Here Comes The Money

Posted on April 24, 2013

Yesterday, I wrote about the recent agreement between Serbia and Pristina, and about how perhaps not every Serbian person in the world is totally over-the-moon about it.

In Mitrovica, 20,000 people gathered on Monday to say “No To The Brussels Agreement.” At the headquarters of the Serbian Orthodox Church, meanwhile, Patriarch Irinej told press that the deal “appears to mark the pure surrender [...] of our most important territory in spiritual and historical terms.”

So it’s obviously kind of touchy. Not everyone is happy. The Serbian Orthodox Patriarch isn’t happy, and Tom Hanks (seriously) isn’t happy either. And even though the talks were sponsored by the European Union, Brussels is not the sort of entity to really delve into things like this, or to have officials make speeches about the theological nature of Serbia’s relationship to Kosovo. But that doesn’t mean that they’re doing nothing.

Early this morning, Bloomberg Media published a story detailing how the market surrounding Serbia’s benchmark bonds is responding to the agreement in a sharply positive manner. Bonds are kind of complicated, and what has actually happened is that the yield-to-maturity rate has fallen, making Serbian bonds less directly lucrative. In the occult world that is international finance, though, this is a good sign, as it means two things: money is flowing out of government bonds and into the markets, reflecting investor confidence, and the government can now borrow at a cheaper rate. Reflecting this good-if-ridiculously-complex news, the Serbian dinar made significant percentage gains against the euro as well.

These weird little equations and calculations, are, to a far greater degree than speeches or expressions of principle, the signals of power in the globalized order. Indeed, politics can sometimes be seen as a grand effort to hide the workings of this truer-than-words regime; though George W. Bush and Barack Obama, for instance, excite very different constituencies, the overall economic structure of the United States has not vastly changed between their presidencies. Things like gun laws, homosexual marriage, and the theological underpinnings of disputed European regions are worthy issues to debate, perhaps, and they do a lot to help politicians gain the support of whatever group of people they’re after… but the world of power remains one of numbers.

You have to follow the money. If you are curious about where political actors fall on certain issues, you have to follow the money. Because, in terms of the Serbia/Kosovo agreement, the powers-that-be have made their feelings known.

Quietly, indirectly, and in a strange and difficult code, they have spoken.

Categories: Europe, In The News, Politics

Tagged: Europe, Kosovo, Politics, Serbia

We Have A Deal

Posted on April 23, 2013

Photo Credit: inpristina.com

Last Friday, Belgrade and Pristina agreed to “normalize relations” between Serbia and its breakaway, independent-with-an-asterisk former territory of Kosovo. Like so many supposedly certain things here, this newest declaration is full of ambiguities, mismatched definitions, and opportunities for plausible denial.

It’s easy to be cynical about these things. When I arrived here, I was astonished at the degree to which Kosovo was willing to depend on vague assurances, “dialogues,” and other such questionable things. But it’s better than the alternative. When, I have come to realize, you see major world powers and organizations giving their imprimatur to these sorts of labored, dishonest-seeming constructions, its because they are concerned that guns will fire in their absence. All parties remain, for the moment, able to see their directly-opposed claims as being somehow independently true. This is the crucial thing.

Kosovo, for its part, is championing (officially, anyway – many Kosovars remain both distrustful and displeased) the current deal as a de facto recognition of its independence by Belgrade. If the protests in that capital, and the claims by the Serbian Orthodox church that the deal represents a “clear surrender” are anything to go by, this contains at least a measure of truth. In disputes such as this, you cannot call something a success merely because it is being lauded by its champions; you also have to check whether the other side is pissed off. And Serbia’s citizens and its historic national church most definitely are. According to one protester, the most important question raised by this resolution is how Serbian Prime Minister Ivica Daçic sleeps at night.

On the other hand, one can also claim that Serbia has exchanged a nominal and symbolic defeat for a vast array of practical, day-to-day, boots on the ground-type victories. In Kosovo’s north, which centers on the bifurcated city of Mitrovica, Serbia has been promised a series of permanent and far-reaching powers which ensure that Belgrade will have a significant say in the public life of Serbian North Mitrovica (and environs). In many ways, the Serbian population of that region will be able to essentially live and regard themselves as Serbians for perpetuity.

The talks that produced this deal were hosted, of course, by the European Union, and the incentive for both Kosovo and Serbia to come to terms with each other is the promise of eventual EU membership. In light of recent issues, one might wonder exactly how excited Brussels (or Berlin) is to welcome two countries with per-capita-GDPs (PPP) of $10,500 (Serbia) and $7,400 (Kosovo) to the union, but in this part of the world, the EU represents the best show in town, and so any hope is better than nothing.

The fact that this is an EU-sponsored deal, however, means that the question of partition – of Kosovo’s abandoning the disputed North to Belgrade in exchange for recognition of the remainder – is entirely off the table, and conspicuous by its absence. Europe has too many fractious states, too many local independence movements to set this type of precedent. In recent history, any mass movements toward the shifting of European borders have tended to take the form of world wars.

As a Canadian, and a citizen of a country whose history is short, pragmatic, and largely absent of ethereal claims, it is easy to tell oneself that this is all much easier than it is. On the streets of Pristina, the claim that “Kosovo is Serbia” seems strange, deluded, and pregnant with denial. But this isn’t Canada. This isn’t (what was once called) the New World. When Serbians say these things, they are not claiming that they, for example, set tax codes in Prizren, or operate the buses in Pristina. They are saying that, in the shadowy realm of national “essences,” Kosovo is tied to the Serbian state in an existential and dissoluble way. It goes back to the Middle Ages, and is essentially religious in nature. It’s a European thing, old and intractable. And it’s not going to vanish just because a group of elected officials say that it is otherwise.

It’s so easy to be cynical. But cynicism is abrupt and absolute, and qualities like abruptness and absoluteness, in the realm of politics, lead us to the point of conflict. As these negotiations continue, they are going to lead both Kosovo and Serbia to points at which both parties will have to abandon certain central claims. These talks will unavoidably produce a circumstance in which each side will have to redefine themselves in a far-reaching and existential manner. And they are unwilling to do this.

So we have a deal, I guess. We have an agreement.

But we also have a standoff.

Categories: Europe, In The News, Politics

Tagged: Europe, Kosovo, Politics, Serbia

Unchained Melodies

Posted on January 22, 2013

Photo Credit: B92

As per Edmund Burke, those who cannot remember the past may well be doomed to repeat it. But so are those who do remember it; who remember it obsessively and minutely, who pore over its many defeats and setbacks, who almost savor the righteous grief provided by its catalogue of shrieks and horrors. The recent spate of vandalisms, desecrations, and passive-aggressive incursions around Kosovo and Southern Serbia is not due to any failure of memory.

The other night, I went with a group of internationals (to use the Pristina shorthand) to watch Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained at ABC Cinema, and it was entertaining. A Spaghetti Western with mythic overtones, let’s say, or an exquisitely realized cartoon. A Siegfried fresco in bloody watercolors. A fun night out.

It also, of course, was a graphic illustration of the doctrine which holds that severe maltreatment justifies fantastical and gory acts of vengeance. After the movie, when we adjourned to Paddy O’Brien’s for the requisite beery round-table, a professor friend told us of his students’ near-total reluctance to see their own (Kosovar Albanian) heroes and myths as being at all similar to those of their historical opponents.

Is this a luxury, maybe? A self-doubting equivocation available only to the rich and peaceful? To the “West”? For these kids, the very idea that their stories and those of their enemies were in any way related, in terms of rhetoric and structure, to those of the Serbs was entirely unacceptable. Ridiculous on its face. A spectacular blasphemy.

In Kosovo, it seems almost socially necessary to believe that one’s own people have, for a series of cruel and unjust reasons, been defamed and assaulted in a near-infinite fashion by an essentially demonic opponent. An opponent that has no motivation save the perverse desire to inflict suffering. This is true, of course, for people on both sides of the conflict, and it is this supposed truth that serves to turn destructive actions into justified retaliation.

In the last week, an array of Serbian Orthodox cemeteries were desecrated, in the dark of night, by (one can only assume) Kosovar Albanians. Not to be outdone, Serbian gendarmes in the southern border region of Presevo took it upon themselves, at seven in the morning, to remove an “illegally erected” (quotes placed not to deny the claim, but to emphasize its innate ambiguity) monument to 27 ethnic Albanian insurgents killed during the Presevo Valley uprising of 2000.

This arguably cowardly series of events all take place as the leaders of both Kosovo and Serbia meet for a series of historic talks whose goal is to come to a solution regarding Kosovo’s still-unofficial independence. Though it is difficult (read: impossible) to imagine a solution that would satisfy the demands of both factions, it is encouraging to see this discussion happen over a table rather than a battlefield.

You have to wonder, though, why these things are occurring at the same time, and after months of relative quiet. Is there some sort of symmetry that we, on whatever internal level, require of these situations? If we apply a certain degree of calm and measured “dialogue” (to use the currently fashionable term) to a situation, must it be counter-balanced by a soupçon of late-night explosives and early-morning bulldozers? Is this how people are? Is this what can’t help but come into being?

As always, I guess, we want it all. We want peace and prosperity – in this case symbolized by international approval and promises of EU membership – but we also want victory and glory. We want calm and order, but we also want the spectacular destruction of our enemies.

These recent occurrences are unsettling. As they were designed to be. On one level, they feel like skirmishes, or minor conflagrations, but on another they feel like a prelude.

I don’t know the difference between these two circumstances, or these two states of being. It seems like one of those paradoxes, one of those zombie cat things. It seems like it is not yet determined, and that it will only become clear after some future action.

One can’t help but be somewhat worried. We like to think of ourselves as masters of our own histories, or our trajectories, but all too often we are slaves. We are slaves to our slanted memories, we are slaves to our selective readings, and we are slaves to our battle-hardened hearts. In situations of any complexity, we are very often slaves to ourselves.

What do slaves wish to do to their masters?

Categories: In The News, Politics

Tagged: Kosovo, Politics, Serbia

Kosovo 1.0

Posted on December 19, 2012

Last Friday, a remarkable thing happened in Pristina. I mean that in the original sense, of course: a thing worthy of remark, or perhaps created solely to prompt remark, occurred here, and now everybody is talking about it.

As all of my local readers are already aware, I am referring to the violent cancellation of Kosovo 2.0’s “Sex” issue party, which was shut down by a mob of club-wielding thugs whilst police – according to eyewitness reports, if not official record – did noticeably less than they may have been expected to do, or less than they may have done in another jurisdiction. People got hurt. Things were destroyed. Luckily, it did not go any further than that. Because sometimes these things do.

What happened here? To speak very broadly, it was a skirmish; it was a fast and unexpected (to a degree) little incursion by the forces of traditionalism against those of (the circumstance we have largely agreed to call) modernity. It was a small, localized battle in a war that is global in scope. It was a raid.

What else was it? Well, this is where it gets a little more complicated. Multi-layered, fluid, pregnant with questions. This is where it gets… Balkan.

Let us first define it by its official response: According to Kosovo Prime Minister Hashim Thaçi, as well as a broad array of the acronym-organizations (UNMIK, EULEX, OSCE) that define Pristina’s institutional sphere, what happened on Friday was an organized attack on press freedom and on LGBT rights.

This is nearly impossible to argue. Following the raid on the Kosovo 2.0 party, the mob subsequently attacked persons associated with two of Kosovo’s (rare and embattled) gay-rights organizations. They screamed slogans beginning with “Allahu” and “Death to”. These people are not mysterious. We know who these people are and we know what they stand for, societally speaking. They are not pro-press freedom and they are not pro-gay rights. Everyone who has lived through the past few decades knows exactly what this particular cultural faction wants and doesn’t want to happen.

Women in Tehran, Iran, c. 2012.

But what did Kosovo 2.0 want to happen? In what manner did they choose to address the fact that Kosovo 1.0 – the actual Kosovo, the fraught, tenuous, “newborn” Republic of Kosovo – contains a certain number of individuals who will go to great lengths to prevent things like gay-rights groups and sex parties and cultural modernity from gaining any sort of foothold here? To what degree were the various best- and worst-case scenarios considered? And what were they?

Two days after the event, I found myself sitting with a friend in Pristina’s Dit e Nat café – a conspicuously “European” corner of the fractious and fractured city –discussing how it all went down. Things were fresh. People were talking, telling stories, repeating things. The grapevine was swollen with intoxicating wines.

The thing to remember here, I was told, is that while Kosovo 2.0’s efforts might have seemed merely “progressive” in Paris or Berlin or (my native) Montreal, in Pristina they were nothing short of radical. To propose a party like this was a radical act. To send out invitations – as they did – mentioning things like “masturbation bars, the prostitution industry […] Albanian male adolescence, homosexuality and war […] having sex while disabled,” was a very direct and very radical gesture toward a part of this city and region that they had to know was watching.

And that, in one sense, is OK. It’s OK because these sorts of cultural skirmishes really are part of a greater war, and in war, radical gestures can and must occur. Sometimes, these are the only things that move the front-lines, that gain ground and cause one’s enemy to lose face and to lose support and to diminish. Because Kosovo is still very much a “1.0” sort of thing, there is this enormous sense that its future nature has yet to be defined. Will Kosovo, in this particular area, possess the public mores of Berlin? Or will it default to the more circumscribed ones of, say, Istanbul? Will the traditionalists win, or will the modernists? Because “dialogue” and “sensitivity” and public-statements-of-acronym-organizations aside, someone always wins. And someone always loses.

Women in Tehran, Iran, c. 1976.

The trouble at this juncture, though, is that it’s hard to see any directly-involved parties as having “won” very much at all. I will state my own sympathies: I am a press-freedom absolutist. I am also a supporter of gay rights, both at home and here in Kosovo. As such, I rejoice in circumstances that advance these causes, and am troubled by those that imperil them. And I am not yet sure where this particular event will ultimately fall on that continuum.

Historically, one of the great blood libels leveled against homosexual men by religious conservatives has been that they support pederasty – sex with adolescent boys. “Pederasts” was one of the many words that followed “Death to” in the mob-cries of Friday’s raid. As such, I think one can reasonably question the responsibility of including “Albanian male adolescence” in a list of things that one’s “Sex” party is going to celebrate. Was this too much? Was this a dog-whistle meant to inflame traditionalists while internationals heard only the familiar language of LGBT rights? Or was it a well-aimed lancing of traditionalism’s stubborn boil, a principled act of defiance meant to communicate that no subject, no matter how taboo, will be silenced or suppressed in the new Kosovo?

This is where it gets difficult. Because though we are on one hand speaking of vast historical changes, of cultural shifts and radical actions and principled stances, on the other we are talking about a sexy holiday party held to promote a glossy magazine.

This is not to say that magazines cannot be political actors. They can. But they can also be opportunistic. They can benefit, in the sense of drawing publicity and public attention, from cultural schisms and divides, and they can benefit from remark-worthy events. They can benefit, sometimes, from things that end up hurting people.

I don’t believe that this is Kosovo 2.0’s intention. But now that the violence has occurred, now that the factions have identified themselves and the battle-lines have been drawn, it’s time for further action. For the sake of both Kosovo 2.0 and Kosovo 1.0, it’s time to be clear.

If one is going to be radical, one must be fearless and direct. That’s the price. Though I am relieved to know that the heads of Pristina’s various acronym-organizations deplore the violence visited on last Friday’s party, and I am glad to know that the reported lassitude of the police does not reflect the official stance of Thaçi’s government, this isn’t over yet. Reprinting the assurances of these institutions is not sufficient; though they may serve to legitimize, they cannot serve to protect. There is still one piece missing.

What do the editors of Kosovo 2.0 and the organizers of last Friday’s violently aborted party have to say to the mob itself? What do they say to the imams, to the hooligans, to the thugs?

Because this hasn’t run its course. For the gay men and women who are the supposed recipients of this act of goodwill, things are not yet over. Things are, in fact, tense and unfinished and dangerous. How will Kosovo 2.0 address the vast cultural fault-line that it has exposed? How directly will it counter the claims of the fundamentalists?

We need to know what the publishers have to say. Not the government, and not the international organizations, but Kosovo 2.0. Tell us what this means.

Tell us what is going to happen.

Categories: In The News, Life In Pristina, Politics, Uncategorized

Tagged: Islam, Kosovo, Media, Politics, Pop Culture, Pristina

Cycling In Germia Park

Posted on October 10, 2012

Cycling gets the monsters out. It really does. It works. Now, I can see why, say, Trek Bicycles (“come out and play”) might not want to use that as their marketing slogan, or why cycling advocacy groups might choose to emphasize the environmental benefits of cycling (“What carbon emissions?”) over the “personal demons”-related ones – but between you and me, I’m onto something. There is just something about the combination of balance, of speed, of covering distance, and of capital-S Suffering that does the trick. It really gets them out.

Sometimes you can even see them sort of emerging. Look closely.

When I was much younger — a million years ago, you know, back in the era of land lines and Archers of Loaf concerts – cycling was something I spent a lot of time on. I got pretty good, in an amateur sense. Though never particularly gifted at any of the team sports (imperious, perhaps; uncooperative for sure), I was a rail of a kid and I had just a shade of that gaunt and graceful endurance common to all bicycle racers, just enough of that penitent’s act. I traveled across the continent and I rode, sleeping in vans and motels, in Vermont, Quebec, Arizona, B.C. I ached in the Rockies; fell down into oxygen debt outside Sedona; threw up my arms at impromptu and sparsely-attended Nova Scotia finish lines. And then I forgot about it. I came of age, met a girl, sunk into the cities. I became a writer.

Now writing, it can sometimes get the monsters out – but a lot of the time it puts them in as well. When you write, you find yourself searching for illustrative comparisons, you know, ways to encapsulate vague or difficult concepts in terms of known things and practices. “Just imagine if we…”; “That would essentially be like…”. Sometimes, you make it to the finish line — you get a metaphor out. You turn a phrase. It ends up funny. Other times, even if you get it built, it’s just not that funny, or it’s kind of ghastly, and you have to leave it half-finished; a bad connection; a broken prototype squirming fruitlessly around the back of your mind. A monster.

Oh Francisco… sometimes it seems like you have a Capricho for everything.

It is for this circumstance that the city of Pristina provides a beautiful escape, one that I think is worth mentioning. I know that sometimes I can be a little hard on the place – one commenter even asked me “is it as terrible as you make it sound”?, which made me feel guilty and inaccurate. Pristina is a small and self-contained city, and though its urban life is as busy and intense as even the largest North American metropoli, one can leave that all behind very quickly.

To the city’s east, and to its credit, the Pristina municipal government maintains the gorgeous Germia Park. It is a place of playgrounds, of chateau-styled restaurants, of a (somewhat depressing) zoo, and of miles and miles of cycling trails, from winding mountain roads to narrow, remote little goat paths (side note: watch for actual goats) that require dedication to find, concentration to avoid falling from, and a very familiar sort of suffering to successfully ascend.

As you may or may not be surprised to hear, Canadian Thanksgiving is something less than a society-consuming affair here, but every time I ascend the three peaks of Germia Park, I give a little thanks that this city has returned cycling – with all its monster-suppressing qualities and cardiovascular benefits – to my life. When the pressures of the desk, or of homesickness, or of mental turmoil or angst or whatever other product of unnatural stillness clouds my view, I remain able, in this city, to surmount it in a matter of pedal strokes.

The word “monster,” just as a curiosity, comes from the Latin root “monstrum,” meaning a portent, or an omen. Our English verb “to demonstrate” shares this root, and I like to keep in mind that the presence of mal-formed thoughts, beings, or ideas should at best serve as a call to action. In my case, in Pristina, I heed it by going cycling in Germia Park. Your mileage may vary.

Categories: Impressions Of Kosovo, Life In Pristina, Uncategorized

Tagged: Kosovo, Pristina

Premature Exasperation

Posted on September 30, 2012

“That’s the trouble with everybody – you’re all so bored. You’ve had nature explained to you and you’re bored with it, you’ve had the living body explained to you and you’re bored with it, you’ve had the universe explained to you and you’re bored with it, so now you want cheap thrills and, like, plenty of them, and it doesn’t matter how tawdry or vacuous they are as long as it’s new as long as it’s new as long as it flashes and fuckin’ bleeps in forty fuckin’ different colors. So whatever else you can say about me, I’m not fuckin’ bored.” – Naked (1993)

I feel like I sort of fucked up a little. I was off by a day or two. I mis-calibrated. Here’s the thing: You know that expression “first world problems?” That irritating little consciousness-raiser of a trope that employs Egyptian prisons, Bolivian cocaine peasants and fly-covered Ugandan babies as parts of its grandly dismissive effort to convince you that your hangnail doesn’t hurt? Well, it has its uses. I hate to admit it, but it does. Check me out: I went on a giant European vacation and I got sick of it. I travelled to the ornate and ancient capitals of my own ancestral Continent,

Pictured: Where white people come from.

wandered in a state of utter leisure among the monuments and archives of epoch-defining civilizations, and decided to go back to the hotel for a nap. I rested on pillows not two miles from Ireland’s National Museum and watched reruns of Geordie Shore.

Bosh.

It’s a little embarrassing. It’s so embarrassing, actually, that I can’t even just let it lie there like that – I feel compelled to add that I am not (read: am often) that type of person, that I toured the Palais des Nations, that I viewed the Trinity College Library, that I ate raclette and took the tram and unfolded the map and stood on the goddamned corner and pointed… but I just couldn’t quite make it to the finish line. It was too much. Too much leisure, too much walking and looking, too much rich food and dark beer and too many desirable things in general.

What Dublin giveth, Dublin taketh away…

It’s a dark truth about us humans, but we’re built to suffer. We flourish in situations of violence and labor, and grow fat, scabby, and diffident in times of protracted wealth. As nations grow more peaceful, more sophisticated, more humanistically-inclined, their birth rates plummet and their suicide rates skyrocket. So there I was, you know, Exhibit A, standing in the cake shop on Dame Street, bitching about my stupid feet and deciding not to go to Dublin castle.

“This sucks. Let’s get out of here.”

I know this entry isn’t really about Pristina, or about Balkan life, but it’s not entirely unrelated. When we moved to this part of the world, one of the main things on the non-“still a lot of land mines around” side of the scale was its relative proximity to the capitals of Western Europe; we came here, in part, so that we could do a lot traveling – and we are doing a lot of traveling. And in the course of doing so, I am learning about what traveling, as a human activity, actually is.

Reflective, no?

The pleasures of traveling are pleasurable only insofar as they differ from the trials of everyday life. As a Westerner in Pristina, my particular trials include things like “ramstek,” comically inadequate produce, and the aforementioned land mines (Germia Park holla!). Yours are likely different, and probably have less to do with rotten tomatoes and bees, but the mechanism remains the same: Travel, and the activities of travelers (sightseeing, shopping, wandering, waiting), are thrilling and energizing for as long as you are able to compare them to the more mundane activities of your day-to-day life. When you begin to forget, and these activities start to become a day-to-day life of their own, the sights blend together, the streets grow long and tedious, and the shops seem crazed and frivolous.

“Sixty-nine francs. Get it? Plus tax. Plus duty. Fuck you.”

It was a great trip, not least because I learned this thing, but also for the things that I saw before succumbing to angst and decadence. As for the actual places, well, I have said already that the proudly pragmatic tradition of travel writing is not a strength of mine… but I can claim to have received certain impressions. There was Geneva, closed and beautiful, a Rapunzel city; locks and windows and intrigues. Then came Basel, the kindly old Doktor of the Rhine, dreaming among the instruments of his study… and finally there was Dublin.

Dublin is difficult. Though initially welcomed, after one too many Continental eccentricities, as a mere repository of upper-middlish Anglosphere delights (farm to table!), after a few days I came to recognize a strange little quiver that told me something else was up.

I never got it before. Not in any pastichey “Irish pub,” not in Boston or Montreal, not studying Joyce or Yeats in university. I never really, viscerally, got it – but now I begin to see. Ireland is a very particular realm of the collective human mind. Haunted; feverish; martyred; ill-adapted. Ireland left me not with a pastoral, homey feeling, but with one of wounded ferocity; of self-consumption. Strange people, the Celts. Voices in that air.

If this is all sounding a little occult, here is a picture of the time we went to Starbucks:

Exotic.

It is kind of an insane project, this “doing” of ancient cities in three to seven days, this dutiful trudging, this stubborn demand to be awed. Though I navigated the old towns, though I queued for the monuments, and though I photographed the symbolic-at-the time curiosities,

It seemed like we were on this street forever.

I can’t say that the impressions of “placehood” noted above were definitively linked to any of these landmark experiences. Similarly, though I ate at the airport restaurants, though I waited under familiar billboards, though I took guilty comfort in the bland trans-national competence of Starbucks, I can’t say for sure that any sense of distinctiveness or essence was altogether absent, even in these places.

What I can say is that I got tired. I got worn out. I walked and looked and ate and drank and consumed things both material and discarnate, and I flew back to Pristina in ruins. I suspect that tourism is actually sort of bad for a person, that we are not meant to simply wander around just looking at the world, but are instead meant to live in it. To struggle, to want, and to make our way. I suspect that travel is actually a mild vice.

Fine. Good. I can do vice.

Paris is booked for November.

Categories: Europe, Travel, Uncategorized

Tagged: Europe, Geneva, Travel

The Dog Days Of Dogana

Posted on September 7, 2012

So “Dogana” means “customs” in Kosovar Albanian, and “customs” means “four loosely related offices between which you are sent in patterns of increasing complexity and cost” – but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Mere delineations of procedure don’t really tell the whole story. Here’s what happened. Here’s how a couple of naïve, online retail-enjoying North Americans were again reminded that they are very, very far from home.

It began with a purse. A bright yellow purse on a cutely named American shopping site for girls. It was a grey humid afternoon, all of our neighborhood restaurants sucked (and continue to suck – more on this to come), and our heroine was in need of a little cheering up. “Just buy it,” I said, thinking, you know, dash-of-retail-therapy/sunshine-on-a-cloudy-day/don’t-really-want-to-back-and-forth-over-this-for-very-long type thoughts. I thought it would be a fun thing.

You have to give the Americans credit: they are very good at what they do. Qualms about capitalism aside, Texas-sized PVC islands in the Pacific ignored, they are really good at selling you things — and in the land of surly, post-Communist clerks (is storage! Is no store! You leave now!), you sort of stop taking that for granted.

Within a few days of the purse order, we received this bright orange envelope informing us of what great people we were, what astute shoppers we had proved to be, and how much we had to look forward to – both in the specific sense of the soon-to-arrive purse, and in the implied sense of life in general. This is what U.S. retail types call the “Total Shopping Experience;” it’s a collection of little communiqués and corporate gestures that combine in such a way as to make you feel like part of a select human grouping, a fun, good-purse-having little family that never forgets the niceties. In Toronto or Los Angeles, this stuff works. We would have smiled at the cute little card, leaving it to animate our hallway shelf for a day or two before the actual parcel arrived at our door. It would have been a nice touch, a thoughtful policy, a shrewd bit of marketing. In Kosovo, though, it just became sort of sad.

The note came shortly after the bright orange envelope, but it was not from the cutely named American shopping site for girls, and it did not communicate any aspect of the “Total Shopping Experience.” Instead, it was official-looking, and told us to go to the fucking airport because maybe our goddamned purse was there. Maybe. And so we went. To the fucking airport. With our fun little orange envelope crushed morosely in a stack of papers, protesting in a strained Midwestern accent that this wasn’t supposed to happen; that it really didn’t know what was going on here at all.

Here is how customs in Pristina works when you want to pick up a thing at the airport: First you go to a little room with a bench and a framed portrait of national hero/accused terrorist Adem Jashari. There are two men there, and they are having a good time laughing at something on their computer screen that you can’t see. When you interrupt them, citing the purse that by now doesn’t seem like such a good idea, and isn’t really any fun anymore at all, they wait 15 minutes before sort of tersely pushing some papers at you. Receipt of these papers requires you to go to another little room with another bench and the same aforementioned portrait. In this room, you give them money – and the amount of money they demand is not the exact same amount that is printed on your form… but it’s close. It’s pretty close. You light a cigarette and you wait for them to print the form that says that you have given them money. You think about other purses, other cities, other lives. You inhale.

The next guy is kind of the joker of the pack, and he lives in a third little room with a third iteration of the typical bench/Adem Jashari aesthetic combo. He’s really nice; seems kind of understanding, even sort of does a little proto eye-roll at the complexity of all this. Unfortunately, his task is to send you back to the money room, as there are further (and seemingly invented-on-the-spot) taxes to be paid.

What can you say? Sales tax? Sure. Handling charge? Seems reasonable. “Stipend of the Barometic Pressure?” Probably just a bad translation. “Propeller Fee?” Sure. Fine. We’ll just stand here like this. Let us know when it’s over.

I think the term “Kafkaesque” is somewhat overused. This situation wasn’t Kafkaesque. Were it Kafkaesque, the story would end with us being packed into the purse’s tiny box and shipped back to America via cargo plane, while the fun yellow purse was placed in a cab and sent to our apartment in Pristina. It doesn’t end like that. We got the purse, exited onto the highway, and vowed to never do something like that again.

It is no accident, though, that Franz Kafka was not from (say) California. Gregor Samsa did not peer from his beetle-y room over the palm trees of Santa Monica. This sort of blind proceduralism, of obdurate officiousness, of Less-Than-Total-Shopping-Experience has Eastern Europe as its home, and the Balkans as its capital.

The next purse will probably be purchased locally, rhinestone double-headed eagle or not.

Categories: Impressions Of Kosovo, Life In Pristina

Tagged: Kosovo, Pop Culture, Pristina