Absorbing / Mysterious: 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