Chilly Chilly

The Kinks couldn't have put it better: chilly chilly, its evening time... 

Autumn's been making me nostalgic, for some reason. Not only does this song make me think with an eternally warm, fuzzy smile of my time in London - I really did walk over Waterloo Bridge at sunset once or twice, one of my fondest memories of that amazing city being the particularly radiant August evening I passed across that dirty old river (must you keep rolling?) with my three closest friends - but I've been thinking of the autumns past. Perhaps its because this is the first Autumn in many years that hasn't brought a change of scene or new beginnings. Last October I moved to Bosnia, the year before that I set out as a graduate and walked into the welcoming arms of Front Line. The year before that, in 2009, I could hardly contain my excitement about moving to London, and for the four years before that I had at least been facing into new years and new apartments and new stages of college in Limerick. 

This year I'm simply settling into a place - this odd little country - that I already know, or if I'm more precise, continuing the process of slowly getting to know. Autumn doesn't seem to exist in the Balkans. Two weeks after I was sunbathing, swimming and coaxing out this year's very last little hint of a tan in Greece, we were cranking up the central heating, desperately searching for woolly scarves and shuddering against the cold when it came time to leave the office in the evening. It went from summer to winter almost overnight, and all of a sudden Kosovars were defrosting ice from their cars in the mornings and Pristina had become a city of woodsmoke and puffing chimneys. It's warmed up a little today, but it was jaw-achingly, toe-clenchingly cold earlier this week, dipping below zero at night and changing my wardrobe, appetite and weekend plans with alarming  upheaval. All of a sudden the cafés and bars I've favoured all summer, lovingly chosen for their outdoor terraces and air-conditioning, are out of bounds and rather useless, and I'm reacquainting myself with this new Pristina emerging for winter. 

But strangely, of all the places and feelings of newness I can associate with autumn, it's Sarajevo I felt homesick for this week. Six months on, I still find myself missing Bosnia and my life there. There was something indefinably cosy about it, some inherently familiar and comforting. Perhaps I didn't feel like that living there - maybe that's only a feeling that's possible in hindsight - but this week the familiar Sarajevo smell of woodsmoke, of indoor stoves, of the rich, fatty smell of qofta and the warm morning fug of bakeries which began to permeate the Pristina air (making me sadly aware that those weren't aromas unique to Sarajevo after all) brought on terrible pangs of nostalgia for my never-to-be-more-loved apartment, the pekara on the corner and the rattling, mouldy, woollen-layered tram ride to work. 

More than anything I wanted to go for a pint at the Police Bar, a place I hadn't thought about for months and months but which was possibly my second home last winter. We called it the Police Bar because it was near the police station - I think its real name was The Hunting Lodge, but the Bosnian translation of that was somehow too complicated to remember. The Police Bar was just around the corner from the office and was more of a cupboard than a pub - it was the downstairs front room of an apartment, with a skateboard-sized bar in one corner and space for six or eight people to squeeze around a table in another. If you arrived only to find that three or four policemen had arrived before you, then you just had to reverse out and go elsewhere; you very literally could not fit inside. But best of all it had an open fire, and a window which fugged up with condensation behind a heavy net curtain. The middle-aged couple who ran the bar - if you can call the act of serving some drinks to people who essentially took over their sitting room the job of running a bar - were sweethearts, greeting us with one-armed hugs and enthusiastic and unintelligible (to me) Bosnian. If you ordered wine the husband would usually throw on his coat and go to the corner shop to buy it; if everyone stuck to beer he would often head down to the shop regardless to buy some pretzels or crisps, which he would pour onto an oval silver platter and set on the table with a smile of tired satisfaction as if serving a Sunday roast. 

The couple would watch the evening news on the television and afterwards put on some Balkan power ballads which it seemed were appropriate listening for us "young people". They were sweet to us and sweet on each other; he would always stoop and kiss her goodbye if putting on his coat at eight o'clock to head downtown somewhere. She was strangely ageless but must have been in her late forties. She was a beautiful girl who was still living out past glories as she became increasingly middle-aged; she had immaculately highlighted bottle-blonde hair and wore an entirely mad pair of leopard-skin, spiky-heeled boots around the bar as if they were her bedroom slippers. But, you would get another squeeze and a hand on your shoulder as you and your friends struggled heroically to fit on your coats in the tiny space left for standing. We would stumble out onto a crystal night of ice and the shining darkness between the old, bullet-marked buildings, our breath proceeding out of the bar before us. The vents from the heating systems steaming majestically into the night, as a slippery trudge downtown to the next bar began. 

The Police Bar was magic. And I really miss Sarajevo. 

The Coal Mines

Last weekend a group of us went for what some of the group optimistically called "hiking" but which for me was more of a "wet country walk". It reminded me so much of damp trudges through autumnal Irish fields that it was positively comforting despite the cold and mud. This walking/hiking experience however only served to illustrate in vivid detail the stark contrast in circumstances between those dewy Irish fields and their Kosovar equivalent. Never before had it occurred to me how clean, how orderly, regulated and wholesome those Irish fields are, the clean air and uncontaminated produce we enjoy, the regulated agriculture and industry. 

Despite the simple beauty of the Kosovar countryside this time of year - vivid autumn colours, rolling fields and peaceful country homes - the pollution and mining we saw were both stark and startling. We drove past the infamous Obilić power station, powered by dirty coal, pumping out dense steady cloaks of black and brown smoke 24 hours a day. The heavy clouds from the power plants are distinct enough to be seen clearly from almost anywhere surrounding Pristina no matter the weather. To give some idea of the scale of environmental pollution I'm talking about here, one of the complex's two generators apparently produces 2.5 tonnes of dust per hour, or over 100,000 per year - 74 times the European standard. And those are the statistics made available publicly by Kosovo's Ministry for the Environment, which may have an interest in downplaying its figures.

I cannot imagine the health problems and contamination for the local communities living near the plant. This and this are both examples of haunting photographs that make clear how close the chimneys lie to the villages, football fields, schools and houses. Dust and smog from the plant linger over the whole of Pristina, clearly visible when driving downhill into the city on the Skopje road or from the Dragodan hills. I have lived before in cities where complaining about dust, smoke and air quality was a favourite hobby of the internationals (Kampala's red dust and Bosnian woodsmoke being highlights, even London coming in for criticism) but it not once before did it really bother me other than in an abstract sense (shouldn't we all be concerned about these things?). Here however, is a different matter. I find my skin has changed completely in the months since I've arrived; I've had problems of dryness, irritation and spots that I've never had before. Meanwhile the dust is physically and visibly present in the inches accumulating on my balcony and windowsills. During the summer when I spent a lot of time on the balcony, I found that I could clean everything down with soap and water in the morning, only to be able to run my finger through visible streaks of dust by afternoon. What it must be like in the shadow of the plant itself is another matter entirely. I shudder to think of the human impact. 

On our hike, after walking a kilometre or two through the fields we came to the site of what to date is the biggest excavation ever carried out in search of the remains of victims of war crimes. The Kosovo police and EULEX have been undertaking a dig on site for over a year in search for the remains of several Kosovo Serbs, allegedly victims of the Kosovo Liberation Army during the 1999 war. I leave it unsaid how sensitive and political such a search is and must be. I simply don't feel qualified to try to discuss the implications of such a search in terms of local politics and legal system, and certainly don't feel this is the forum to do so.  And for the record I'd like to note that I only heard this background information in a very informal context. To date, nothing at all has been found at the site, while locals claim that no remains were brought there during the conflict. Meanwhile a police watch is kept on site to ensure that no one either takes away or indeed adds remains to the site. And in the meantime, they keep digging, into a coal mine over 25 metres deep. 

It was the first time I'd ever been anywhere near an excavation site like this, and it didn't look anything like I expected it to - no forensics, no archeologists, no men in sterile white overalls working under a marquis tent. Presumably all of that will start if and when they find something. The sheer size of the site must severely complicate excavation work because any failure to find remains can be countered with the argument that they simply haven't explored all of the mine yet. And in the meantime, vast amounts of coal being removed from the mine in the process are being left to the side for locals, so at least there is one minor benefit to the whole process. 

My favourite kind of excavator at the entrance to the site. What are the chances! 

The dig site - the white chair on the bottom right of the mine give an idea of the scale of the site 

Further on, however, was a sight which still managed to startle, even after viewing a war crimes investigation. Several holes in the ground, twenty metres deep, rough, haphazard and hewn by hand, these were informal coal mines. In the bottom of these holes, without power, light or air, two or three men dig coal by hand with shovels and picks. This is hauled to the surface in metal cages on ropes and pulleys made by hand from branches of trees, powered without electricity or an engine. For this, the men make about ten Euro per day, on a good day. A bad day will be when they hit a seam of rock or poor-grade coal, which is worth little to nothing for sale. In other words, a bad day involves no less work, effort or labour - it simply goes unrewarded. And quite often it will be necessary to remove the poor-grade rock or shale in order to get to better coal underneath, so that the men do not have the choice of avoiding bad patches in the mine. 

Its hard to get an idea of the size of the mine, but it was approx. 30m deep. Open to the elements, ground and rainwater was collecting at the bottom. 

Mind the step... 

Inspecting the baskets used to haul coal to service, while a hardier soul than I heads down the mine

Did I mention the mud? 

Quite honestly, this was one of the most bleak chunks of reality I think I've ever witnessed. The primitive nature of the mine and the equipment used needed to be seen to be believed. We were only 15 miles from a European capital city. No regulation, no oversight, the concept of helath and safety something laughable from another world. The 20-30m deep mines don't have so much as a fence or a railing around them to prevent anyone from falling in. I didn't go down myself, because I was too afraid to use the ladders - handmade from the branches of trees, twisted and uneven, wobbling under the wind and rain and stretching across open depths of the mine below. Because of the rain and exposure (it was pouring by the time we got there) they were damp and slimy, and looked too slippery to make me overcome my nervousness. But those of the group, braver than I, who did go down passed some money to the miners and later expressed their shock at the darkness, dust and dank below. The harshness of the working conditions, the physical brutality of the labour.

Its entirely possible that I shouldn't be so shocked or dismayed - in a country with so little formal industry, natural resources or formal employment opportunities, this at least is a cottage industry which provides these men and their families with a chance for self-sufficiency, an income and potential future opportunities. Maybe. Or maybe not. If one of the men had an accident, you couldn't even bring an ambulance anywhere near the mine due to lack of road and the deep, sucking mud. Not to mention pay for the healthcare anyway. What kind of quality of life do whole families have, subsisting on ten Euro a day?

This was Kosovo, laying bare what lies behind the decrepit, shuttered or decaying industrial plants, the cafés and kebab shops of Pristina, the sights lying out of sight and inaccessible to the international community's jeeps whizzing past on the main road several kilometers away. 

Privilege

I've posted on this blog very infrequently since moving to Kosovo, and what I have posted has been generally pretty shallow and effortless. The truth is that time has been trickling away in a pleasant blur of dinners and drinks and weekends away. I'd love to write here about the dangers of Kosovo, the great hardships I'm enduring, terrible working conditions or grueling field work. But they wouldn't be true. For most internationals working in Kosovo - most but not all, of course, and everything I'm about to say comes with that disclaimer - this is a place to receive an extremely good wage, live a generally spoilt and easy lifestyle, and pursue an interesting and progressive career. 

What does an ex-pat do with his or her spare time in Pristina? Well, in large part you leave Pristina. Especially in summer, you leave on a weekly basis and go elsewhere for the weekend. Every weekend. This week its been five months since I first arrived, and in that time I estimate that I've probably spent no more than five or six weekends in Kosovo. And of those five or six weekends, many included visits outside of Pristina to other cities and regions including Prizren, Mitrovica, Pejë/Peć or the Rugova Valley. 

Five months in, I still feel at times like I hardly know this city. For quite a long time I hardly felt like I really lived here - Pristina was merely a place where I slept for a few nights during the week between coming back late on Sunday night and taking a bag with me to the office on Friday morning ready to leave directly from the office in the afternoon. I still feel as though I've only begun to scratch the surface, and despite the city's small size I'm certain there are large parts of it I've never seen and know nothing of - why would I? I haven't spent any serious time here, nor made any sustained effort to get to know the city, its people and its language.  

In contrast, I've spent the summer obligingly collecting a pleasantly detailed knowledge of the surrounding region, of the Balkans and an expanding corner of South-east Europe. I couldn't give you directions to the other side of Pristina or point out the neighbourhood where my colleagues live, but I can happily guide you across Northern Albania or navigate a route to Bosnia around the roadblocks and closed border crossings in Northern Mitrovica. Last night for instance, while returning from a weekend in Greece, I surprised both my friends and myself with my previously uncharted knowledge of the network of ring-roads surrounding Thessaloniki. 

My travels since I moved to Kosovo on 1 May have included four trips to Macedonia - twice to the beautiful Lake Ohrid, to Skopje where I saw the Irish football team beat the Makedonians 2-0 in a European Cup qualifier, and to Negotino where we stayed at the beautiful Popova Kula vineyard and drank ourselves silly on some of the Balkans' best wine. I was present at Amy Winehouse's last, doomed gig in Belgrade (to be fair, we forgot how awful she'd been when Moby came on and played a blinder afterwards). I finally discovered Montenegro, that magical little pocket-sized country, and decided on the first visit that Kotor is one of the most beautiful places in Europe and on the second that Budva should be avoided at all costs in August. I met up with my parents in Croatia and realised that I'll probably never get tired of Dubrovnik. I visited Istanbul and had a weekend of culture, food, friends, politics and other adventures in that amazing city. I went back to Sarajevo for a visit that was all too short and made me realise how very much I miss that little city and the people in it. I went back home to Kerry for the first time in six months, stopping en route for a weekend in Berlin with two dearly-missed friends. I finally went to Greece for the first time, to Thessaloniki and then last weekend to Halkidiki where the benefits of finding yourself within driving distance of the coast during the off-season are all too apparent: cut price hotels, uncongested roads and beaches left all to yourself. 

All of this in five months, and all of this in addition to other trips around Kosovo itself. For the first time since graduating two years ago I am well-paid, managing to save, enjoying my own duties and responsibilities at work and almost - almost - unworried about money, job stability and what the immediate future will hold. It's been a long, full summer during which friends and I made constant reference to having left 'real' life behind, perhaps only half jokingly; this is a privilege, it is a bubble and it is entirely removed from most persons' version of reality. I am achingly aware that there will likely only be a short period of my life like this, only a few years in which a lack of responsibility and a willingness to live rootlessly is shored up by disposable income, an easily-stamped passport and a career that's finally starting to take shape but which hasn't yet tied me down. But I'm also highly aware that this is not real life as most people have to live it, and that something is askew when it seems a novelty to stay in your own apartment for a weekend, spending your time on ordinary things like laundry, the gym or making a late, lazy breakfast rather than facing into a five-hour drive on characterful Balkan roads through a hangover. 

Travel is a bug that bites. It bit me very hard and I sought out a job that would facilitate it. But now that I'm here, I wonder - does it reach a certain point at which the bite leads to infection and fever which obscure a clear-eyed view of the world? 

None of this is real life, and I'm acutely aware at every moment of what a privilege I'm living at a time when my former classmates - not to mention friends and family - elsewhere are struggling with the bleak prospects for graduates, or paying for our country's effective bankruptcy if they have indeed managed to find work or break out of the cycle of endless unpaid internships. More than that, I'm aware of how I live in a post-war country with over 50% unemployment, a non-existent economy and income levels which scrape the bottom of the barrel even in the Balkan region. And perhaps most acutely of all, I understand the cliché which I have willingly volunteered to become: the over-paid ex-pat driving around a developing country in a large white jeep bearing large colouful logos, whizzing past the people and the streets and the communities that I am supposedly here to serve, insulated by layers of internal reporting and movement restrictions and high wages from many of the realities of life in Kosovo. 

No, this is not real life. And the longer I spend in environments like this one, the more I wonder how it would be to go back?


Some of the highlights

Lake Ohrid, Macedonia 

Ireland 2 - 0 Macedonia, 4 June 2011 

Skopje Macedonia. The musician's pileus hat is extremely typical of ethnic Albanians and are also extremely common among older Kosovo Albanian men

Ruined Roman city of Stobi, Macedonia 

Macedonian summer, Stobi 

Bay of Kotor, Montenegro, 

which I would rate as possibly the single most beautiful part of the Balkans

The evening stroll in Kotor

Dubrovnik, Croatia - clear waters and vivid colours

Lokrum Island, Dubrovnik. We found an abandoned chair overlooking the sea.

Mirusha Waterfall, Kosovo

Peja Patriarachate, Kosovo, former seat of the Serbian Orthodox Church 

and a working monastery for 700 years

Jewish Memorial, Berlin

Oh hipsters, how I have missed you

The Wall, Kreutzberg

Breaking News

Update! I returned back Sunday night from a weekend away in Greece* to find stupendous developments had taken place in my absence. In addition to pavements we have been tarmac-ed. ASPHALT! Clean, pure, smooth, dark asphalt. Whats more, asphalt with no sign of construction equipment, drills or industrial-level dust in the vicinity. It was so fresh last night that a smell of burnt tar smouldered in the air and my sandals stuck to the road as I trudged home up the hill. It was glorious.

Clearly, if my absence is what it takes to initiate developments like this then I'll happily volunteer to disappear for a few days whenever necessary. 

Behold the developments since last week. Quite the improvement, you'll agree, even with the pavements covered with parked cars.

And my balcony with my lovely basil and mint plants, which it took me prolonged investigation before I found them in a flower shop buried under an apartment building

*Highly recommend Thessaloniki as a lovely place for a city break, by the way. 

Chasing pavements

You'd be surprised the things you can get excited about. Take pavements, for instance. I'd never been a big expert on pavements before, myself. Don't get me wrong - I like them. New pavements can look clean and pleasant. Interesting patterns can be made laying bricks and slabs. And of course I played games skipping over the cracks as a child (I even had somewhat sweaty teenage dreams of Jeff Buckley doing so too). But I'd never taken much of a personal interest in the matter of concrete and pavements, y'know. Never even thought about it from a County Council, Health-and-Safety point of view. Never really had a need to. Until I moved to Kosovo.

They're not big on pavements around here. They're not big on pavements anywhere outside the the sanitized environment of the Western world, if we're to be honest - most poor countries have much more important things to worry about: unemployment rates, stagnant economies, getting international recognition of your country, ethnic conflict, funneling back-handers, misusing donor funding, that sort of thing. And usually I don't have much of a problem with this. I don't complain about the water being turned off at night or lack of public services or the fact that there are potholes everywhere because I know that this is a poor country and putting up with it was part of the decision to live and work here.

What I'll complain about though, loudly and enduringly, is paving a road with smooth, beautiful new asphalt and then digging it up again six weeks later. Or digging things up when there are no funds and no foreseeable opportunity to re-pave it again. Or even when funds are available - digging up a whole street in one day, then leaving it a mess for months on end, rather than working on it slowly on a section-by-section basis. I think all three of these scenarios have taken place simultaneously on my street, which has more or less been in a state of constant chaos since I moved into my apartment in May. It was a spectacular mess when I first arrived, but it was asphalted beautifully not long afterwards. Then they started tearing out chunks of it (usually right in the middle of the road where it disrupted both lanes of traffic), supposedly to lay manholes. Once laid, the large squares of dirt surrounding the manholes were not filled in, leaving the street looking something like a chess board, alternating black and brown squares, albeit not quite in such neat patterns. Not long afterwards I came back after a weekend away to find that the new asphalt, laid only six weeks before, had been scraped away from the entire street, leaving only a hard bedrock behind. They've been working on this ever since, ensuring a harmonious judder of clamouring drills, engines, generators, diggers and shovels outside my window at early hours of the morning all summer. Very early hours. And 'all summer' includes weekends. Plus providing the source of the heavy dust that films over every surface in my bedroom, whether I leave the window open or not.

Then the pavements. It was mostly mud outside my front door when I first arrived, wet from the spring rain, so my landlord had laid a few bricks to use as stepping stones so we could get in and out of the building. A month later they dug a vast trench the width of pavement, too wide even to take a running jump over. Some shipping pallets (the kind they use in warehouses to lift vast cubes of stacked boxes) provided a drawbridge into the building for a few weeks at that point. They did come along and fill that in lately, but the street was still a mess of rocks and gravel at that point.

So imagine my surprise when I came home from work one evening last week to find... astoundingly... a clean, wide sweep of perfectly paved pathway outside my house. No notice, no warning, no sign that morning when I'd gone to work that anyone would come and work there today. And now, suddenly, unexpectedly, pavement! REAL pavement! My landlord was standing outside the front door, clearly as astounded as I was to see this unprecedented development, and urgently sweeping it, brushing it, and watering it down (naturally), as if to make sure that it was real and wouldn't get up and walk away from us.

He doesn't speak a word of English, but speaks Serbian, of which I speak almost nothing. Still, the two of us stood there, looking at the literally solid ground beneath our feet - 'literally' solid for the first time - beaming broadly and saying Dobro! Vrlo dobro! Super dobro! Which was the one and only piece of Serbian vocabulary in my possession which I could use to express my pleasure - Good! Very good! Super good!

And went inside, laughing at myself and blushing at quite how pathetic my excitement about the whole thing was. The street itself's not paved yet, the dust is still clouding up my room and making my balcony practically unusable, and the raised-manhole obstacle course is still in effect in the middle of the road. True too, no sooner did they lay the pavements than people started parking their cars on them so that people have to walk on the street regardless. And how long before they dig the pavement back up again? Who knows. But its a start. And makes me feel less like I'm literally chasing pavements on my walk to and from work every day, which is always an improvement.

View from my balcony of our street with its brand spanking new pavement.

PAVEMENTS!

(Note: for added authenticity, see the manhole obstacle course in the centre, and the stretch downhill where the road, typically, has been watered down)

Acquainting myself with Ramadan

Highly recommend having a look at this collection of photos from around the world depicting the beginning of Ramadan last week; some really beautiful pictures here.

Its the first time I've lived in a Muslim country during the Holy Month of Ramadan. While I would have considered myself to already have a reasonable understanding of the practice and meaning of Ramadan, seeing my neighbours and colleagues integrate it into their daily lives has been new. Its easy to forget that Kosovo is a majority-Muslim country: society here is extremely secular and there is little visible sign of religion around the city. This is particularly the case compared to Sarajevo, which I always thought of a pretty secular place itself. Its quite rare to see women wearing the hijab here (at least in urban areas), and the lack of historic buildings generally means there is nothing like the beautiful Islamic heritage, architecture and decorative influence so prominent in Sarajevo. From almost any location in Sarajevo you seemed to be able to hear the call to prayer from two or three different mosques intermingling at sunset, but in Pristina the call and the practice of Islam itself is something that almost needs to be sought out.

Which I suppose is why it was interesting to realise over the past week how many of my neighbours and colleagues are fasting, because over the past three months I never perceived any sign of their faith. I mean this of course not in a way intended to indicate any judgment on my part; simply that I find it intriguing how Kosovo society has closely integrated faith into life in a way which is quietly and discretely expressed, and it does lead me to wonder whether there's any relation in this to Kosovo Albanian's long history of living as a minority in a country (Serbia/Yugoslavia) which was majority Christian.

Most of the building I live in is occupied by my landlord, his family, married children, wives and grandchildren; it transpired last week that I'm one of the only two people in the building not observing the fast. Nor do they expect me to, of course, but its still interesting to see and hear the gathering for iftar (the evening meal which breaks the fast) taking place every evening.

Ramadan also throws up all sorts of little observations and dilemmas which are unknownst to us back in Ireland. For instance, half the restaurants and cafés around town (especially those near our office) have closed for Ramadan because as business is significantly reduced anyway, its as good a time as any to take summer holidays. More seriously, I hadn't ever thought about the sleep deprivation that accompanies the fast; because of daylight hours this time of year the pre-fast meal has to take place at around 3.30am, so that sleep as well as eating patterns are profoundly disrupted. How to politely inquire after the well-being of colleagues who are clearly exhausted and falling asleep at their desks by 3pm?

How to remind myself not to cheerfully announce loudly that 'I'm off for lunch now' or complain after my return that I'm sleepy because I ate too much? Is it impolite or simply immaterial if I eat in front of people who are fasting - is bringing breakfast and coffee to my desk off-limits for the month of August? It's not that I mind, but I'm almost as afraid that I'll offend my fasting colleagues more by making a big deal out of their observance than by impolitely enjoying a croissant in front of them in the mornings.

Especially during summer, observing the fast must be a daunting challenge for which I have huge respect (extended daylight hours, no water despite temperatures in the mid-30s). All very intriguing cultural differences, and all make me consider the contrast with home, where its so in fashion these days to complain and feel so uncomfortable about the Catholic Church's requirements regarding behaviour and conduct, few of which are ever observed regardless.

Kosovo quirks

I think its about time I memorialise some of the particular quirks which I think I'll forever associate with life in Kosovo. Here are some the daily features that make Ireland in hindsight seem effortlessly convenient.

Watering the Streets

Pristina has a severe problem when it comes to maintaining its roads and streets. Either streets are neglected long enough to slide into decay, are poorly built and paved with substandard materials in the first place, or are dug up for works/pipe-laying/redecoration/other arbitrary reasons and simply never repaired afterwards. Apparently one of the very first acts of the Kosovo government after declaring Independence in 2008 was to dig up the streets for a comprehensive works programme; three years later this is still ongoing and many of the roads have been left in a state of 'temporary' chaos ever since. Potholes, sinkholes, uncovered manholes, loose gravel and eroded concrete are a problem everywhere, resulting in clouds of dust and dirt rising magestically before and after the passing traffic (which itself, in its chaos and aggression, is another of Kosovo's charms).

The local solution to this problem? Watering the streets to keep down the dust. A common sight every day in Pristina are the men simply standing outside shops and houses with a hose, patiently spraying the street with the tender care that people usually reserve for watering their roses. This might seem like a simple and clever solution, but it drives me mad for plenty of reasons. Its not so much the unintended foot-wash you receive as you trudge through the puddles in your sandals, nor the fact that the water only seems to do more damage eroding the streets and washing away the gravel they lay over the potholes, but the fact that millions of litres are thus wasted in a city with such severe water supply problems that the service has to be turned off at night. Yet this practice is applied even on roads with nice pavements and road surface, where dust is not a problem. And its extremely common to see the streets being hosed down at night when the sun has gone in, the traffic has died down, and the thirsty day-time dust is no longer a problem. I think of the nights I tried to run a shower only to find an empty tank, and I cringe.

Thirsty nights

Yep, there is no water supply in Pristina between 11pm and 6am, seven nights a week, 365 days a year. At the moment some neighbourhoods are also having cuts mid-afternoon for the duration of the summer, mostly because the water pressure is so low that a supply cannot be pumped uphill. Watering thirsty streets becomes less of an innovative charm and more like short-sighted uselessness from this perspective.

My first nights in Kosovo were marked by the violent gurgling of toilet cisterns and water tanks at 6am, as newly-refilled pipes knocked inside the walls and dripping taps sputtered. Apparently flooding is a common problem in apartment buildings because people don't fully close taps during the hours without water, only to awake with over-flowing sinks or baths a few hours after the supply is restored. This also frequently soaks through to neighbours' apartments. Lately I've adjusted to sleeping through the morning sloshing and splashing, which arrives about an hour after the first call to prayer from the mosque nearby, but since then I've also moved into an apartment which has a water tank that keeps the toilet flushing overnight. Never have I been more grateful for the foresight of this provision than I was last week during a 12-hour dose of food poisoning which ran its violent course over an extremely long (and otherwise water-less) night...

No street names

Its not that Pristina's streets don't have names, its just that no one uses or even knows them. During the 1980s and 1990s, local Kosovo Albanians stopped using official street names because most were Serbian-language or referred to Serbian religious or military heroes. Then the war happened, huge population upheavals took place, much of the city was destroyed and rebuilt (a process that is still ongoing as small one- or two-storey buildings are chaotically knocked down and replaced with taller ones that can be subdivided into apartments) and most street names were changed by the new Albanian authorities. The result is that street names are now simply meaningless. It is not possible to give a taxi driver an address (i.e. a street name and number) because he simply won't know where to take you. Much less to try to have mail delivered to your house - the staff of my Organization have post sent to them via our HQ, which is located in a major European city, which then forwards items to Pristina once a week via the equivalent of the diplomatic pouch.

The accepted system here is to navigate by landmarks. Upon arrival in Pristina, it is imperative to learn the name of a hotel, shop, park, office or institution near your apartment or accommodation and to explain it accordingly to taxi drivers (another Kosovo quirk - there's little to no public transport and the entire city moves by cab). Approximately four or five roads do have commonly-used names (Ramadani Street, Police Avenue, Nana Teresa Boulevard, Bil Klinton Boulevard), but these themselves are informal nicknames rather than official titles and they refer only to the city's few main arteries. Beyond that, you have to get more creative. Everything from government buildings to particular statues to cafes or something odd like a DVD shop can be used for directions; its not at all unusual for directions to involve "going through that carpark which looks like a dead end" and then "going upstairs over that kebab shop with no sign on the door". I recently heard someone explain something in terms of its relation to "Chicken Corner". This was indeed a place where they sell chickens.

To get home, I tell drivers to take me to a gym called Life Fitness. If they don't know it, I explain that it is located next to a park which is called either "City Park" or "Italian Park" depending on who you're talking to. If they don't know the park, then I mention "Slovenjia Sport", a clothes shop on a corner 200m away, which closed down about a year ago but which is still a navigable landmark. Simple, no?

Taxi drivers who rely on passersby for directions

Despite the scientifically-perfected landmark navigation system described above, none of it is any guarantee that a man with a car who claims to be a taxi driver will have any idea what you're talking about. The number of taxi drivers in Pristina who simply don't know where or what anything is is staggering. I took an unlicensed cab driver from the airport a few weeks ago after he offered me a good price. The problem was that I think he'd literally never been into the city before. It took an hour of telling him to go "left, then right, then right again" in my worst Serbian (which he also only spoke a few words of) before I eventually made my way home. Are there really taxi drivers in other parts of the world who don't know the main streets of their own city??

Babies

Albanians love children, and family is everything to them. Kosovo has Europe's youngest population (I've heard different statistics but apparently about 25% of the population is under 25 or 30, with another 100,000 people graduating and joining the labour market each year). The young people crowding Pristina's streets are themselves all engaged in the process of marrying young and having babies. Most girls (women? Do I have to start calling myself a woman yet?) my age already have children, and the sheer numbers of young children everywhere in Kosovo simply cannot go unnoticed. Even in central Pristina, only a street or two away from the main artery, children are playing in the middle of the road at all hours of the day and teenagers are crowding the benches and parks in the evenings, checking each other out and flirting. Older children are looking after younger ones, and you never see siblings having a fight. Large numbers of young, happy, smiling children is of course a developing world cliché, but perhaps it is more startling here because for all its chaos Kosovo still feels more like Europe than the Global South.

Its a stereotype of Kosovo which is always worth a giggle. I recently flew back to Kosovo from Vienna after I was rerouted from Croatia because of a cancelled flight. I immediately knew that I was approaching the right gate because the area looked more like a creche than an airport lounge; the flight was delayed for a full 45 minutes because of the chaos on board as all the families simultaneously fought to swap seats so they could group their children together with adults. I'm almost certain I was one of the only people on the plane who either didn't have responsibility for a child or indeed wasn't a child.

For me however it also highlights some intriguing contrasts with home. For instance, a German colleague whose wife and young children moved to Kosovo with him told me that Pristina is far more geared towards family life and the infrastructure needed for children than most western European cities; landlords will choose tenants with children over younger, single candidates apparently - something entirely unheard of at home, where landlord don't want the wear and tear caused by children. Restaurants welcome infants with open arms, often having a small playground outside.

In the end, it is of course a lovely thing, a wonderful thing - large happy families out to lunch on Sundays; groups of girlfriends doting over their friend's baby as they gossip over their coffee in the afternoons; ten-year-olds protectively guarding their three-year-old siblings with a big smile of pride on their faces. I think one of my favourite sights is my landlord, a middle-aged workman who lives upstairs with his family and his married son's family, doting on his infant granddaughter with a big, goofy, child-like smile. She giggles at him hysterically and then runs to hide when she sees me coming. She is only two after all, and I guess spooky girls who don't speak Albanian look rightly strange. As of course, do 25-year-olds without husbands or children, or any interest in either. But that's a cliché of a different kind, no?

Pristina

I've often mentioned it, but never shown it. Pristina is a chaotic, unstructured and untidy place. It has its appeals but most are not visual... and yet, at certain times and certain moments, its quirky charms become slowly and strangely apparent. Especially on summer evenings, when the new-found daily heat (since the start of July its often peaked at 35 degrees in the afternoons) begins to fade into evening cool, Pristina relaxes into its café culture, its neighbourly strolling the streets, its children playing outside on the road, its citizens lolling on balconies.

Since the hot weather has begun, the city has also been bathed by a tremendously beautiful hour of twilight every evening between about 7.00 and 8.00pm. Pristina suddenly becomes another city, and for an hour or so it begins to look almost... beautiful here. Really! The sad reality being that the vivid, velvety sunsets, I presume, are the result of the city's terrible smog and the serious dust problems which arise from unpaved roads, industrial waste and that coal-fueled power station. If sunsets are the result of atmospheric conditions, then Pristina has a lot going on up there.

Last week, I managed to take some pictures which I think capture the city's essential charm at that magicked hour of evening. These were taken last Friday, 15 July 2011.

Is this the ugliest building in Europe? The library building of the University of Prishtina

Unfinished Serbian Orthodox Church of Christ the Saviour, construction of which was interrupted by the 1999 conflict

Istanbul

... now that I've actually remembered that I have a blog and need to keep updating it (times does fly), here are some pictures of the big, bold, beautiful phenomenon of a city that is Istanbul, which I visited for the first time a couple of weeks ago.

Cooking sizzling mackerel sandwiches near the New Mosque

A mix of east and west, at a frantic pace

Relatives of the Kurdish disappeared protest on Istiklal Caddesi

Seagulls circling over the Blue Mosque at night

Inside Haggia Sofia

I spotted a father playing with his young daughter on the floor inside the prayer area at Suleymaniye Mosque

At the Istanbul Pride march

At the Grand Bazaar...

... and the Spice Bazaar

and an obligatory Bosphorus shot

Another obligatory picture... but its difficult to imagine how any photograph could do justice to that skyline

Abdulhadi Al Khawaja receives a life sentence

This morning Abdulhadi Al Khawaja and seven other political prisoners in Bahrain were sentenced to life in prison by a military court. Several others recieved sentences of up to 15 years in prison. The BBC report that "the authorities claim that they plotted to overthrow Bahrain's Sunni rulers "by force and intelligence with a terror group colluding with a foreign country" - in an apparent reference to Iran."

The Guardian reports today that "The defendants punched their air with their fists and shouted 'peacefully' as their sentences were handed down, according to relatives." Later, "Khawaja then shouted: 'We will continue our struggle' ... His daughter, Zainab, was forcibly removed from court by female guards after she cried out 'Allahu akbar' or 'God is great'."

Bahrain may have been pushed back out of the headlines as a result of media overkill, Syria, Libya and any other number of this year's big news stories. But this verdict and its speed is a stain on Bahrain's conscience and shows that they continue to willingly punish their own people. The verdict, the proceedings and the prosecution itself are a disgrace. I can't help but think of the situation of these individuals as they sit in their cells tonight thinking about the months and years ahead, and their families at home facing the same truth. And besides the bleak immediate future of these individuals, how bleakly does this bode for the future of Bahrain, under a system that deems it appropriate and necessary to rule like this?

Below is the text of Front Line's statement.

Front Line, the Dublin based International Foundation for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders deplores and condems the life sentence passed against the organisation's former Protection Coordinator for the Middle East and prominent member of the Bahrain Centre for Human Rights, Abdulhadi Al Khawaja.

Today's verdict and the fact that the trial took place before a military court whose procedures fall far short of internationally recognised fair trial standards underlines the determination of the Government of Bahrain to secure a conviction at any cost” said Mary Lawlor, Executive Director of Front Line in Dublin today.

Abdulhadi Al Khawaja and the 20 other defendants were tried before the State of Safety Court which has consistently refused to address repeated and credible allegations of torture in pre-trial detention and during the trial itself. “This trial was a total legal charade and followed the brutal arrest and torture of Abdulhadi Al Khawaja for exercising his legitimate rights to freedom of expression and association by campaigning for democracy and human rights in Bahrain” said Ms Lawlor.

Front Line is concerned by the increasingly hard line being taken by the Bahrain Government. The targeting of members of the medical profession, including three doctors who are graduates of the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland and the harassment of anyone who speaks about human rights abuses to the media is of particular concern.

“For the forthcoming national dialogue to have any serious hope of success the Government of Bahrain must attempt to restore trust as a vital pre-condition. The first step to creating trust is the immediate and unconditional release of Abdulhadi Al Khawaja and all other human rights defenders currently in detention including blogger and founder of Bahrainonline.org Ali Abdulemam who is being tried in absentia”, she added.

10 things to like about Kosovo (and it's honey)

To make up for my own sore lack of blogging in recent times, I came across this piece by another blogger based in Pristina today and thought it was a great little analysis of 10 things to love about this funny little place. Perhaps it's fair to say that some of this top ten are equally things that might drive you completely bonkers (I don't find the wind-up plastic dogs on Mother Teresa Street particularly endearing) but this is a great little round-up of many of the quirky little things that I haven't gotten around to writing yet about Kosovo. Also some great pictures which make Kosovo (and especially it's food) look great.

Kudos to the talented Ms Claire C, whom I met my first week here and later discovered to be a blogger extraordinaire. She recently relocated, Kosovo's loss clearly being Ireland's gain.

If that whets your appetite, I also recommend having a look at the lovely One Hundred Days of Honey. It's a shorter and more recent blog intending to only give you a brief glimpse of Kosovo, but it's a great read for anyone interested in a quirkier and less development-and-politics, meat-and-potatoes view of the Balkans. And I'd insist that everyone should be interested in it's writing about food - there are some recipes here which make me want to stop everything and run home and start cooking. I recently had the privilege of meeting its author at the launch of her lovely book about Kosovo, Travels in Blood and Honey, where she was kind enough to sign my copy while plying us with homemade baklava. I've lately adopted a habit of spending some time on my balcony in the last hour of the day's sunlight, reading about her adventures becoming a beekeeper in Kosovo and learning local recipes.

Finally, if you do want the more traditional political round-up on Kosovo, you can't do worse than MTCowgirl.

Kosovo

I haven't been very productive this month in describing Kosovo. So perhaps the simplest observations are those I've had during a few weekends of day tripping around the country, to Mitrovica, Prizren and Novo Brdo.

Zvečan

Novo Brdo

Kosovo can be startlingly beautiful. Hilltop fortresses - in particular at Zvečan and Novo Brdo - offer amazing panoramic views of vast tracts of open empty countryside, rolling hills, green fields. Except that such views also demonstrate two common problems: pollution and decay.

Novo Brdo

The fortresses are not only ruined but are entirely unprotected, unfenced and unpoliced, and seem to be actively crumbling. I literally saw pieces of masonry fall down hillsides as daytrippers scrambled and climbed over the monuments, which were often scrawled with graffiti and usually strewn with litter. These are amongst Kosovo's oldest and most precious structures, but they literally decay before your eyes.

The problem of pollution is perhaps even more pressing (or depressing). I can't claim to have seen much of Kosovo, but abandoned industrial plants seem to be everywhere, no matter how isolated or rural the area. The infamous dirty coal-powered electricity plant at Obilic pumps vast, filthy clouds of smoke across Pristina and the surrounding area, but at least it's put to productive use. Most of the industrial facilities I've seen are long-closed, many presumably since the collapse of the socialist state, others since the conflict. They look as if they were not so much shut down as literally abandoned: as if someone simply closed the door at the end of a working day and never came back. Debris, waste materials and scrap usually lie around and outside the buildings; doors hang half open; shards of glass still remain in the window frames. Most of these plants are indistinguishable - there's no way to guess what used to be produced here.

Perhaps more tragic is the human pollution and decay which accompanies them. Novo Brdo's only urban area, for instance, is an abandoned mining town, consisting of nothing more than three small apartment blocks, a tiny grocery shop in a construction which looks like a portacabin, and a single, shiny new building which was constructed to house the local municipality. The municipality building is bigger than the single school and is the only building in this tiny little collection which doesn't look as if it's rotting from the inside out. Since the mines closed the former employees have remained in the apartment buildings, subsisting on who knows what. Seeing the kind of socialist-style housing blocks which are patently designed for a utopian urban environment - the kind which surround every city in Eastern Europe - decaying in the middle of verdant, uncultivated countryside dotted with industrial waste, surrounded by rough yards where chickens peck the dirt and the occupants grow small patches of vegetables in order to get by, was one of the more bizarre and heartbreaking sights I've seen since I arrived.

Kosovo also differs from Bosnia however in terms of how the recent troubles and conflict here manifest themselves. In Bosnia the signs of recent war are brutal and in-your-face brash: bullet holes on walls across Sarajevo, collapsing buildings, the circular marks from shells. Here however, the buildings which look like they've just seen the end of the war mostly are not the result of damage of the 1999 conflict, but of the ethnic conflict which has followed it and which still takes place on a continual basis. Most of the houses which appear bombed have in fact been looted: such houses were generally abandoned by ethnic minority owners such as Kosovo Serbs, who were displaced due to overt violence (such as during serious rioting in 2004) or as a result of the low-level but constant, daily thrum of intimidation, hostility and aggression which continues between the communities in Kosovo. Their homes, once they had left, were systematically dismantled by the remaining residents who take not only any useful materials such as windows, doors and even the bricks, but in effect destroy the displaced persons' links to their old home. The houses in the photo below are in Prizen, in a neighbourhood which used to be predominantly Serb but which today is quickly succumbing to trees and bushes.

But finally, on a lighter note, my favourite signs on Kosovo's roads. Yes, the international community is far more apparent and obvious here than in Bosnia, particularly in terms of the military presence. It's still common to see convoys of NATO trucks, ambulances and armoured personnel carriers on patrol. In most countries, bridges carry a sign stating the weight limit for passing trucks and heavy vehicles, but in Kosovo every bridge carries a second sign with the designated weight limits for tanks. Makes me giggle, every time. Though perhaps really, not all that amusing.