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

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

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.

A post from Pristina

It's about time that I got around to telling you something about Kosovo. For anyone unfamiliar, (which one was that one again?) Kosovo is a former (well, that's debatable, but I'm not going there right now) province of Serbia which was placed under UN/NATO administration in 1999 following a guerrilla war of independence which escalated into full-blown ethnic conflict. From a legal, historical and political point of view, Kosovo's was a unique conflict because it ended due to NATO military intervention - largely led by the US and Britain - justified on the basis of stopping large-scale atrocities which were being allegedly committed against civilians, specifically ethnic cleansing. If this sounds familiar to anyone, this is the same justification which is currently being used for NATO intervention in Libya. All sides committed atrocities but the bad guys in 1999 were the Serbian forces. Since then, local Kosovan Albanians have been accused of committing ethnically-based violence against Kosovan Serbs in retaliation, the worst of which happened in 2004 when serious rioting led to the displacement and expulsion of much of the remaining Serb population. Kosovo declared itself to be an independent state in 2008 but it has not been fully recognised and it's status remains unresolved. It's not a dangerous place and the conflict is over, but tensions between the communities remain high.

I'm here working in The Organisation's headquarters in Pristina, the capital. And let me tell you, there are a hell of a lot of Organisations in Pristina these days, so you can have fun trying to work out which one I'm not naming. Kosovo remains under international administration, and although it does have its own government and authorities, it also has a hell of a lot of NATO troops, UN agencies, EU personnel and a whole host of others.

Pristina's a strange place, very different to Sarajevo, though it's about the same size. It's sort of a brand new city, to start with, which doesn't sound as odd as it feels. I'd never thought before about how our conceptions of cities are anchored around their historic development; our individual consciousness of urban development – particularly in Europe – is drawn immediately to the historic centers of cities from which all else usually grows outwards, both physically and mentally. Think about it; upon getting to any new place you immediately head downtown and orient yourself from the main landmarks, which are usually based around a square or imposing public buildings. You don't realise how central – literally and socially – this concept of a city is until it isn't there.

In Pristina, for instance, everything seems to have been built in the last 10 or 20 years, but not in a good way. Urban planning is non-existent. The city is unplanned and follows none of the logic you take for granted in most towns. It seems to lack a sense of centre or history, a sense of itself. I've been to plenty of places where unplanned and unpredictable growth has led to organised chaos, but even in Africa most towns and cities originally functioned as markets or were initially developed by colonisers who had some purpose in mind. But for some reason, it doesn't feel like Pristina has that kind of background. It was a small city whose population exploded in an unpredictable and impromptu mess following the 1999 war. This doesn't make it particularly modern, because most of the new development has taken the form of featureless, six-story apartment buildings. Most only seem half-finished because features like porches, balconies, outdoor lighting (even over the front door) and paving never were finished, leading to a distinct building site quality that's only enhanced by the many half-paved streets, rubble-y pavements and the litter lying around.

So it's not a scenic place. I don't think I'd particularly recommend it as a tourist destination unless you have a thing for army vehicles or a business interest in concrete. But to be fair, despite all the above, it's not really that bad. Pristina's not spectacularly ugly or uniquely bizarre by any means: all of this just makes it sort of... boring, really. Visually, at least. I haven't taken many photos, for instance, because there's nothing much interesting to take pictures of (bar the truly spectacular crater in the street outside my apartment building, below. I amuse myself by watching the cars waltz gingerly around it as I walk home in the evenings). I had heard about all of this before I got here, so perhaps it simply couldn't live up to my wildest and worst imaginings. There's also a good chance that a spell in Africa – in the developing world in general – cures you of many snobberies (once I'm in a place that has a decent internet connection and toilets with a flushing mechanism, I'm generally happy).

But the main thing that really hits you in Pristina is the immense extent to which it is internationalised. By internationalised, I don't mean globalisation (no McDonalds or Starbucks here), but rather the immediate and overwhelming sense that the one and only industry in this town is the international community. All those organisations have a hell of a lot of people just like me working for them, and as a result the service industry which supports people like us feels like the only thing driving Pristina forward.

Coming from Sarajevo especially, the choice in food is mind-bending: sushi, thai, tapas - I had a pancake brunch last week. This is unheard of in the rest of the former Yugoslavia. I don't feel like I'm in the Balkans at all. Everyone travels every weekend (Greece, Macedonia, Serbia, Montenegro, Bulgaria and Croatia are within driving distance), eats out all the time and does plenty of drinking because everything here is cheap, people make good money and there's nothing else to do. Obviously, the lifestyle is pretty sweet and I'm not saying that I won't enjoy and take full advantage. Except that to be honest, it makes me feel somewhat uncomfortable. Pristina is the living epitome of the international development/aid cliché, more than I've seen anywhere else, including Africa: well-paid white people bumping around in ubiquitous four-wheel-drives, spending money somewhat frivolously in a poor country, complaining about things like litter and potholes.

Well, enjoy my self-righteousness before I inevitably get sucked into it, I suppose. And it'll be interesting to see how much these first impressions change.

Last Sarajevo afternoons...

Bye bye Vuchko!

Belgrade

Some pictures from Belgrade, Easter weekend