Nov 07 2009
Turn it on again
SOFIA, Bulgaria — Sticking to a rakia-fueled promise to return to the region by year’s end, I’m back in the Balkans. Although not as a permanent thing yet, I am slowly working toward this pipe dream.
Archive for the 'Kosovo' Category
Mar 26 2009
Fighting my own Kosovo battle
My apologizes for the hiatus. My ailing organism is on the mend in Berkeley. If you’ve been following my Twitter, you know that I’ve been fighting a second case of Kosovo-perversion-acquired food poisoning for the past week or so. Yes, this republic has been an abusive lover, but what a lover she is. There is [...]
Mar 16 2009
Albin
Albin picks up. The 20-something Pentecostal Renaissance man (a former or current pastor, depending on the source) who believes that the Rapture is near cannot come to dinner. He’s at church, in the middle of a service, but will join us at the bar later. Thank God for the cellular phone.
Mar 15 2009
Visoki Dečani
In quick succession, the black-clad monk administered a holy trinity of beverages: water (father), espresso (son) and raki (holy ghost) accompanied by chocolate and poppy seed cookies. A kamilavka hat concealed abundant gray hair that matched his beard whose length reflected what were most likely decades of celibate life in one of Serbian Orthodoxy’s holiest sites, Visoki Dečani monastery, in western Kosovo. This was a hardcore holy man, and his appearance made me think of the eerie footage of Serb paramilitary forces being blessed by a priest before they went on to perpetrate in Srebrenica the worst atrocity of the Bosnian civil war.
Mar 13 2009
Where everybody knows your shame
Pristina is a small place. While respectable in terms of population and geographic area, it is nearly impossible to walk around without drawing the attention of friends or acquaintances every five or 10 minutes.
Mar 11 2009
The infant’s teething
1. Packs of wild/stray dogs roam the streets, but it’s all good.
2. The power goes off a couple times a day, but it’s all good.
3. Toilet paper, soap and clean water are privileges, but it’s all good.
4. Pavement is optional, but it’s all good.
Mar 09 2009
12-hour Pristina night
Only in Pristina: Drinking and dinner included a former KLA fighter turned venture capitalist who thinks I should invest with him, two hired Roma musicians, a 27-year-old Vermont state representative, a Kosovar born-again Christian rocker and other assorted folk.
Mar 08 2009
Kosovo
It was a long road of crazy Albanians, but we’ve finally made to Kosovo after an epic drive through progressively backward Balkan backwaters. (This helps explain the lack of Internet chatter on my part, since widespread Internet access isn’t exactly a cornerstone of second- and third-world Europe.)
Mar 05 2009
It’s on
“Nate, man, can you please pass me the slivo,” Bashkim said, referring to the bottle of plum moonshine next to me in the backseat of his 1998 Opel Corsa. This wouldn’t have seemed out of the ordinary had my Kosovar Albanian friend/fixer/translator/driver not been at the wheel of the his European hatchback as it braved the Croatian toll road somewhere between Zagreb and Split amid rain and violent winds about 3 a.m.
Mar 24 2008
An anniversary
Today marks nine years since the start of NATO’s bombing of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia to end Slobodan Milosevic’s brutal crackdown on Kosovar Albanians. Belgrade is marking the occasion by proposing an ethnic partition of parts of northern Kosovo where Serbs are a majority.
Creating a Republika Srpska-style zone in Kosovo may prove to [...]