I'd just been broken up with by an ex, and I needed a day. A break from work and a place to be free". The personal life was taking a hit.
I knew just the place to go: Prishtina, Kosovo.
Demographically young, attractively cheap, and scantily explored. Newborn in liberal iridescence, an increasingly educated class of young men and women under the watchful graces of the promiscuous Bill Clinton, could it all be real? If my politics degree taught me one thing, it’s that this dataset says that Kosovo was going to be expressively liberal, emotionally free, and have enough self-assurance needed to accommodate a whole new me. A country still exploring its newfound identity would be the perfect place for me to find mine.
I arrived at Prishtina airport at 1:20 am, having been given the chance to experience Luton for two more hours by the ever-gracious Wizz Air. I was thankful the plane made it past Serbia and was able to land me in one piece. Immediately upon disembarkment, I awed at the warm summer Balkan ventilation and the ripe smell of gasoline hanging in the air. This would be a happy place.
Bill Clinton Boulevard
Without a cell reception, and my Three phone provider charging me £5 per mb, I decided to try to use the airport’s free wifi, having not planned for this completely predictable inconvenience. Overburdened by the sudden appearance of several dozen people at such a respectable hour, the airport wifi rightly stayed asleep and ignored my frantic pleas to connect to its interweb. Having forgotten the name of my hostel in my haze of exhaustion, I connected to my £5 per mb phone data and frantically searched Google Maps for my saved places. The two bars on the top left of my screen worked tirelessly to ensure this loading process of 4 minutes would come to my saving grace. With luck, I managed to find the hostel that I booked. Immediately scared of next week's impending phone bill, I took screenshots of the hostel location to show to my taxi driver.
Having just paid £33 to the overlords of the world's shittiest mobile broadband provider for the luxury of a screenshot, I proceeded to pay £8 to the world's shittiest ATM service, Euronet, to convert my British pounds to Euros. The official currency of the officially non-EU Kosovo. Armed with cash, I was now loaded and ready to meet the taxi man who would safely take me to my bedroom for the night. Walking out of the exit, I was immediately surrounded by strong Balkan men, with at least a 5:1 ratio of slightly balding taxi drivers to Western tourists. Whilst I didn’t mind the yelling and the offering of services, the ratio of so many taxi drivers to one me made it hard for me to find my voice. The many “I’ll make you a fair price” and “I’ll take you anywheres” made me admire just how far these honourable men would go to ignore the plain white sign advertising “standard taxi services to the city centre from the airport” and offer me “premium value services” for my trip at 2 in the morning. From my many suitors, I selected a slightly shorter man for his comfortable height, clean black Adidas tracksuit, a Camel cigarette, and his premium offer that was £2 cheaper than his competitors but £18 more than the standard rate.
A mosque in the city centre
All in all, I assumed I would be riding in style and comfort for my first trip around this vibrant cosmopolitan city. The driver, Enver, led me past the row of taxis immediately adjacent the airport entrance and toward the backlit edges of the parking lot to where he got into a grey Skoda Slavia. I sheepishly followed him inside. Lighting a cigarette, Enver pulled out of the drab airport parkway onto a two-lane road, immediately swerving into the left lane and cranking the Slavia up to 120km/h to rev past a slower-moving Skoda before merging into a four-lane highway off to the city centre.
The drive from the airport was pleasant. Enver asked what I was doing in Kosovo.
I told him I was “exploring”.
“Why?”
“To move past my empty soul and be filled with inspiration and love and compassion so that I could truly love myself again”. I replied honestly.
Enver, his eyes unblinking and off the road, stared at me. “Where are you from?”
“London”.
“London! I love Chelsea. England football league is the best in the world!!” Enver stated exuberantly.
“I don’t like Chelsea” I replied.
“Chelsea! You love Chelsea! London!?“
“No”.
“Yes”.
“No. I do not love Chelsea, I think they’re shite” I corrected Enver, a wry smile covering my mouth as it always does when I call a football team shite.
“Yes, yes! I love Chelsea!!”. Drogba, Hazard, Lampard, Terry. He started listing dickheads. A vibrant smile formed across his face as he did so and he stared at me warmly, seemingly to have thought we had just formed a connection.
I awkwardly sunk in my seat, unsure of how to reiterate that I thought Chelsea was a team full of bellends. I decided against it and instead sat silently in my slightly awkward presence. It felt unpleasant.
National Library of Kosovo and the Radio and Television building donning the words “freedom has a name”
We passed a sign stating that we had 12 km left in the city. Enver proceeded to spend the next 11km talking up the old guard stars of prime Chelsea, often looking in my direction for agreement as a person from the Anglosphere. I nodded, waved, and longed for the passing of time to be faster. Unfortunately, time only passed its normal speed and Enver called me brother four more times before we arrived at my hostel. Upon arrival, Enver gave me a familiar deal: he offered to drive me to Prizren for the same price as he had just driven me from the airport, and slipped me a one-sided taxi card inscribed with words that I assumed meant somewhere between “best services provided in Prishtina” and “Call again”.
I walked into my new hostel relieved to never see that particular man again, yet somewhat sad I wasn’t really able to connect with him on a 35-minute drive. The room in the hostel was orange and bright, two twenty-something women who hadn’t washed their hair recently lay asleep on a couch, three cats curled up between them. On the table in front of them, my name was written on a piece of tape attached to a pair of keys and a room number. I immediately felt safer.
“Tito’s room” at the Hotel Yugoslavia
In my short sleep, my night dream consisted of two dreams. The first dream consisted of my ex-girlfriend. Waking up in a heat at 4 am in the morning, I panted for 3 minutes and listened to the snores of my roommates. My breath was panting harder than Olaf Sholz trying to decide whether to spend on social security or increase the military budget. I decided my goal for Prishtina was really to get laid. My second dream was much more breezy, filled with flaky raindrops of feta whilst sliding down a tunnel of borek head first, waiting to plunge into the pool of my wallet because it still had money in it.
When I awoke, I walked to my Breakfast at Burek’s otherwise commonly known as “D.P.Z. Burektore”. Walking up to a store with tables outside, placed squarely on a car friendly street, several women were trying to calm fussy children down and several men were smoking cigarettes, all of whom had a coffee placed next to the ashtray. The smell of burek, one of god’s greatest donations to breakfast, filled my lungs. Not seeing a menu, I walked up to the counter, struggled to order,and struggled to pay. Creating a line out the door, the spectacle was resolved by a man who told me it was 2 euros and sixty cents. I proceeded to walk over to the corner of the storefront and stand anxiously for the following two minutes. I stirred over how locals not paying attention to me must think I’m an idiot.
Monument to Brotherhood and Unity spomenik
“Am I the one that's stupid?” I thought.
I stand up straight and don’t conform to the normal drag of Adidas-themed clothing, except for my three-striped faded yellow fanny pack which clearly demonstrates that I have an esteemed high sense of fashion. I even recently grew a mustache. My plain beige hat with a single dolphin on it and my baggy light jeans further should have made it more obvious that I was clearly with the times. Just maybe the times hadn’t caught up to Prishtina.
A woman from behind the counter, who had seen my state and stopped what she was doing, tapped me on the shoulder. She led me to an open table beside a young couple and their young child. As a person of a similar age, I looked at them, they looked at me, and we established we had nothing in common. Anxiety permeated my brain as I pondered the thought of children as shackles around my ankles and the empty feeling of lovelessness in my heart. Luckily, I had a cigarette to calm my nerves and a coffee to spike my cortisol. After another few minutes, a younger waitress than the one who had taken me to my chair came to give me my plate. Presumably, she spoke English and was sent to deal with me should I complain.
Inside of the Hotel Yugoslavia, during the Manifesta 14 cultural event in 2022
I could not complain. Caffeine and cigarettes, Burek and dopamine, the Balkans, and particularly Southern Yugoslavia, know how to do breakfast. My convictions of Prishtina weren’t wrong yet. I sat and enjoyed; trying to decide if burek was better than Bulgarian banitsa.
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