Great Indoors of Kosovo

I haven't really been going out so much since I got to Ohrid. There's just one hostel in town and the weather has been bad so people just spend most of the day laying about on the balcony, TV room, and in the back yard. There are actually a lot of churches, old historical sites, beaches to see, and free bicycles to ride around on but we spent most all our time playing cards and chatting.

One of the days I went to the beach with my friend Emily that I met at the hostel. It was kinda cold and the 'beach' was made of pretty rough rocks but it felt good to lay out in the sun for a good long time. Emily has been backpacking around the Balkans for a long time now and seems to love the area. She's currently traveling with a young girl, Saranda, who is an American Albanian visiting her family in Albania and touring around the region. She's a nice girl but a little inexperienced so it's good that she found Emily to be her travel partner for a while. Saranda is fluent in Albanian and proves a useful if somewhat reluctant translator.

Every night we'd go out to tour the many bars and midnight eateries. One of the nights a group of 6 of us were seated for a lakeside table at 1:45 am, by far the latest that I've ever seen a tourist restaurant operating. One of the others in the group that I hadn't mentioned is a cool Irish guy named Ian. He's been traveling for more than a year and a half so far and did a little work in some places to kill the time. Recently he visited India and he's carrying several cases of silver and turquoise rings that he bought there. He gave one of them to Emily as a present; how nice of him!

The restaurants in Ohrid all serve traditional Macedonian food of course. I probably already talked about this in the last post, but I ate so many bacon wrapped chicken kebabs that I actually managed to get sick of them in 3 days. I thought it would be impossible. Most of the salads that came with the food seemed pretty Russian in style, though there is some good German potato salad available. I was with a couple vegetarians and they were having some huge difficulty finding anything more than cheese and tomatoes to eat, but hey, too bad for them. Most veggies that I've met put that side of them on vacation until they get home.

So anyways, I was having a perfectly lovely time at the hostel but then after a long long night of drinking I was convinced by Emily and her friend Saranda that we ought to travel to Pristina Kosovo together to see Snoop Dogg perform the next night. Also, they knew some local people that we could stay with and would show us around the city. Emily is supernaturally outgoing and tends to know a lot of locals everywhere. It's her dream to start a hostel in Pristina next year. Early the next morning, after 3 hours of sleep, we got on our way and didn't get to Pristina until 8 pm after a series of minor mishaps.

We got picked up by Emily's friend Noli and his gf Lydra. They're in their early 30s and have some sort of career assisting international peacekeepers in and around Kosovo. I hear that they got their start as translators for the international monitors that came into Kosovo before the west started bombing the shit out of Serbia in the late 90s. These so called 'monitors' were really special opps agents of various countries that gave assistance to the Albanian guerrillas and marked targets for the future. Here's the short version of what happened.

From after WWII to the early 90s, there was a country called Yugoslavia and covered most all of the western Balkans: Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia, Serbia, and Macedonia. The Serbians were the ones with the most power and guns in Yugoslavia so when Western style ethnic nationalism became powerful enough that the union started to fall apart, Serbia attacked pretty much everyone. They really blew the hell out of Kosovo because despite being part of Yugoslavia, it's mostly Albanian people living there and the communist country of Albania had recently collapsed into anarchy. Hundreds of thousands of people died fighting and there were many massacres of various groups before Bill Clinton decided to stop waiting on the European community and to bomb the shit out of Serbia with 75 days of air raids. Serbia surrendered but still claims Kosovo as part of it's territory though most of the world recognizes it as a separate country. This history made Clinton (and America) the heroes of the Albanian people and there are many many things named after him here. I think that he did the right thing, but I haven't heard much of the Serbian argument. From what I hear, the country is in denial over it's horrific war crimes, and actively lionizes the wort kind of people, like this unbelievable a-hole.

We did make it to the Snoop Dogg concert that night just in time to hear him take the stage but we could not get in. There were no more tickets for sale and Emily's friend in the police arrived too late to escort us inside himself. Oh well, we caught some of it on the news a day later. The next day and the day after were pretty much on the same schedule. We'd wake up at noon, get something to eat at 3, and then drink and chat until 4 am in that cramped little apartment. Not too inspiring but fun. I don't really have too much to say about this period of time other than that I felt a little sick all the time and I'm glad that I'm carrying a deck of Uno cards.

Finally, it was time to go from this very non-beautiful city. Saranda needed to part ways to go off and do things with her family. Emily wanted to go to Mostar in Bosnia to see this gem of a city. I didn't really have any plans in particular but I opted to head on towards Mostar with Emily. It would be skipping some of the sited in Albania and Serbia but who cares? I can't see everything and it would put me in a good place to part ways and explore Croatia on my own afterwards. Unfortunately the only way to get to Mostar was to visit Sarajevo Bosnia first and there were issues crossing the Serbian border so we had to travel through the night for 20 hours. It kinda sucked actually. We checked into a big and busy hostel here in Sarajevo and we'll get to making new friends immediately. She's probably going to want to move on sooner than me so I think we'll part here.