Arrival in Pristinë
Trip Start
Jan 06, 2006
1
54
120
Trip End
Sep 02, 2008
Pristinë,
Serbia and Montenegro
Friday, October 13, 2006
Bro and I caught the bus from Belgrade to Pristinė at 9.45. The kind folks at LP led me to expect that the bus wouldn't take all that long. After all, the distance is something less than 400 kilometers. How long can that take?
Nine hours, apparently. At this time, we still hadn't discovered that Kosovo isn't in Serbia, and we were surprised by the lack of proper highway connecting Belgrade and Pristinė. Most of the trip was on 2 lane rural roads, shared by tractors, horse carts, and going through every city on the way.
At about 3.30 our bus pulled into Novi Pazar. It's a Serbian city on the border with Kosovo. Bro and I were the only people from our bus to get onto the connecting bus to Pristinė. After half an hour we arrived at the border with Kosovo. Ukranian troops working under the UN guarded the border and our passports were examined. Then we continued along the road to Pristinė. It was mostly quiet, a beautiful drive, going through forested hills, rural pastures, old bridges, until I heard someone say "Holy S***!" again.
The road turned from paved asphalt to gravel all at once. I looked out the window to see why: the road was supposed to continue along a bridge over an inlet of a lake. It couldn't though: the bridge was another victim of a cruise missle or something like it. It was a pile of rubble in the water and someone was fishing off of a part that stuck out of the water.
Part of the way along we stopped in Mitrovica and a young lady got on the bus. She saw that there were only three people on it and said hello to us. When she realised that we didn't understand her language, she asked us what we were up to in Kosovo. When Bro and I said we were tourists, she said, "oh, lucky you." Then she turned to the driver and left it at that.
As we came into Kosovo, the view from the bus revealed an "undeveloped" landscape. The roads were a bit worse than before. There were UN vechicles and Nato military jeeps. Bro saw a peasant with a scythe for his first time and many vehicles were powered by either livestock or modified lawnmower engines. The buildings looked a bit rougher and as we pulled into the Kosovar plain it was devoid of trees. Smoke seemed to drift up from fires every few kilometers and we couldn't believe our eyes when a stack of like that of a nuclear power plant rose on the horizion to the North West of Pristinė. It turned out to be a coal plant, but the juxtaposition was overwhelming.
As we came into the city, the road jammed with traffic and I asked the lady if, when we got out, she could point us in the direction of the city centre. She said she was headed in that way herself, and that she could walk with us part of the way.
Her name was Miriana and she was 27. She was coming to Pristinė to get a better job and to be with her fiancé. She had worked in Mitrovica as a travel agent, but she wanted to find something with better pay in a bigger city. I was surprised that Kosovars could afford to even travel, from what I had heard about the place I thought that it was pretty poor. But she said that Kosovars travel to places like Tunisia and Egypt. She also said her fiancé was Albanian and she was Serb. A star cross'd love, perhaps. Later someone told us that an Albanian would never be with a Serb and suggested such a thing would be seen as unclean. But she showed us the way to 'Bil Klinton' street (a nearby apartment building had a huge poster of the guy), and from there we managed to find our pension.
On the way to the pension we had a first learning experience. I naively thought that because Kosovo is generally considered part of Serbia that it was. My little LP didn't suggest otherwise. And, thinking that Kosovo was to Serbia like Quebec is to Canada, we just expeced that Serbian money would be accepted. Unsuccessfully trying to buy a doner kebap in Serbian dinars clarified the matter pretty well. General rule: when you can't use a country's currency somewhere, you probably no longer in that country. In Kosovo, the Euro is king.
We walked a long way, with some blind faith that we would get to our pension eventually. Going along the way was a surreal experience: white trucks with UN decals in black were parked everywhere, so was a lot of litter, and most of the buildings had unfinished exteriors. It was also really easy to see the stars (ie, it was really dark). Street lights here are extremely rare and most of the light comes from lights that people put on their houses to make up for the lack of municipially organised lighting. There weren't really any signs for the pension, but the rare street sign seemed like a god-send. Our LP wasn't helpful as the place was off the map. Eventually I saw a tattered sign for a guest house with an arrow and the same phone number as our guest house. Down a street and then a hill. Tada, we found the place.
The owner, an electrical engineering professor, with a professor's forgetful/tangential-like manner, showed us to our room. He showed us the television set and how give it power with a power bar and then how to turn it on with a remote. Then he showed us how to turn on the shower heater with a switch and the shower water with a clever little lever that is just like a tap faucet.
He had a keen, soft voice and had a certain pride showing us these things like he was teaching us something new and interesting. He was really a very nice man and he explained the local currency issue by saying that Kosovars have never had their own currency. He left and took the remote with him. He came back a moment later to give it back to us. We had arrived in Kosovo. Hooray!
