Yesterday, I went on a walking tour of Pristina. This is what I was looking forward to all along. Pristina obviously isn't a Madrid, Prague or even a Sarajevo. This is the largest city of a country that has oficially only been recognized since 2008.
The walking tour was given by a 21 year old college student. The guy was knowledgable, and I saw
- A new Catholic Church which was recently completed.
- A grand hotel, which was on the site of a mosque (Destroyed back in the communist days of the 50's or 60's so the hotel could be constructed).
- The grand bazaar, which is centered around 3 mosques-so the workers at the bazaar could pray easily (from what I gathered).
- An old house in the Ottoman style,
I also learned that the reason the US and other nations involvement in the war for Kosovo's independence was to avoid a reprise of the Bosnian war, where thousands of innocent civilians we're killed.
While I was glad I was able to learn this (my main question about US involvement), the guy wasn't a professional tour guide, and focused more on the sights rather then political events, and didn't really stop to discuss them-he discussed them more while walking, and it was difficult to hear.
After the tour, we all went to an American-style restaurant, and had lunch with a few beers-and then I went back to the hostel for a nap (it was around 3:00).
At 5:00, I walked down to the front porch, and BSed with the others in the hostel. We discussed other parts of Kosovo, past travels, and other stuff. After a while, 8 of us went to a restaurant called Te Nazi for dinner-which was inexepensive ($22 Euros for all 8 of us).
We then went back to the porch to talk. The people here are largely American, which is unusual. (out of 9 of us on the porch last night at least 5 we're American). We discussed the usual-one is a recent college graduate who studied Linguistics (and has already learned a lot of Albanian phrases in less then 24 hours here). The one nice thing about Americans is few smoke-so in the crowd of 9 only 3 smoked (tops)-so it was easy to breathe.
