Thursday 21711

a day late, ill explain why eventually

woke up in Prishtina wandered our way around looking for the office of an NGO Nansen, which works with dialogue between the Serbs and the Albanians in Kosovo. They work to bring mainly young people together to learn about eachother and their cultures, in the hopes that it will prevent further conflict. they also work to help the Serbs that fled Kosovo during the war to return to their homes, while this portion of their work has been generally unsuccessful, they continue to try.

Prishtina was a nice city, they ran on the Euro, and considering the entire country is propped up by the West, it was pretty western, thought it was odd spending Euro on not Euro prices, beer was only one Euro for example, so that was pretty cool, everywhere i looked there was alot of construction, i think that is partly because there is so much money pouring into the area, and rebuilding/newbuilding since the war.

on the way out we visited the monument tower to the Battle of Kosovo, in which the Serbians did not get slaughtered by the Ottomans for a while, until the Ottomons brought in the reserves, which numbered larger than the original Serb forces. the monument was protected by KFOR, considering its a Serbian thing in Albanian dominated Kosovo.

here is the tower with me and Kurtis on top of it, after climbing to the top with the group we decided to sprint up the 60m to get a picture with us on top

also fun fun

so we got stamped on our way into Kosovo, even though we requested we not get stamped, and because Serbia does not recognize Kosovo, they couldnt let us back in with a stamp because that would mean that Serbia recognized Kosovo, which would be bad. so they turned us away, and we decided to go through Montenegro. This took us out of our way by quite a bit, so we spent the night in this tiny town in Montenegro, Rozaje, in a nice hotel, i got to share the bed with our TA, he stole the blankets.

Miguel and I in front of a German KFOR car guarding the bridge which, due to my lack of coherency and timeliness makes this post all kindsa messed up.

also while still in Kosovo we stopped Mitrovica, which is a split town across a river, the south side being Albanian, and the North side being Serbian, the town is split by a river and there are EU, KFOR and local Police providing security for the bridge, cause it is a chokepoint for the tensions, which is the town that we tried to leave from Kosovo, and then yeah the shit hit the fan.



anyways its morning now, and we are deciding how we are going to get back into Serbia, and whether we will stop and Srebrenica or go right on to Serajevo.

we are flying by the seat of our pants, ill keep you informed as we go