September 16th-21st, 2019

I arrived in Prishtina, Kosovo’s capital, after spending the day in Niš. When I alerted my Serbian friend that I was in Serbia and going to Kosovo, his response was, “So you agree, you are in Serbia?”

Serbia does not recognize Kosovo’s independence, which it declared in 2008. As of 2019, only 108 countries in the world recognize Kosovo as an independent country. The biggest impact this has on travelers is that they cannot go to Serbia from Kosovo. Serbia considers this an illegal border entry.

The reception you get as an American in 2019 can vary somewhat from country to country. Kosovo loves the United States.

Bill Clinton’s support for the NATO intervention and commitment of US troops in 1999 made him a beloved figure in Kosovo. There is a statue of Bill Clinton and a street named after him. There’s also a clothing store named after Hillary Clinton that she visited in 2012.

I took a walking tour in Prishtina. It was a good way to hit all the major sites in Prishtina. To be honest, there weren’t a ton. Prishtina is kind of an ugly city, but there’s something charming about the way it carries itself.

Newborn Sign

The Newborn sign represents Kosovo as a new country. Different artists paint the letters for a different theme each year. While I was there the focus was on the environment.

Heroinat Memorial

The Heroinat Memorial is just across the street from the Newborn sign. It depicts an Albanian woman using 20,000 coins, one for every woman that was raped during the Kosovo War. The face of the woman was a composite created to be representative of Albanian women.

Cathedral of Saint Teresa

The truly mindboggling thing about Prishtina’s Catholic Cathedral is not how old it is, but how young it is. It’s still not completely finished, I was told that a lack of funds was holding up some of the construction, but it’s fully functioning. It’s much simpler than the gold-covered cathedrals of Europe. Instead of the usual apostles on stained glass, there is Mother Theresa and three of the most recent popes.

Ethnography Museum

This is a category of museum that we don’t really have in the United States. It’s almost as if we have outsourced our understanding of how people live and have lived to Hollywood. The museum was free, but it was also under serious renovation, so a huge chunk of it was closed.

Prishtina Library

This building is a must-see for anyone visiting Prishtina. It has the reputation for being the ugliest building in the world, and I think that reputation is completely deserved. The architect tried to bridge different styles and pay homage to Kosovo’s history, but it just looks like an alien prison.

Apps have been helpful for meeting local people and in Prishtina I met a guy out for drinks. He worked at an advertising agency in Prishtina and was currently working on political ads for a special election as one of their politicians had recently resigned due to corruption. The agency he worked for was owned by Dua Lipa’s father. Dua Lipa is part of the Albanian Diaspora storming pop music that also includes Rita Ora and Bebe Rexha. He showed me a picture of him with Dua Lipa from a recent music festival in Kosovo where she was headlining.

One of the things he mentioned to me was that the Kosovo passport one of the worst for traveling. It’s ranked 98th in the world, sandwiched between South Sudan and Iran.

Prishtina Bear Reserve

Getting to the Prishtina Bear Reserve was backpacking at its finest. I walked to the bus station with all my belongings, dropped off my bag for storage, then hopped on a bus for about a half hour. I knew I needed to get out at a gas station near the entrance to the Reserve. From there, I walked 45 minutes to the entrance of the reserve. Oh, and it was pouring outside. Luckily it stopped raining shortly after I began my walk. There weren’t too many cars passing me or I would have considered hitchhiking to the entrance.

In 2010 Kosovo outlawed the practice of caging bears. Previously they had been trapped in small cages at restaurants to attract guests. They were often trained to dance. In order to train the bears, they were placed on hot ground while music played. After some time, the bears developed a pavlovian response to the sound of music and would begin to hop whenever they heard the music. It’s supremely fucked up that the bears were traumatized and then forced to relive that trauma every time there was music.

The Prishtina Bear Reserve houses 24 bears that were rescued from restaurants and even some homes. There is a trail you take that loops around all the different spaces the bears inhabit. They appeared to have plenty of room and to be pretty happy, but some exhibited behavior like pacing back-and-forth that was a direct result of their life in a tiny cage.

The rain scared off nearly all the other visitors, so I was one of the only people there, except for a group of new hires who were getting trained at the facility. I walked the 45 minutes to the gas station, waited for a local bus, and then grabbed a bus to Prizren.

Prizren

The town of Prizren is much smaller and prettier than Prishtina. There’s a river that runs through it and a number of historic bridges. The old town has beautiful old mosques from Ottoman rule. There are a couple of sights to see, but mostly I took it easy. It was a serene place to walk around. I went to a dingy gym where the music was so loud that I had to say something to the front desk. The mosques were beautiful, and they welcomed visitors.

Pizzeria Rita Ora

Singer-actress-model-spokeswoman-socialite-Dubai Regular-Rita Ora was born in Prishtina and very proudly Albanian. Kosovo seemed pretty proud of her, and nothing made that more evident than the pizzeria I saw that was completely themed around her. Rita Ora occupies a fascinating place in pop culture where she is seemingly everywhere and yet most people in the United States have no idea who she is or why is famous. One of my favorite podcasts is Who Weekly?, which has the tagline. “Everything you need to know about the celebrities you don’t.” It posits that all celebrities fall on a binary of Thems, who are household names, or Whos, which are the celebrities with millions of Instagram followers yet if you heard their name your first response would be, “Who?”

It’s podcast canon that Rita Ora is queen of the Whos. The podcast has a weekly segment called “What’s Rita Ora Up To?” where they simply recap what instagrams she’s posted or lecherous Daily Mail coverage she’s received. When I saw PIZZERIA RITA ORA, I knew I had to go.

At PIZZERIA RITA ORA there were a couple of older men sitting outside, but it was pretty empty when I was there. Inside the restaurant there were pictures of Rita everywhere. I tried to be respectful and so I surreptitiously take pictures. There was a poster that said “Rita Ora Pizza Time.” Ora means “time” or “clock” in Albanian, so I guess it’s a bit of a play on words.

The menu was pretty standard pizzeria/fast food stuff. I wasn’t really in the mood for pizza, so I thought I’d order something else. As I worked my way down the menu, the guy working there indicated everything I wanted wasn’t available. I ordered a hamburger, thinking that would be simple and there’s no way he didn’t have it. He then gestured across the street to say that I should get a burger across the street. It was clear he didn’t understand that I was deadest on eating at PIZZERIA RITA ORA. I ordered the vegetarian pizza. It came out with ketchup and mayonnaise for dipping, which is surprisingly common in this part of the world. Pizza was solid, and now I can say I’ve eaten at PIZZERIA RITA ORA. It was good, but not particularly memorable.

My hostel recommended a hike that everyone should do up to the fortress overlooking the city. It’s the long way around that takes a good 90 minutes. It walked along the water for a while before gradually ascending to the fortress. Prizren was once the capital of the Serbian Empire and the fortress must have been a commanding presence during its heyday before the Ottoman invasion.