As for the trip itself, things are clicking after a few hiccups and a little food poisoning.  I’m staying up in the hills at the home of Isa, a 50-something property investor, and his son Adiran, who works for an advertising agency. 

Everybody seems to be checking me out on the street. Maybe it’s because I’m wearing the best jacket in the world.  In Bulgaria, one person assumed I was skinhead.  Another thought I was a “ho-mo-sexual.” Apparently, I haven’t graduated to gay skinhead yet.

The business end of this two-week trip is visiting the Kosovo Institute of Journalism and Communication, to which I applied this past summer.  I punted admission  til next year for a variety of reasons (working for the Mercury News and too many loose ends with this house of higher learning, among others).

My goals are fairly modest: Scout out this school and avoid parasitic infections. Anything else is just accoutrement.

***

Bulgaria Air gets my airline of the year award. This newish Airbus A319 from London to Sofia was white, without any logos or identifiable features other than the standard ID numbers.  However, the cabin was filled with comfy leather chairs. Beautiful flight attendants provided a paper cup filled nearly to the top with Bulgarian merlot,  a ham sandwich and a copy of the Sofia Standart newspaper. Passengers greeted the metal bird’s landing with muted applause.

***

I’m staying at the Communist-era Sofia flat of Yasen, a 23-year-old graffiti artist whom I met through CouchSurfing.  He lives with this mother, Laura, younger brother, and 95-year-old grandfather.

“It’s all about love, man,” Venet, a bartender, says in a thick Albanian accent between sips of Schweppes Bitter Lemon.

We’re standing near the back of Depot, where Shpat Deda — Kosovo’s version of James Blunt — is having minimal success at moving a crowd that’s more interested in the DJ with whom he’s alternating sets at the popular Pristina nightclub. (“Can you please talk a little lower,” he softly pleads at one point, alone onstage with an acoustic guitar and harmonica.)

Well in excess of 2 meters tall, Venet towers most of the participants in the ritual of bumping, grinding, smoking and drinking. The young man who has submitted himself to God and prays five times a day at whichever mosque is closest has little use for this escapist orgy that defines the Pristina nightlife. Yet somehow he’s here, enjoying myself more as an observer than a participant.

“You seem to be on a different level than these people here,” I say over the mix of ’80s dance music. “Not better or worse, but you see the world differently.”

A wide grin appears on Venet’s face.

“You get it, man” he says before describing the “lost” years of drugs, booze, chasing women, and an unspecified tragedy that led to his rebirth in Islam. Although most people in Kosovo are Muslims, what they practice is best described as Albanianism — a cultural Islam that embraces life’s excesses.  So Venet’s transformation was more akin to conversion than anything else.

“Are you having fun, enjoying yourself? Need another beer?” Venet asks.

I order a mineral water, to the consternation of our more leisure-inclined companions as Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” comes on.

Albin karaokes in central Pristina. Nate Tabak, 2009.

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.

I’m taking it easy tonight. In Pristina this means not ordering booze every time your glass is empty. Red wine with dinner, so I get a Coke. Still on Cipro for the food poisoning. Likely the delicious ĉevapi in Prizren, but no one believes this. They’re convinced that my weak American digestive system couldn’t handle minced-meat sausages served with mounds of kajmak (clotted cream); no way could it have been bacteria because of lax food preparation standards. In any event, the crash course in Kosovar living is over without injury or infidelity.

Albin’s with his bubbly, blonde lady friend, Yllka. For 25 minutes they speak with Bashkim in Albanian about genitalia sizes. The notebook is out, and I need to talk to Albin. Albin the Jim Jarmusch enthusiast. Albin the bearer of a get-out-of-apocalypse-free card and a license to debaucherize. Albin the man with a line into some Pristina rappers, including Nora, the hotel receptionist. Albin the key to a prime radio piece.

After some clarification about the unethical nature of paying reporting subjects, Albin agrees to introduce me to these rappers the next day. A righteous dude, even if he believes I’m going to Hell.

“Jesus is just alright with me.”

Visoki Dečani Monastery, western Kosovo. Nate Tabak, 2009.

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.

Yet, here he was graciously serving Kosovar Albanians, a French EULEX official and an American Jew — all guests at Visoki Dečani, protected by Italian KFOR soldiers who tote large assault rifles. It was a remarkable scene in what might assume to be a chamber in the Serbian nationalist heart, an organ that pumped bloody destruction throughout Kosovo and maintains that the country is Serbia despite clear evidence to the contrary. While these nationalists could hold up this awe-inspiring 14^th century complex as a prime example of their claim, the monks here apparently have more important concerns in their lives devoted to God.

As I nursed my beverages — which brought relief to an empty stomach ravaged by deliciously acquired food poisoning and the Cipro treatment — a much younger monk, tall, slender with black hair and a couple of pimples, Ilarion, took a seat at the long wooden table on Decani’s second floor and began a wide-ranging talk that seemed to embody the very essence of Christ. Shifting at ease between English and Serbian, with helpings of Albanian and French, he made only a passing reference to this virulent ultranationalism when he politely declined to have any of his words recorded, citing potential exploitation by extremists. Indeed, he spoke of love, divinity, monastic life, the universal nature of religion, even throwing Descartes into the mix. I had wanted to ask him about the whole Kosovo problem, but it didn’t seem relevant or appropriate, though he probably wouldn’t have minded.

A few hours later, chants in Old Church Slavonic harmoniously mingled with incense inside Decani’s medieval house of worship, illuminated only by candlelight for evening prayers. Shadows danced along the walls and ceiling, where frescos depicting biblical scenes waxed and waned in lightness and darkness, punctuating their competing yet symbiotic influences of East and West in an allegory of modern Kosovo. Standing in the back of the church with my secular Muslim Kosovar Albanian companions, I saw Bashkim cross himself several times and Adrijana wipe away tears.

This is what Kosovo could be.

There is no such thing as a quick, forced “stop and chat” when each encounter is nothing short of a minor celebration with some combination of warm embraces, hardy handshakes, kisses on the cheeks and increasingly frequent fist bumps, all combined with lengthy banter.

This is refreshing coming from the Bay Area, where not only is the threshold for acquaintance-worthy-of-public-acknowledgement so high, even running into a friend is sometimes too taxing for us.

“You Americans are like plastic,” said Nora, a 22-year-old hotel receptionist who raps in her spare time, quickly adding that she loves America “as a superpower.”

However, some of Pristina’s inhabitants long for the impersonal existence those of us who live westward (the course of empire, according to Bishop Berkeley) take for granted. Bashkim’s possible distant cousin Adrijana (it is believed that they share a relative who’s a pilot in Serbia, but this has yet to be confirmed) said a major problem is culturally appropriate levels of drinking and the embarrassing acts that result cannot happen anomalously. (See my Twitter feed)

In other news, Prizren is pretty amazing. Also two bombs exploded last night in Mitrovica/e.

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.

Lying awake in bed last night, I was wrestling with what to say about this infant of a country. I’d been here for a few days soaking it all in — and up, in the case of raki — without really dwelling on that much of this country remains in a Dickensian condition, with a healthy international military presence to keep a lid on ethnic violence between Albanians and Serbs. 

Indeed, this is all true, yet something more compelling going on: This place, Pristina in particular, is blossoming into a civil society that has largely broken free from the siege mentality that permeated everything and everyone during my short visit in 2006 when Kosovo was still a UN-administered province of Serbia.

A city once dark, depressing and desolate now bustles with life as people crowd streets lined with cafes, bars, restaurants and shops with little acknowledgement of the prevalent muck and decay. Conversations that seemed to dwell on war now take on aspirant qualities with talk of better futures, starting businesses, getting advanced degrees, and making music and art.

Dardan, a former Kosovo Liberation Army member who resembles Jon Lovitz and identifies himself as a Jew at heart, gracefully made the transition from guerilla fighter to real-estate investor, and now works for Phillip Morris International.  Talking in a dark café — whose air was thick with smoke likely thanks in good part to Phillip Morris — over copious amounts of Peja lager and raki, Dardan said it was difficult initially to balance the ideals of a freedom fighter of those of capitalism; I offered that perhaps becoming an entrepreneur represented part of the freedom for which he fought.

My man of action, Bashkim, and some of his compatriots still maintain that this struggling, tiny nation is a “shithole, but my shithole”) moving at a slovenly pace toward European integration.  Shithole, perhaps, but a special shithole with a brighter future.

Dragan, an official in Kosovo’s European transition agency, shared similar sentiments when we talked today in his central Pristina office, which included coffee service. As a Macedonian who has traveled to and from Kosovo frequently during the past five or six years, he said the progress is “remarkable,” acknowledging the many challenges in a country full of red tape and bureaucratic corruption. There is also the little matter of the global recession, which he said government has yet to acknowledge.

Another teensy problem: Negligible participation from Kosovo’s largest minority, the Serbs, who largely view as illegitimate Kosovo’s declaration of independence. But I will take that up later after making a longer trip to Mitrovica, the northern city divided between Serbs and Albanians that has been the site of recent clashes. We did a quick visit today and were not attacked, which happened to Bashkim when he was reporting there a few years ago.

We’re still recovering from this productive evening and a little encounter with Kosovo police. But Bashkim managed to avoid a speeding ticket (97 kph in a 60 zone) after telling them that I’m an American journalist Jew, which apparently means that drivers of such people are exempt from traffic laws. Perks, indeed.

Surprisingly little trouble, except two Albanian customs agents at the Montenegrin border had me pour them some homemade slivovitz. I’m assured that this was courtesy, not bribery.  There’s also the little matter of Albanian driving.  More on that later. But Bashkim is a hero behind the wheel.

We arrived in Kosovo late last night, getting a warm welcome from Bashkim’s parents, who live outside Pristine in Fushe Kosove/Kosovo Polje.  This delightful place is the symbolic epicenter of the great Balkan clusterfuck (see Battle of Kosovo in 1389, then Milosevic’s 1989 rant before hundreds of thousands of Serbs).