The birthplace of history. The wet nurse of Western culture. While we'll never know for sure, it's safe to say that early religious leaders probably meant the Balkans when they talked about the "promised land."
Who doesn't harbor some instinctual urge to travel to the Balkans - to swim upstream, to stand where our ancestors stood, to roll in the grasses that they once rolled in?
The Balkans starts a lot of wars, but they also start a lot of parties; to many, it is "the peninsula that never sleeps."
In the past, Low Brow and company have flirted, foreplayed and fingered our chins with the idea of a Balkans Spring Break. And this year we got our excuse: as of February 17th, Kosovo got its independence! You may be thinking, "Yeah, yeah, repeat 1990" (that year Kosovo first declared her independence, but everyone except Albania - Kosovo's robotic yes-man - just kept looking straight). Not this time! Twenty-seven states have pledged Kosovo-fidelity, including democracy's favorite gigolo, the U.S. It's legit! Could they have a bigger excuse to party? We had to take part, and really it's a win-win situation: we get to go to Kosovo, they get publicity from a reputable news source. We present. our 2008 Spring Break.
Let's get to know Kosovo. If you look at the Kosovo flag you will notice that the large symbol in the center of it looks like the Brooks Brothers logo (the one with the hanging pig). It places Kosovars in a moral dilemma - should they buy from Brooks Brothers and proudly wear Kosovo's logo on their shirts, or should they buy local and support their own industry?
Kosovo is 92% Albanian and 6% Serbian; in Kosovo, you are either Muslim or Orthodox Christian. There are exactly two registered Jewish families in Kosovo, as recently depicted in the moving documentary No Country for Yarmulkah Salesmen. Not to speculate, but this low Jewish-population statistic could be the reason why there are so few Kosovars at Penn.
Kosovo is 4,200 square miles with a population of about 2 million or about that of San Antonio; however only four countries recognize San Antonio's independence.
To get from Vienna to Pristina, Kosovo's capital, we had to take Air Austria. I liked it. The service was better than Continental, especially since they didn't waste your time with a dumb safety video that showcases their CEO, who himself resembles a flotation device. Also, Continental chose High School Musical as their in-cabin movie. We were excited to think that, due to the scarcity of TVs in Kosovo, the souls of Kosovar tweens have not yet been polluted by girl-power icons Zac Efron and Hannah Montana; Kosovo and Disney usually fail to see eye-to-eye. Except for maybe the medieval "theme," Kosovo is quite unlike the Magic Kingdom.
We landed in the Pristina International Airport and were greeted by a friendly bunch of UN peacekeepers. We grabbed our bags and picked up our rental car, a Fiat. Pristina, the capital, is covered in mud and concrete. Just imagine if Qdoba Field and its surrounding sidewalk was in fact the capital of Kosovo.
The city is scattered with miniature Harnwell and Rodins - shoddy, socialist-style apartment buildings from the '70s. The tallest building in the city - the former headquarters of the "Rlindja" newspaper ("the 34th Street of Kosovo" as the natives call it) only reaches 20 stories.
On a building in the distance, we noticed about a six-story poster of some man. We thought that perhaps it was their own Fisher-Bennett and some artist had decided to put a large poster of a random guy, and in doing so make a weak, boring statement. We were wrong. It was, in fact, Bill Clinton. We found out that Kosovo really likes Bill Clinton (the main drag is called Bill Clinton Blvd.). We decided we would introduce ourselves as Bill Clinton from now on.
Pristina has a dog problem. When everyone left during the 1999 Kosovo War, all the domestic and stray dogs got busy, as any reasonable person would do before he went into battle, and as a result, everyone returned a few years later to a superabundance of dogs. So much interbreeding had occurred that all of the dogs now looked the same: 30 pounds of gray, matted fur. To walk a dog in Kosovo is either to be crazy or to be making an ironic joke.
We went out that night for some Spring Break festivities. Turns out there was only one club. It was called 212, started by a New Yorker and named after his home area code. There were very few hos in this area code, except there was this one cute chick towards the back. I normally don't do this, but since it was Spring Break, I thought I'd make a move. I downed another drink and went up and asked her for a cigarette. She said she didn't have one. I didn't know if that was her way of saying "not interested" or if she just really didn't smoke. It bothered me, but I talked it over with the boys and they made me feel better. Kosovars aren't so easy.
After our stint in Pristina, we arose bright and early one morning and made the two-hour drive to the other end of the country, where we were to spend the rest of break. Unlike Pristina, this part of the country was beautiful. We were in the heart of the Juniku Mountains set over by the lush blanket of the Gazimestan forest. The craggy, steep mountains made this region nearly impossible for the Nazis to control during WWII; like them, we could barely control ourselves.
We approached the small town of Pec.
Perhaps more important than its history, Pec is famous for its macchiatos. Arguably, the Pejan cafes make the best cup of macchiato in Eastern Europe, and for 50-75 Eurocents, it's a steal. One guy in our group put his plastic stirrer in the middle of the macchiato, and it stood upright - a remarkable display of the Kosovar conception of latte-foam: thick and resistant.
We went to a nearby Serbian church that that contained the tomb of Holy King Stefan. Kosovar legend holds that if you touch the tomb, your wounds (assuming you have some) will heal. We were skeptical. One of our guys had fallen and scraped his knee back in Pristina; we thought we would take King Stefan for his word. Stefan however outsmarted us: he did not say when exactly they would heal. thus when his knee was better a few weeks later, Stefan, that holy bastard, was probably laughing wherever he was.
For the remainder of the trip we stayed at Prizren, a town made famous for its heroic resistance to the Ottoman Turks in 1389. I'm not sure why they're so proud of this battle, because the Turks would conquer them pretty soon after. It would be like taking pride in a football season where Penn won their first game, but then lost every game after that, something like most seasons.
When we first showed up in Prizren the people greeted us with this look as if we had come to do community service. We had to politely explain to them that while we would pick up trash if we came across any, we were journalists: we don't help the community in any tangible way, we just write about it.
All good things come to an end. Memories blurred together, aided by the fact that every city we visited started with a "P." It's interesting to think that we spent Spring Break in the poorest country in all of Europe (GDP per capita, as reported in World Almanac). Perhaps it is the many decades of reckless, destructive Spring Break trips that have led to Kosovo's backwardness and failure to mature as a country. Like Mexico.
