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Saturday morning: I left the Academy at 7AM. I had booked a taxi already. The bus to Skopje was due at 7.30.
I got to the bus stop around 7.15. When getting out, the driver told me to not buy a ticket until the bus arrived. I thought it was kind of a Macedonian thing, sort of like, 'this is how you can show you live here; do like the others - don't buy your ticket yet!' But after I got back I've heard from my colleagues that they weren't even able to buy their tickets until the bus arrived; the woman at the counter had just said 'no, you can't.' Why? Who knows...
I bought the bus ticket when I saw the bus drive into parking area. So did everyone else. The bus left at 7.21.
I got to Skopje bus station at around 08.10 - which was a bit annoying because the bus I meant to take to Pristina wasn't until 9AM. And the previous bus had been at 8AM, so then I had just missed it, but I hadn't intended to take that one...and if I had taken a later bus to Skopje, I would have missed the 9AM bus anyway. So it wouldn't have been ideal either way.
Because it was so early, the 'departure' board didn't even show Pristina yet - so I, having learnt to be 'Macedonian', decided to wait with buying the ticket. They had lots of other nice destinations, some of which were really far away. One said like...Kopenhagen - but that can hardly have been going all the way to Copenhagen.
I bought the ticket about 20 minutes before scheduled departure time. It was 320 denars, or about 5€. Then I went outside to the gate and waited. And waited. And waited.
The 9 o'clock bus to Tirana had left. So had two Nis busses that were going to Serbia. At 9.20 I had definitely started giving up hope every time a new bus drove into the parking area. A lot of other people seemed to be waiting too, though at around 9.45, I realized they were all actually going somewhere else.
I think it must have been almost 10, when a small shuttle labelled Pristina in cyrillic finally drove into the correct gate. I remembered that the next bus was supposed to leave at 10.10 - and that's when we left, so I don't think the 9 o'clock one ever showed, even though it had been on the board.
The trip itself was quite smooth. It only took a bit more than two hours, including the border. A person at the front was allocated the role of returning everyone's passports after Macedonian emigration control, and he had already given me mine, yet when he saw a Chinese passport, he automatically handed it to me. When I didn't take it, he looked confused, looked at the picture, and saw that that definitely wasn't me; it belonged to a slightly chubby Chinese male (who of course was also on the bus). He made sure to not make that mistake again when we got the passports back from the Kosovan immigration control...
I arrived to Pristina around 12.20. My friend had messaged me saying he'd go to the bus station at 12.00. If he wasn't there when I arrived, I was to just sit tight. I don't really know how we missed each other; it was a tiny station. But I found wifi, and said I was there. He couldn't find me and even tried to call on Viber. Basically I had waited around for half an hour or so (and he around 50 minutes) without seeing each other. Yet I'd actually sat in a fairly visible place.
'I've got bad news...' he said when we had properly said hello with a nice hug and 'how are you/how was the trip' formalities.
'There's no air con in my car...'
I had really thought it'd be something much worse, so I just laughed and said we'd probably be OK. He banned me from entering the car though until he had started the engine and opened both the windows. And lets face it, it was a sunny day with 33 degrees C.
We headed into the city center, where we parked the car and went for a walk. He showed me Kosovo's (or Pristina's...?) landmark, the NEWBORN letters decorated in different colours for different festivities, we went up into a church tower, saw the main square...ran into some of his friends. I was massively surprised when I saw a sign that I understood; they use the same word for hospital as we do in Iceland - and I've never seen that word in any other language.
We also went to a mosque, but I (preferably) needed more clothing to enter, so we got to borrow an imam dress/cloaky thing from a nearby kiosk to enter. I didn't need to cover my hair though, like in Uganda, but we still took pictures of me looking all silly/pretty in the golden dress.
After catching up a bit over a glass of soda in one of the most popular café/bars in town, we headed out of town towards a cave our Albanian friend had told me about, Gadime. In the car we listened to his music; a mixture of Turkish music and Eurovision songs. After all, Eurovision is really what made us good friends in the first place (yup, let's not get into detail about that but let's just say it involved some pretty nerdy Eurovision talk and a karaoke performance...)
Though my friend had never, as far as he could remember at least, been to the cave, we managed to find the right exit from the main street, then ask around until we found it. We had to wait some 10-20 minutes for the next tour into the cave; accompanied sightseeing only. But it was well worth the wait, and we were just chatting in the meantime.
The cave was quite big and...I don't know any of the geologic terms used but basically, it was nice. And cool. Not just a cool cave, but it was so good to walk into a cool cave after those 33 degrees without air con.
When we got out, we made ourselves ready for a roadtrip; we were heading for Prizren. It's Kosovo's second largest city, but more importantly, it's Kosovo's tourist city. I think my friend said it was an approximately two hour drive, but I'm pretty sure it didn't take that long, at least it didn't on the way back.
We opened the windows both on my side and his side to get some cool air running through the hot car. After a while though, when having reached the highway, my friend asked if it was OK to close one of the windows because of the draft. I may have mentioned this in the last post that people in the Balkans believe that ‘the draft will kill you’. I’ve only ever heard that when it had to do with a draft in a house, so I laughed because I wasn’t aware that it also applied to cars and just…wind.
Saturday evening: It was quite easy to understand why Prizren is more popular than Pristina; the...main part is small, cute and charming. There's a small river/stream running through, by which there are lots of restaurants where you can sit and eat. This is where we decided to sit down for dinner. My friend was starving, and all I had eaten was a...bready thing in Pristina, and some snack on the bus. We (or I, because my friend refused to even be part of the decision making; I was also to ignore his convenience...), decided to go up to the castle after dinner. It didn't really matter that it'd be dark, not to me anyway, as we'd still see the city lights from up there then.
We had Balkan kebab, though they call it...like chebab? Or something slightly different. The small grilled sausages served with bread. This was served with some cabbage and tomatoes as well. We spiced it up a bit with the red spice on the table.
On the way to the castle, there was a small fountain, and apparently you're supposed to drink the water from it; then you'll get married. I don't remember if it was 'then you'll get married here'. We didn't drink from it, but made a lot of jokes about it. My friend seemed more worried that if I would drink some but without taking it seriously, I'd definitely end up getting married there, because love always finds you when you least expect it. And no - that's not the reason I didn't do it.
The walk up to castle was short, but brutal. Insanely steep, and I can only think it's a good thing we didn't walk up there in the burning sun.
It was nice and quiet up there. It had started getting windy, but it was nice after the sweaty walk. We enjoyed the stars, the city lights…talked a bit more. We were probably up there for a good twenty minutes. On our way down we even met a security guard who said they were closing anyway.
We got back to Pristina around…11PM. We had thought we wouldn’t be back until midnight ish, so this was good. Left us some time to talk to his parents before heading to sleep, since they “really” wanted to meet me. They didn’t speak a whole lot of English, but they were really nice, and offered homemade desert and drinks.
Sunday: I set my alarm, because otherwise I can easily sleep…for way too long. We took it easy in the morning; my friend’s mum made us lokum, a deep-fried Balkan/Turkish bread kind of thing. Very nice - and much nicer than what it sounds like if you know what it means in Danish (yes, I had told my friend what it means).
My friend had planned every minute of the trip, but because it was a slightly colder day (only 23 degrees in the morning, though it’d get about the same temperature later), we decided to change our plans a bit, and head for a spring close to Pejë, Kosovo’s third biggest ‘city’. That way, we could possibly also meet another friend of ours who hadn’t been able to see me in Pristina the day before since she was in Pejë for a wedding.
This time, my phone was charged so now we listened to some of my music. Most of my stuff is on Spotify, and I obviously did not have any internet there, but some Enrique Iglesias that we sang our lungs out to, and the Swedish Eurovision song. A bit of Swedish stuff as well, since my friend understands some Swedish from watching the Swedish qualifications.
The drive was at least an hour, and it had got hotter when we got out of the car. It’s also hotter in Pejë because it’s closer to the sea, or so my friend said. We were pretty much in the mountains now. It was beautiful. Went down a flight of stairs and got to a small waterfall/spring thing. There were flat rocks that led to the other side of the stream, so you could cross. Lots of people were out on those rocks, though more for the sake of taking pictures and cooling down in the freezing water, rather than to go to the other side.
We took lots of photos, selfies, asked other people to take pictures of us. While my friend went out on the rocks to splash himself with cold water, a guy asked me to take a picture of him - on my camera…and asked his friend something that clearly was along the lines of ‘how do you say this in English…?’ because then he was like: ‘greetings from China!’
And I just sighed, and said I’m not from China. And obviously, he wasn’t.
‘Where are you from then?’
He seemed surprised when I told him…
It was only after that that I noticed people saying “China” when they walked past me. They pronounce it almost like “China”, not with an “ee” sound like in many other languages, but so yeah, it was easy to understand. And when we headed back upstairs, towards a cave nearby my friend was like ‘oh my god, everyone’s starring at you!’
If you’ve followed my blog for a long time, you might remember that when I was in Africa people…starred a lot. Their entire lives stopped for a moment in the villages when they saw white people. There was no way you couldn’t notice, but somehow, my Rwandan friend was like completely oblivious to the fact that his white friend was attracting a lot of attention. Here…it was my friend who noticed all the gazes, and I hardly didn’t - but I still heard the “Chinas”. And yes, to be fair, it seemed like almost all the people/tourists at that spring and cave were from the Balkans.
The cave was almost bigger than the one we had been to the day before. If not because I had followed the people in front, I would have got lost, because the guide pretty much abandoned us as soon as the tour was over. Plus the group got split so I have no idea how we all made it out.
When we got out, we called our friend who said we were to come to the bank in Pejë and meet her. We put on some more music. I put on one of those songs my students used to play at the student parties, which, I hadn’t realized was Serbian. My friend laughed in the ‘shit, we’re gonna get caught - hahaha’ way, saying that ‘that’s so dangerous if anyone hears that!’
I immediately turned the volume down. Like really down.
‘No, no, it’s probably OK.’
‘No, no, you’re right. Better keep it low.’ I said, and I may have turned it down even more. Cultural…mistake. And probably the most interesting Balkan ‘clash’ since I started working here, that tells a lot about the underlying tension/legacy that seems to remain in the area.
We picked up our friend in Pejë and discussed what to do with our limited time before we needed to head back. She had arranged for us to see her brother and sister at a café because they also really wanted to meet me, but first we decided to drive to a canyon because it was only like two km out of town.
The canyon was not so much a canyon that you see from a viewing point, but rather, we were driving through it. So mountainous, very…exotic in a way, we don’t have that at home. We saw another spring from one of the mountain tops, took some pictures, then headed back into town, and went to a café by a river where our friend’s siblings were waiting. They had just had some ice cream, so we ordered some as well.
Our friend needed to go to Pristina since she had work the next day, so the three of us went back, and her sister as well. We continued to listen to some music, including the Academy ‘signature dance’ song. We got to the bus station in good time, but they told us they had cancelled the 6 o’clock bus (which was supposed to be the last one according to…the Internet), but there’d be one at 7 instead. So we headed to a café, got burek on the way, since we were all a bit hungry, and I’d definitely get hungry on the bus otherwise, had a drink at a café, then walked back…
A really nice weekend for sure, and there’s just something so special about reunions.
So it’s a crazy life… So much travelling. Last weekend I went to Greece with two of my colleagues. Thessaloniki to be precise, which is in the Greek region known as ‘Makedonia’. My colleague almost got assaulted when he accidentally said that ‘we work in Macedonia’. The middle-aged man got really angry, first asking ‘what did you say?’, then told us to keep up walking, to get out of his sight. He grabbed a chair but some other people around him stopped him. After that my colleagues referred to it as ‘that place of which we cannot say the name’. I told them that I I was pretty sure Voldemort also just went by the name of ‘you know who’. Except for that, it was cool to get away with your colleagues for a bit.
My ‘boss’ said that it was amazing how fast people in our positions bond, because two colleagues of mine went to Greece for their week off. And now I just did the same thing for our weekend off, after having known the guys for…4 weeks. But I suppose when you both live ‘together’, eat every meal together and work together…you kinda have to bond quickly. Or you’re bound to.
This weekend is the last with the students, and we’re taking them to Lake Ohrid. It’s supposed to be a super nice place, so stay updated for a chance to read more!