Author: John Keefe

Its all wrapping up. My final is now on the render queue. I’m making this blog post now as our final is rendering and being finalized. Its a trip. For the last month and a half I have gone to 9 countries and will be going to 3 more after the program ends. Before this trip I had never even been outside the continent of North America. Once I go home I will have been to 15 countries.

I’m really going to miss Kosovo and Pristina. I have had so much fun here and I love all the people that I met while I was here. I really feel that I may never see some of these people again and that is kind of sad, but I still have social media so I can contact all these people whenever I want. I wish I could stay longer but I have too many project going on back home. I really need to find some time too come back.

Its all ending soon. Its currently 3:10 am as I am writing this entry and it is right before the last day of class. I have most of my documentary done and ready to go for the 5pm deadline today. I only have one paper left to write for my State building class, and I only need to have a draft done of the book for the documentary class.

I really wish I had more time. It comes with taking summer classes that everything goes by quickly, but I feel like I needed more time to see everything I wanted to see in Pristina. I still need to make some time to go see the Bill Clinton statue and gets some gifts for my family. The next two day are going to be packed and I hope I can get everything I wanted to get done out of the way.

Everything is wrapping up here in Prishtina. Its all going so fast. By this time next week I will be in Slavonia for a day visit. Today I have been planning out my week in Eruope That will start to when the Kosovo program ends.

I’v been booking hotels, flights, and train ride for the next week. My current plan is to fly to Slavonia and then get a bus down to Croatia. After that not sure. My flight back home is out of Munich, so I need to be there on the 4th. Maybe I’ll go to Vienna for a day, still thinking about it. I really want to do this trip mostly because we made it to 5 out of the 7 republics that were part of Yugoslavia, why not go all the way and say you went to all of them?

We are now half a week into our second to last week in Kosovo. How the hell did it all go by so fast? When planning for this trip I thought in the back of my mind “It will start to drag a bit by the half way point”. We have now gone past that point and now all I’m thinking about is how fast this all happened.

On the other hand, we got back from Greece a few days ago. It was an awesome time. We chilled at the beach and hike Mt Olympus. We made some pretty good distance, unfortunately we didn’t have time to make it to the top. Greece was defiantly a trip and I look forward to whenever I can go back.

We had plans to shoot the last of our footage last Thursday. I had Elion do the first shift in the morning. I started getting texts from Elion saying that DJ Gamble had not came to the meet up point. After nearly two hours had passed Elion told me that he was not coming.

I asked him why and he told me that Adrian had gotten into a motorcycle accident. We got word that he is ok and doing fine and back on his feet. It is a good thing that he is ok. I saw his social media and he looks like he walked it off pretty well considering what happened.

Tonight is going to be stressful. I just finished my paper for State Building. But I need to work on finishing my New Born for the Doc class and fix up the Audio tonight.

We are leaving for Greece in less than 12 hours so I need to get everything done fast. It so bad I don’t even have a hotel booked. It will be fine Im excited for Greece. It might be the worst week of the trip for me personally, but I may never get another opportunity again.

So yesterday we meet with Adrian for our interview. I’m not sure about all the details about the interview because he was giving his answers in Albanian. I was able to grasp a few thing because he was talking about his battle with cancer.

I am looking forward to reading the transcript. Elion said that he will be translating it when he gets the chance. The whole project is moving so fast. We already have video of him preforming and tomorrow we are all following him around on his normal day.

So I finally meet with my subject for my final. I was told he was local Dj, but I came to find out that he was one of the biggest DJs in Kosovo. If you google Kosovo DJ he is one of the first people that pops up.

I actually got to get up on stage at the last night of beer fest to film him play. It was defiantly a trip to be on stage with him. I had scheduled the whole thing the day before.  I never imagined any of this when I was planning for this project.

This week we met with the subject of our newborn project. Me and my partner went up to Mitrovica. Mitrovica was defiantly a different town to Pristina. It felt a little less polished and a bit more rough around the edges. It was not bad by any means.

We also finally meet with our subject and she was really nice. She showed us around Mitrovica and showed us her college campus. Last Friday she also showed me around the Serbian side of town. We went to her other campus and we got coffee.

It is currently Saturday night over here. I am currently working on my essay for my state building class and working with my partner in our Newborn project. Class are going mostly smoothly.

 

I have been really enjoying downtown Pristina. I have gone out for a few drinks about half the nights I have been here and It had been a blast. I am defiantly looking forward to the next few weeks.