And now a message from Russell

Trip Start Jul 30, 2008
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21
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Trip End Ongoing


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Where I stayed
Various Old Ladies
(Pristina hotels)

Flag of Serbia and Montenegro  ,
Thursday, October 2, 2008

For my much-anticipated personal week I decided to head to the Balkans. From Italy, I took a ferry to Bar, Montenegro and then a bus a little up the coast to Kotor, where I stayed with a nice old lady whom I met at the bus station. Kotor is a scenic seaside resort at the base of a large fjord, however the tourist season had definitly passed and the town was pretty quiet. After a few days, I decided to go to Kosovo and left Kotor early in the morning in hopes of making it across the border to Peja. It wasn't meant to be though and after two four-hour bus rides and a five hour layover in Montenegro's charmless capital, I found myself stranded in the moutain town of Rozaje, and without the comforts of warm weather or the latin alphabet. So I got a (freezing cold) hotel room directly behind the bus station and the owner, Nuka, kindly treated me to a small dinner and a coffee at a nearby cafe.

I woke up early the next morning determined to make it to Pristina and was thus quite surprised when the bus station commander told me that there were no buses to any part of Kosovo until the next day. It took about a minute of emphatic gesturing before I was able to deduce that the buses were canceled because of a Ramadan holiday (Bajram, I later learned).

Instead of waiting another day in Rozaje I decided to take a bus into Serbia and try to get into Kosovo another way. In hindsight, this decision was stupid. I spent the next 13 hours on three separate buses touring Southern Serbia before arriving in Skopje, Macedonia, tired, hungry, and irritable. The good news, though, was that Skopje is only 90 km from Pristina, and I finally arrived the next day.

Pristina is a pretty small city and serves as the capital of Kosovo, the country which declared its independence from Serbia only in February and is recognized by just about 50 countries in the world (FYI... U.S., Albania, Turkey - YES. Serbia, Russia, www.travelpod.com - NO). I spent several days in Pristina and was able to visit two nearby towns as well. And altogether, I found Kosovo to be a fascinating place. The country felt like the center of intersecting religions, cultures, time periods... everything. There are UN and foreign military personnel who share the streets with german luxury cars, peasants with horse carts, and school children who would fit in at any American school. The cities also felt incredibly safe and comfortable to be in too. Even though the streets and sidewalks are terrible and there are abandoned houses all over the place, there were children everywhere (Kosovo supposedly has the youngest population in the world) and the people were friendly and spoke english rather well. And the food and coffee was amazing and incredibly cheap.

When my time came to an end I boarded another bus for Skopje, connected to Sofia where I spent one day (dreary, not too interesting), and then took the overnight train to Istanbul.
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