Kosovo Journal

This second half of the week was a full week. It started with a fourth of July celebration that had the resemblance of an American celebration, with the burgers and the beer, but the live DJ and dancing gave away the Albanian influence in the event. It was really fun to destress from the past two weeks and touch home for a little bit. After this event, we went straight back to business. On Friday I had my shoot day with Fitim, the Military parkour guy as I’ve taken to calling him. The day started promisingly; it was an early start at the military base where I was happily let in with the credentials I had. But that is where it started to go downhill. Every time a military policeman passed us we would get stopped and scrutinized about what we were doing. And then I was informed that I am only allowed to photograph Fitim, so I had to delete half of my photos from that shoot.

After that Friday the weekend was surprisingly relaxing. I did not go to the Peja trip, which meant I had some time to just relax by the giant pool pictured below.

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 as quickly as the last problem occurred it was corrected for and then fixed. The week started with Aulona and I finding a new subject to work with for the New Borns project. A man named Burhan who is a member of the Egyptian community in FusheKosovo; he volunteers with Ideas Partnership in order to help teach the people of his community that education is important. Because he was our second subject we rushed through meeting him and did our interview on the same day that we met. I’d rate the interview a 4/10…..he just wasn’t comfortable enough with us yet.

As things tend to happen the day after we did the interview with Burhan we were told that the situation with Fitim was a misunderstanding and that he was still up for doing the project. So that is how I ended up with two Newborn projects.

On a non-academic note, our adopted dog Auk is getting bigger and bitier every day, while I still am more attached to him than I should be I definitely preferred it when he did not untie my shoe laces everytime I play with him.

Well that’s the end for the beginning of week two of classes, more updates to come.

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.

Traveling To Gjakova

My partner and I reached out to our subject and we decided to meet at the bus station and travel to Gjakova together. In theory this sounds incredibly easy but traveling to a bus station in a foreign counties is much harder than expected. I asked the worker at the hotel to call me a cab and he was even nice enough to talk to the cab driver in Albanian before I left.

I arrived at the bus station with no issues but finding the bus seemed to be tougher than I expected. At the bus station, one has to go to the bus that they would like to and then pay for their ticket there. Well This is a fairly large bus station and there was a lot of people there on a Sunday afternoon. I arrived an hour early and I was still extremely stressed right up until I got on the bus. My partner only arrived ten minutes before the bus left, so I was on my own for a good amount of time.

The bus ride went very smoothly, it was an hour and a half ride even with multiple stops along the way. I was happy that this ride seemed to be an easy one because I was already sure that this was the project that I wanted to do.

We sat down and talked with Lorik and he seemed to be even more interesting that I could have expected. He has just turned eighteen and he has won multiple Master level Classical Guitar contests around Europe. He has been accepted to a college in Germany to study under one of the best Classical Guitarists in the world.

I am positive that this will be my subject.

So earlier this week we were broken into teams and then given our subject. We were given a teenage classical musician from Gjakova. I was immediately excited by this project! Musicians are usually a little different and fun to work with. I was immediately excited by the possible angles I could take to work on this project. The only issue that was made was that my partner decided that Gjakova is too far from Pristina.

He and I had to have a conversation about the possibilities that could be created by working with this particular subject. I was determined to follow this project through and had to convince my partner that this would be best for our project. We decided that we would go meet the subject and see if this was a story worth following up on.

The week started off with a nice orientation day. We had the experience to tour the college and some of the city. We had a nice lunch with the professors and we had a chance to talk with each of the different professors. It was nice to sit down and talk with professors I wouldn’t have.

Half of the reason that I went on this trip was to take the Developmental Economics class that was supposed to be offered but not enough students signed up. The staff was extremely helpful with helping me set up an independent study. I will be able to take the classes that will help me the most in my field of study. I am very happy that they were willing to do this for me.

The regional trip was a lot of fun but it was also very stressful. It felt like we spent a majority of the trip on the bus. We went to five countries in eight days. That is way too many places to go in such a short amount of time. There was never any time to relax or to absorb the culture. Wherever we went it felt rushed and slightly disorganized. Whenever a group of this size travels, there will always be issues but I felt like many could of been thwarted by visiting less countries.

I did enjoy myself but I felt like I only got to look at these places. I never felt like we had enough time to truly relax, and enjoy the cities were were in. Even with the constant racing, the trip was fun and I enjoyed the trip.

Whenever I have traveled in a group before, it seems like groups form as soon as the trip starts. I was surprised to see that the group seemed to stay fluid. I felt like I was able to move between groups and interact with everyone.

The only time that it seem to segregate was when it got later in the evening and people wanted to do different things. I was happy to see that people appeared to be comfortable doing their own thing.

I went on the Kosovo tour with Kaltrina and some of the others. It was fun although there was a lot of walking! We started in Prizren and hiked up a small mountain to reach the fortress. We stopped to see the Decani Orthodox Monastery, the artwork inside the Monastery on the walls was amazing. We were told that many of them were originals, for instance the image of Jesus with a sword in hand. Next we saw the caves and waterfall of “Burimi i Drinit të Bardhë” or “White Drini Spring.” It was nice to walk in the colder cave after a hot day of walking. Some of us took a swim in the water at the base of the waterfall. I didn’t, I watched as a lot of people go into the very cold water though. Lastly we stopped in Peja, but only to eat. I had a crepe!