Kosovo

Got to Kosovo yesterday morning on an overnight bus, and am mostly recovering from the late night border crossings. Crossed from Bosnia to Serbia at about 2am; everyone got off the bus to smoke, and I urinated on the junkyard right next to the border. Then we piled back in the bus and tried to sleep for a few more hours, until we got to the Kosovar border.

On the Serbian side, which they don’t recognize as an international crossing, there is a small shack with two policemen and a tiny car. On the Kosovar side, there is a row of barbed wire, sandbags, and armored personnel carriers. The border is actually staffed by UN officials (the guy who checked my passport was Kenyan, and the guy who checked the bus for drugs was Bangledeshi), and the troops are NATO. They stamped UNMIK on a separate sheet from my passport, as there can be issues re-entering Serbia with what they consider this illegitimate stamp.

Got to Pristina and were dead tired from the lack of sleep and uncomfortable seats. Found a taxi driver to take us to “Pansion Professor”, a relatively cheap guest house. The driver agreed, as soon as his friend returned from an errand. Smelling scam, I backed away and started searching for someone else. But just then, another taxi drove up and produced a coke bottle full of gas. The driver poured it into his tank, and we were good to go.

There’s not too much to do in Pristina besides look at the UN buildings and try and figure out how to get inside. We did stop by where we think Chris Hammond works, but the guard didn’t believe our (admittedly shaky) story. Went out for Chinese food, as Hannah and I are bored by the Balkan standard meat, filo dough and yogurt combinations. Seriously, I have eaten so much yogurt. Yogurt drink for breakfast with burek, yogurt for bread dipping at lunch, and yogurt on top of veal burger for dinner. I love yogurt!

Today we took a bus to Gracanica, a Serbian enclave inside Kosovo, and the home of a 14-th century monastary covered in frescoes. I found it more impressive than the much more famous Giotto chapel in Padua. It is guarded by NATO, Swedes in this case, because there has been anti-Serb violence in the past.

Then we found a taxi to take us to the Gadime caves, which are not particularly spectacular compared to some of the other caves I’ve seen, but a welcome change from the church-mosque-museum beat. The stalactites all grow at strange angles, which is apparently something special. Our guide spoke “not so much” English, but was happy to tell us the same three things over again. Still, nice to be out of the sun and somewhere cool for half an hour.

For our afternoon in Pristina, we wandered to the Kosovar Museum, which has a great collection of pre-Medival finds from the area. Here, as in Israel, archaeology is profoundly political, as each side tries to find a historical basis to their claims. The museum captions were pretty one sided, but shows how the Illyrians turned into the Albanians at the fall of the Roman empire, and how they successfully defended the area from the Slavic “barbarians”. Sadly, the collection is mostly missing, as they transferred the best stuff to Belgrade for safe keeping from the NATO bombing campaign, and then the Serbs refused to give it back. There is a large poster pleading for help from the UN, which doesn’t seem to be forthcoming.

Hanging out at the hostel tonight, as Hannah and I feel pretty done with this place. Having a hobo dinner of pasta, tuna and weeks old pesto. One more bus ride to Nis, and then a train to Istanbul. The crusaders march on!