Quite an Adventure!

Well, I am almost done with my semester here! I finished my 30-page ISP on Monday and travelled back to Zagreb yesterday. I made it back from Kosovo in one piece - I would have written earlier, but I couldn't stand the thought of typing on my laptop anymore!

Getting to Kosovo was an adventure in and of itself. Because of all the politics and whatnot, there is no regular bus that runs between Belgrade and Prishtina. Instead, two Serbian brothers run a private coach between the two capitals daily. Gaby called this private number and got the info - we needed to meet them at the minibus outside of the main train station at 6:00am Friday morning. This bus was crazy. It was like the Knight Bus from the Harry Potter books - it would randomly pull over on the side of the road and people would jump on. Once, we stopped under an overpass and some woman came out of the ditch. At the toll plaza, some guy just opened the door and sat down upfront. It was so random!

We got to Gračenica, a small village near Prishtina, around 12:00. It's also a Serb enclave (Serbs are a minority in Kosovo and mostly live together in these small towns). We were the last people on the bus and expressed to the driver that we needed him to take us into the city, which he did. Then he called his friend, who was a taxi driver, who met us, translated for us, and took us to our hotel. He told Gaby "don't speak so much Serbian! Use English here!" So, from then on, we spoke English with everyone on the street.

We got there during the middle of jumu'ah (Friday prayer), so the mosques were full and the streets were empty. It was also International Labor Day, so only the cafes were open. After jumu'ah was over, the streets were full of men - we didn't see any other women on the street! We think it was because the kids were home from school for the holiday. When the guys heard us speaking English to each other, they would stop us and ask to buy us coffee (I think there was a marriage proposal or two, as well).
Prishtina was a small city. We walked around for a little while and Gaby did her interview while I sat in a cafe and worked on transcribing my interviews. Most of the buildings (as you can see from the pictures) are alphabet soup - UN, EU, OSCE, etc. There was some very interesting graffiti too, such as "EU-LEX, Made in Serbia."

Saturday saw a much more general population on the street. We had breakfast at the hotel and explored a little bit more, then got lunch and headed back to the hotel, where our taxi driver from the day before said he would meet us at 2:45 to take us out to the edge of the city where the bus was picking us up. He was there waiting for us! How nice it is to be chauffered around :-)

Our bus driver on the way back drove like an idiot, there is no other way to put it. Probably 80 miles an hour, which is about 40 miles too fast in a minibus, on roads that haven't had much maintenance. He got pulled over and got a ticket, but it didn't slow him down at all. The return trip was supposed to take about 7 hours and he did it in five.

Despite getting carsick on the way home, the trip was well worth it. It really put things in perspective - to think that Kosovo is the world's newest country and struggles with transition, governance, etc. It made me think of what Bosnia and other countries here were like 10 or 15 years ago.

I head to island Krk tomorrow for our final seminar & presentations! Back in Zagreb on Sunday night for our sending-off dinner, then flying to Vienna on Monday morning.