Weekend in Kosovo
I have put up several photos of our past weekend in Kosovo for you to see. Thanks to many of you  who have reviewed my entries and enjoyed them. There is much material to use here in the Balkans!
Kosovo was mostly the same terrain as Albania in terms of rugged rocky mountains, orange tiled houses dotting the hillside and friendly people, some of whom speak English.
The interesting and at times, confusing part was the climate (not weather) and politics. Kosovo suffered mightily during the war in 1999 when part of the population, the Serbs, decided to take over the country and try to force the mostly Muslim Albanians out. The history over centuries has fueled this uprising. We would walk into a few preserved13th century churches, Turkish baths or Ottoman houses from 1600’s but most have now been burned or destroyed by these wars. We learned that church and state are very intertwined and have been for years. The Orthodox priests would align themselves with the governmental powers and lead a charge on the neighborhood mosque. The reverse was true as well. In a more regional context, you had the Turkish empire waring against the Austrian Empire and the churches would follow one or the other.
Today there is a big presence of UN, NATO and Italian entities in the country. When we visited the monastery on Sunday, we had to call ahead, leave our passports at the gate and retrieve them when we left the Italian outpost. There is still real fear that some Albanians might, in this case, try to destroy the Orthodox monastery. I think there will be an international presence in Kosovo for a long time.
Other observations:
I tried to order my daily Coke Zero and found it hard to get because it was bottled in Serbia and the Kosovars were boycotting the product.
If you want to travel from Kosovo to say, Vienna, the most direct way is through Serbia. The Serbians won’t allow any car registered in Kosovo into the country so one must drive around the country. We could enter Serbia in our car because we are from Albania.
If you fly from the capital of Kosovo, Pristina, the pilots have to fly due west and then up to Vienna and can’t fly over Serbia
There is so much overlap between the Albanians and Muslim Kosovars. The Albanian flag is flown everywhere in Kosovo. Kosovo has its new flag (it only became a country in 2008) but most people say it is only flown to irritate the Serbs and seldom flown at all.
There was recent issue up at the border where the Serb/Albanian tensions are strong. Some Serb hot heads piled  3 feet of rock across the main street in town, thus blocking the predominately Serb side of town from the Albanian side of town. It took members of parliament to travel up there from Pristina to quell the madness.
We had a good snow storm and 30 degree temps our last day there but 3 hours later when we arrived back in Tirana, it was partly sunny and 65 degrees. I like where I am living!
The capital (which I walked around for a long time while Peter was at his conference) was a crude mixture of building styles, museums not open because all the artifacts are in Serbia, no parks and plenty of restaurants because of the huge international population.