the 1992-95 war, the visitors can leave any time.

Those who check in to the War Hostel are greeted by the owner wearing a helmet and a flak jacket. They get to sleep in rooms with just one bulb on the ceiling, running on a car battery. The plastic sheets on the windows are just like the ones the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees handed out to Sarajevans so they could replace window glass shattered by bombs.

At night, they use candles to move around the hostel and to read by. The walls are plastered with wartime newspaper articles depicting the daily struggle in besieged Sarajevo.

At the War Hostel, visitors quickly discover it is one thing to watch people surviving wars on TV, but it is really something else to spend the night on a sponge mattress on the floor, covered with military blankets, and in the darkness listen to the sound of exploding bombs outside. A tape of the bombs plays all night long.