Hotel Begolli Pristina

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In any case I guess he was satisfied that I had mastered the art of relieving one's self so he just exhaled a huge puff of cigarette smoke, flicked the butt into the wall toilet and left me there enveloped in his nicotine. Not that I would have touched it anyway with anything other than the sole of my shoe, but I couldn't figure out to flush this rusted out thing. Mr. Three Teeth somehow knew from his perch that I didn't flush and he came ...

... angeschaut (und zur Abwechslung mal ordentlich gegessen). Es gibt noch ein paar interessante Kloester in der Umgebung, vermutlich sogar zu besichtigen, dafuer reichte die Zeit dann aber nicht mehr. Die Kloester sind alle serbisch (die Kosovaner sind ja Muslime, auch wenn man das eigentlich nicht merkt, Pristina gibt sich sehr westlich und die Frauen ebenfalls). Kosovo ist das historische Zentrum Serbiens, daher wollen die Serben den Kosovo nicht abgeben.

Gruss
Ralf

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I gave up after about an hour and went to see the man who ran the guest house - an old university professor who was completely eccentric.

I asked him about buses to Croatia and he shook his head, chuckled and said that it would be very hard to do. Not good!

I started feeling like I'd made a one way trip into a country I wasn't allowed to leave. Then it got worse...

I asked the Professor if it would be best for me to just head back to ...

... like me still trucking. Kosovo is not exactly a hot spot for travelers these days, not yet at least. Right now it's more of a joint project between the UN and EU, keeping the Serbians at bay, the EU presence in evidence everywhere. As such it's the largest preserve of second-language English speakers between Athens and Dubrovnik. If this improves its possibilities for tourism, that hasn't happened yet, though the possibilities are there ...

... few people on Earth that don't). A small café just down the hall from me opened up and was almost instantly stormed by Kosovans eager for their first coffee of the day (Caffeine is one of the three staples of living in the Balkans, the other two being Nicotine and Rakija- a spirit they all drink but each country claims is their national drink.) It was then I decided what I would have to do in order to stay awake. I headed into the little ...

... We had taken a taxi from the bus station to the 'bridge'. This bridge divides the Serbian/orthodox/Cyrillic side from the Albanian/Muslim side of Mitrovica, Kosovo. 'Save Us, Russia!" was emblazoned in Cyrillic letters on a banner strung along one of the main roads in Serbian Mitrovica. A man sporting a Cetnik cap selling Serb propaganda at the square. The streets are clean and filled with kiosks of all types--stockings, magazines, movies, food. The church on the hill looks ...

... that. So, Kosovo. If you're like me, that name means fighting somewhere near Bosnia in the nineties...or maybe that was Chechnya. What's the difference between those two anyway? Well here we go, another brief history. First off, Chechnya is in Russia, Kosovo is in southern Serbia and Serbia borders Bosnia. Both were part of Yugoslavia. The mess in Kosovo goes back to 1389, when the area was conquered by the Turks. At this point, the Christian Serbs abandoned the region to ...

First off, whenever people asked us where we were going after Belgrade, or even the people we met on the bus on the way there, everyone expressed various mixes of surprise, concern or hilarity when we said Pristina, the capital of the Serbian province of Kosovo. Apparently Kosovo isn't a huge tourist destination. Since the bloody civil war in 1999, which ended with NATO intervening to stop what looked to become a genocide, and further violent uprisings in ...

... often only to find rubbled buildings,burnt cars and a danger of UXO,mines and booby traps all around.As we passed through their villages,they were often to be seen standing in roadside huddles,patiently waitng for the assistance of KFOR to render it safe to re enter their shattered homesteads. Serbs,and sometimes gypsys were making the opposite journey,getting out while the going was good,unwilling to stake their future in a province governed ...