So Over Kosova

Ugh, forget being hip and cool, and liberal-minded. Give Kosovo back to Serbia. Now. This has been the most emotionally trying day of my life and I never want to go back to Kosovo again. Not even Sidney Crosby’s winning goal last night provides me any solace in the fact that Kosovo has actively tried to destroy my life.

So, without further ado, let me invite you to Kosovo by Foot: an intimate guide to Kosovo. The best way to experience Kosovo by foot is to bank with a Credit Union that only has one branch in your small home town. This will ensure that you cannot take out any money with your bank card because it’s not an official country. Also, it is not an official Eurozone member, so they cannot exchange any money in their banks. I exclaimed to the bank teller, “I’m trapped in your country!” and he, fully comprehending what I said, reiterated that point with a simple, “Yes.” I had all the money in the world (except USD or Euros, unfortunately), and it was useless. As it was already 10 in the morning, my iPod was losing power, and I hadn’t eaten yet. The bus was only 3 euros to Prizren and the Albanian border, and I had absolutely no choice but to walk out of Prishtina, and out of Kosovo.*

One thing that can be said about American military intervention is that it tends to turn everywhere into Spokane, Washington. Trust me, this is great if you’re looking for Mexican food, cheap shoes, or freedom (—which, ironically, I was) but if you’re not with car, it ends up being a painfully and dare-I-say needlessly long walk out of the strip mall development of outer Prishtina. It was an agonising walk to open road, and I discovered just outside of the city centre, near a café featuring a large Statue of Liberty, that carrying my 25-kg backpack in near-spring weather was not going to be a viable option. Outside a hiatused construction site, I reluctantly donated to the local barter economy my trusty pair of gumboots, a yellow and gray striped cardigan, the rest of my shaving cream, a copy of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Turkish Embassy Letters, some pasta, and my towel. Not a huge haul, but as astutely noted later, I still made some scrounger’s day.

As much as I would like to paint a vivid picture of the mid-Balkans and use the English language to summon evocative descriptions of mountain passes, rich seas of oak forests where intrigue and brigandry abound, unfortunately contemporary Kosovo was not the setting. I am neither Lady Mary Wortley Montagu nor Lord Byron, and all naively romantic imagery was sadly crushed by the realities of the international banking system—albeit a system that responded accordingly to the political-economic situation descended from the same that Montagu and Byron toured hundreds of years earlier. However, they never had to worry about their debit cards not working, so things were ultimately worse for me.

Onwards I marched, passed by Finnish tanks, the Danish Refugee council, bus after bus, and two American armed hummers (who honked and waved/cheered me on) as the clouds circled overhead and signaled a fairly severe storm was gathering. The worst part was knowing that I would be fine. I knew very well that I would be sleeping in a warm bed later that evening, and that everything bad that was happening to me at that time was entirely of my doing. I was the agent of change. I led myself down this path and I had no one to blame but myself. I just needed to get over this hurdle, which in this specific case was a mountain and the Albanian border. So instead it was just tedious, fleeing from Kosovo by foot with everything I owned on my back and no breakfast in my stomach.

After several hours of walking and a few rides from village to village with local delivery trucks, I had some luck just as the rain was coming down. I started to walk up the hill into the forested mountains when a young man picked me up. He spoke no English but enough common-knowledge words to explain to me that he had been a sniper in the war and had been part of an ambush of a Serbian convoy ten years ago on the very road we were on at that moment. He bought me a coffee before dropping me off at a café at a turnoff and going home. The café was at the crest of a hill looking down on the border with Albania and a crane truck stopped and the fat, jovial driver hollered some non-sensical German phrases at me and told me to get in, regardless of the fact that he was blocking everyone on the single lane road. He fed me crab apples and told me he had lived in Switzerland. I assume that’s what he told me. He only spoke German and I am starting to doubt there are any similarities between the two languages, except what I assume the German language borrowed from English. From where he dropped me off I walked through the town of Suhareke and a young teenager, absolutely aghast at my present condition, insisted I get on a bus. I flat out refused and said I would be fine. He was horrified and made me take a 50 euro coin. I was horrified and insisted I had money but was choosing to walk. He would not take no for an answer and felt personally responsible for my well-being. He flagged down a bus, forced me on, and told the driver to make haste for the Albanian border. The driver, a man of rigid, socialist, no-nonsense upbringing, took me to Prizren because that was his route, and there was no room for exceptions.

At Prizren, I found myself in the same situation of walking through the town to the outskirts and trying to flag down a car, only this time fighting the rapidly depleting daylight. A man picked me up, took me through the border where I received no stamps (this is something that Albania and Kosovo may want to look into if they are serious about EU applications…) and took me to Kukes in Albania, a town nominated in 1999 for a Nobel Peace Prize for taking in a record number of Kosovar refugees fleeing the destruction. 11 years later, I was one of them. And as I had predicted, by midnight I was tucked into a warm bed eating a pizza and watching dubbed films on television and contending with the rank smell of my shoes drying on the heater. My material conditions had improved immensely, and I was ready for another attempt at Kosovo, this timed armed to the teeth with euros and a more concrete plan at getting to Montenegro utilising every resource available to me—specifically hard currency.

*Okay, so I could have opted for the sketchy black market money changers on the street but I don’t want to be supporting that sort of economy, and let’s face it, I live for this sort of adventure.