Here's an
email I sent to a few friends about my first twelve hours in
Kosovo.
I'll try to get my initial impressions down now that I have access to email, and hopefully provide you with a more
enlightened installment once I've actually managed to walk around this
place.
Flying in on a small
Alitalia jet accompanied by a small herd of
Arabic-speaking men who hardly fit inside
XL t-shirts and looked like a
rugby team was a bit unsettling. Could be the sheer
size of them, the
language they spoke, the shaved heads, the menacing attitude, the insistence on vegetarian meals, or simply the stories that have made the
press about this kind of situation on a plane leading to rather
rapid and
unplanned landings that caused that mixture of
excitement and
apprehension.
When we had descended below the thick cloud cover, the
Macedonian landscape started to rear its
mountain ranges, stark and
grey for the most part except for jagged gashes of red rock, scars on each facet of the
topology that seem to warn incoming travellers that further
scars have yet to come. These dipped suddenly into gentle,
verdant hills, furrowed along their length by winter streams, to give the appearance of a giant green brain,
ruminating on all that they have had to witness with the numbing pace of
continental drift. Another sudden drop gave way to a vast flat plain that was dotted, sparsely at first, then more thickly as we approached
Skopje, with red brick houses. From time to time we flew over very regular rows of dull steel huts, possibly stores or factories, that had fallen into disuse but retained their rigid
grid-like structure when viewed from above, echoes of a not-so-distant
communist past.
The
pilot did not land the plane so much as drop the thing out of the sky and hope that the runway was somewhere in the
neighbourhood for the event. This had everyone struggling to keep their seats and attempt to appear composed but the chorus of loud thuds inside oversize chests was most likely audible from
Belgrade. We walked across a runway into an airport that was evidently a recent affair, where some form of
grandeur was present at planning stage but only the
delusion remained in the final
execution.
I was scrutinised by a
Macedonian police woman who wore her
fringe with an almost
patriotic pride, skipped through the empty pages of my new passport with unsuppressed disdain, chose a page at
random, and then stamped it with an
apocalyptic finality. Never have I been made to feel so
insignificant, such a meek instrument on the cosmic scale of things, such a useless
mayfly trespassing on precious
Macedonian soil. Armed with this new confidence I found myself on the street outside the airport, with no such thing as an arrivals area so that there is no interface between the
passport control queue and the
world outside.
I was immediately confronted by a dozen
friendly faces who solicited their
taxi service shamelessly and pushed each other aside in an attempt to take me to wherever it was I surely didn't want to go as long as they had secured my fare. The more
vociferous of them asked me whether I was waiting for someone and I nodded dumbly and said "
My Friend" for
god knows what reason but I was still feeling rather intimidated and very, very confused. He immediately told me that
no, my friend wasn't coming, he had
forgotten about me, and that I was going with him. He would take me to
Skopje and find me a
hotel. He also knows the
restaurant where I'm having dinner. I listened for a while then asked him whether I could
smoke there, a question that he wasn't prepared for and interrupted his script.
Floundering he accepted that I wasn't accepting his offer and went on to pester some other hapless traveller, this time a huge
Nordic man who must have inspired much of their mythology, looking
Thor-like and possibly of the same proportions.
I walked out of the throng and made my way to a small open-air cafeteria with
eight tables and
ten waiters.
Labour is cheap in
Macedonia. My dad picked me up a few minutes later and we headed out North towards the border with
Kosovo in a white
4x4 with
UN written
inconspicuously in 2 foot-high letters on each side of the vehicle. It beeped frantically whenever we hit the
speed limit and informed the
powers that be that we had committed this crime. On our way to the border we overtook a convoy of about 12 army
tanks,
hospital and
supply vehicles and a
police escort. We stopped ahead of them and I tried to take a couple of pictures but they climbed out of the bellies of the
metal beasts they were riding to wave angry fists and even angrier
Kalaschnikovs at me. Bad move.
Back into the
jeep we finally reached the border and I decided to take a photo of the
sand-bags and
artillery. Bad move? Of course it was a bloody bad move. A
police woman came up to the car smiling, and politely asked me to go with her. Internal battles were raging inside her since she was
livid at my
audacity but had to retain dignity when faced with a
UN vehicle. Fumbling with the seat-belt I dropped the
memory card inside the car and followed her to the police station like an obedient
puppy. She rattled off in Albanian to two soldiers, hands on hips. Holsters, actually. Eventually I got out of it by convincing them that I had no card inside by brand new camera and that I was just practising.
Off to
Pristina then, capital of
Kosovo, a bit more cautious with the snapping this time.
The hour and a half drive from the border to the capital revealed a countryside with plenty of natural beauty and
human interference that attempted to reverse this. Shops the size of my car sold a few apples and bottles of water, scrap-yards with hundreds upon hundreds of
deceased vehicles rubbed shoulders with shops that seemingly existed purely as purveyors of
rubber ducks. Plastic, it turned out, since many shops sold a small variety of plastic items, each 'specialising' in the range of items sold. So all of god's handiwork on whatever day he created plants was cruelly
mimicked inside a shop that attempted to sell crude plastic representations of
global flora.
At the same time,
poncey, new,
glass-clad buildings were erupting at
haphazard intervals, glorious European architecture surrounded by the now-familiar rubble, like a steel-and-glass
phoenix rising from the ashes of a recently-torched countryside. These are all evidence of new investment that is somehow focusing on small patches of land while ignoring the surroundings. Quite why certain patches are chosen for development remains quite a mystery since these new buildings seem to spring out of nowhere, and around them the car-sized 'shops' and mounds of metal or construction waste grow
unchecked.
Another striking feature that hardly blends into this landscape was the presence of a
disproportionate amount of advertising billboards, advertising
cigarettes, the
American School in
Pristina, and a few other consumer products. The
smokes and the school, however, alone dominate the vast majority of square kilometres available for public perusal.
Into the city finally, we enter a twisting and turning maze that diverted us through
ramshackle shops and
minarets,
casinos and
mosques,
kebab restaurants and
tobacconists. The first impression is that of a typical
Islamic town that has been infused with a certain degree of
communist architecture and the crass commercial in-your-face advertising of the glorious
West. The latter factor is possibly the most incongruous. We drove through quite quickly but I'll be walking around soon enough and will be able to provide you with more detail later on.
The
flat we're staying in turns out to be the only one in a neat and brand new house, with the landlord and his wife living on the ground floor and renting out the first floor to justify their investment. They seem to be obsessed with
security,
cleanliness, and for some bizarre reason,
carpets, so each step has a tiny carpet to itself. The flat itself is comfortable and airy, with windows all around, an excellent level of finish and a massive car battery. An attempt, it turns out, to make up for the power cuts, the occurrence of which ranges from weekly to daily.
Straight on the house of an American judge for dinner with another 6 judges. I was delivered a healthy dose of discussion about the technicalities of the farce that they call a judicial system. They entertained Article six from the European courts, separation of the church from the state, delays in the Italian judiciary, systemic responsibility in Poland, and a mind-boggling array of similar fictions. They really don't get the point, do they?
Sending email from UN office that has two maps on the wall. One is an
updated political map of the
world and the other is a "
Mines and
Routes Map". Quite why one would want both on the same map is beyond the realms of my comprehension.
Scenic route there,
mine right next to it, climb that mountain for a view of the city, just be careful because it hasn't been
demined, etc...
Off to the town, for want of a better word, to
forage for
food and
cheap cigarettes.
More soon...