NOT my butcher shop

Tom and I saw this mishtore (meat shop) open when we were out for our walk on Sunday. You can see that the door is wide open and while it was cool out, it was definitely not the temperature of a meat locker. When I have been here in the summer it is the same deal....door wide open, the meat not covered, and so on. Oh, well, it's not like I'm going to eat goat, anyway. I think the ones with the heads still attached are goats....the others, um...I'm not sure.
You can't see it in this photo, but on the far right side was a fresh hide hanging there, too. I can't help but believe that this can not be a selling point. However, to be fair, I should point out that this mishtore appears to be cleaner than other ones I have seen.
I've been kind of sticking to eating chicken here but I'm wondering about that, too. The bird flu has been confirmed in just about every country around here so I know it is just a matter of time before they find it here, too.
Everything I have heard on the news indicates that eating chickens with bird flu isn't a problem....just handling them is. In the meantime they are killing off gazillions of chickens across Europe.

Does Disney know about this?

I'm just wondering if "Nilaj & Diar" is Albanian for "Mickey & Donald".

This is just one of many examples of things you see here where you never know if the goods being sold are authentic or what.

There is, however, a store called Bata near Tom's office that sells what looks like real Italian leather goods. However, the prices are so low, I wouldn't bet on it. I'm thinking I might have to buy a pair of shoes there just to "test" them....ha!

Glove Alley

Here is the so-called street I call Glove Alley. For one thing, as you can see, it is very narrow. It is made worse by people walking in the street but then, they hardly have a choice thanks to cars parked on the sidewalks....at least what passes as sidewalks. Some of them are only wide enough for a cat. The glove connotation is because I kept noticing gloves stuck in the snow, ice and mud. The mystifying thing to me was that they were usually pairs...not just single gloves.
Well, anyway, this is the street that Tom and I walk through to get to his office.....it's only a 10 minute walk at the most....it depends on how many cars we have to dodge.

My favorite green grocer

This is where I go for produce. Can you believe how beautiful it is? My understanding is that most of this comes from Italy and Spain. Inside there is a tiny store, about the size of a walk in closet. But it is packed with everything, fresh baked bread, farm fresh eggs, juices of all kinds and the top shelf that goes around the entire inside is lined with liquor. I LOVE this place. I bought blood oranges there today. I bet you can't just go to your grocery store and pick up blood oranges, unless you have a Whole Foods!
The guys who work in there are really nice, too. They don't speak perfect English and I think I scared them the other day when I was trying to find out if they sold kitchen knives. I was demonstrating cutting and chopping and their eyes got kind of big. One of them finally said, "We don't have."

Better Than Hobees

As a number of people know, Hobees was about my favorite place to go out for breakfast when we lived in California. I always ordered the Santa Cruz Scramble because of the fluffy eggs, cheese, artichokes and pico de gallo on top. Oh, it was heaven. Well, get this: The Calabria restaurant in downtown Pristina, Kosovo has Hobees beat. I wish everyone could experience this. Eggs that taste like eggs and they come from chickens that run around in someone's yard here. Mushrooms that aren't just filler....they taste like mushrooms. The ham comes from some local little farm where pigs are grown right here in the country. Not in some giant food conglomerate feed lot type of thing. Creamy cheese and mildly spicy little peppers chopped up throughout. And look at the potatoes.....they look like Yukon Gold potatoes....not just some mushy, bland white potatoes....and pan fried so they were all crispy. And check out the tomatoes....it's February, people...and you know what? The tomatoes taste like tomatoes!!! Unheard of. And then there's the little chopped cabbage salad thing going on in the middle....it had a tiny bit of some kind of thin dressing on it....just enough to pique the flavor a bit. And pickles on the side....who would have thought? Good pickles, too....Paul, you would have loved them. The bread? It's called "morning bread", sort of like English muffins but a thousand times better. The bread in this country is worth the trip here. You can't see the glasses of fresh, hand squeezed orange juice that we had, too. Of course, Tom had a cafe latte and I had my usual capuccino. All this for the low, low price of 13 euros. If this breakfast alone doesn't afford The Calabria a Michelin four star rating, I don't know what would.

Night of the Living Birds

Okay, I said I was going to try to get a photo of the birds that darken the sky of Pristina every night and by luck, last night was better than it has been in awhile. There were literally tens of thousands of them. When I took this photo the mosque across the street was broadcasting call to prayers so that added to the moment.
Personally, I believe that Alfred Hitchcock must have visited here once and this was where he got the idea for the movie "The Birds".

Bird is the Word

This is just a photo I took from my window the other day. "The Birds" were showing up at the usual time, just about dusk. I'll try to get a really good picture of all the black birds that converge on Pristina every day. Some days they are so thick the sky almost goes dark. But I liked this one bird at the very top of the mosque across the street from our flat. I wonder if he has a "bird's eye view" of the city?
I've been told that the name Kosovo means something like "field of black birds". The real Field of Blackbirds is close to Obilic not too far from Pristina. That's where the Turks and the Serbs fought a gigantic battle back in 1389. There were thousands of corpses lying around the battlefield afterward and these black birds feasted on them. Ewwww.

George Amadeus Washington

Notice anything about the Mozart sign? I had seen this place before when I was visiting here and I vaguely recall that I thought something was "off" about it, but I didn't zero in on it until the other day. Maybe it's supposed to be a subliminal message to internationals working here to spend their money there, but the portrait in the "O" on Mozart is definitely not Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.....yup, it's good old George Washington.

Cookin' in Kosovo

Here was a little wake up call. I had this great idea to make cornbread to go with our chili tonight. Tom was nice enough to go to Camp Bondsteel the other night and buy some provisions at the PX. He bought some packages of Betty Crocker cornbread and muffin mix and Hormel Chili. I am all jazzed up about making this and having food like "back home". First thing I realize is the oven controls are kind of um, different. For one thing, the temperature only goes up to 275 degrees. So it dawned on me, "ohhhh....Celsius" so being internet-ready I happily Googled a Celsius-Fahrenheit chart (how does anyone on the planet exist without Google??). Then I set the oven temperature but there are all these other little pictures on the knobs that I have no idea what they mean. This could get interesting.
Back to Betty Crocker. I have eggs I bought from the green grocer today so -check. Milk - check....we bought some in a little carton at the Interex the other day. And I bought Gold Butter on Kelly's advice....she said it's the "only" kind to get here....it's imported from Germany. Butter-check. Then I realize that the butter wrapper does not have those handy little lines on it marking off tablespoons! So I'm eyeballing it. Tom doesn't have any measuring cups and spoons here, either. So I have to eyeball the milk, too......all I know is the little carton of milk is 0,5L....I wonder what the heck that is??? Half a liter, maybe? What's a liter? Forget it......right now the oven is starting to smell funny....I don't think Tom has ever had it on....I hope it isn't burning up the wood floor underneath!
2-24-06
Just realized I had forgotten to update this. The results of my Chili Dinner, while not exactly a disaster, it wasn't exactly a resounding success, either. The good part is I figured out what the little picture on the oven knob means....the one I used, anyway. Turns out I had it on broil! Now that I look at it, it is so obvious! Anyway, the result was that the cornbread looked okay (although I thought it baked awfully fast), it was gloppy in the middle. So I cut the outsides away and it was really good. Then the next mistake I made was putting the gloppy part back in the oven (yes, it was still on broil).....it came out charred in about 2 minutes! That was fun cleaning up that pan. No, I don't have a dishwasher here. I am the dishwasher. The good part on the dishwashing thing is, the water is about 212 degrees here. I guess there is a boiler ....not just your average hot water tank. I want one of these when we get back to Idaho.
The chili part was only so-so. I had added a can of diced tomatoes to the Hormel chili so I thought I could kick it up a notch with the package shown above of the red powdered pepper. It did NOT do a thing other than just make it very red! Good news, though, Marcia and Kelly gave me one of their extra jars of McCormick's Chili Powder....for the next time. Some friends had gone back to the States and brought them two jars. They couldn't use that much chili powder if they made chili every day for the remainder of the mission. Thanks Marcia and Kelly!

Kosovo Television

Happy day! The landlord showed up today with not one, but two internet gurus and after much jiggling of wires, I now have internet access at our flat! Yay! I'm not going to count on this all the time, and it has taken me about five attempts to get onto the portion of Blogger where I can create a new post. So I had probably better type fast.
Just wanted to share my Kosovo television experiences thus far. The really good part is there are about three channels in English that show a lot of movies and you know what? They're pretty good movies, too, unlike Cable One back in Idaho (I mean, how many times can they replay "The Karate Kid" and not set off a riot?").
I get CNN, BBC and EuroNews and EuroSport all in English, too. I have watched tons of the Olympic games thanks to EuroSport. As a sidebar to the Olympics, I have to ask: does the luge actually involve some athletic skill??? I mean, it looks to me, other than that little hand flapping thing at the start, aren't they just riding the rest of the way down? Sorry, but I think curling events top that!
There are a number of channels that are in various languages, German and Italian primarily, that are subtitled in Albanian so sometimes trying to figure the plots out on those channels is something of a wash. There is one channel called X Explorer (it's similar to National Geographic)that you would think is in English just because the word Explorer is in English, but nope, it's dubbed over in I'm not sure....Croatian, maybe?? Sometimes I can hear the speaker in English a little and then between watching the show and hearing a little, I get the drift. Yesterday was a big exception....the program seemed to be about weather. First they showed a tornado and they had some really awful graphics and I'm talking about the farmhouse , ala' The Wizard of Oz, whirling around in a tornado that was reminiscent of those ancient commercials for White Tornado cleaner. Then immediately it switched to a scene of a little rabbit in a hole looking out as snow piled up. Then that scene faded to a snow globe with the Manhattan skyline inside....with the Twin Towers, no less. Finally I had to move on....I just could not figure out what the deal was on this one.
But one of my favorites is Fashion TV. It has actual runway fashion shows from Paris, Milan, and other real live fashion capitals of the world. Don't ask why I'm so enchanted with it, I just am. And who would have ever guessed that this would be running here? You just never know about this place. The models, however, look like they are 14 year old Holocaust victims.
There's another French program on that is kind of weird....it's called Chasse et Teche and it runs non-stop and all it is about is hunting and fishing. Marlin Perkins would have been jealous! (You remember Marlin. Wild Kingdom? Yeah.)
Oh, and Tom and Jerry cartoons are pretty fun in Albanian! Who needs those in English?
That's about all on my running commentary on Kosovo TV. I like it.....the only thing I miss is the FoodNetwork but I can log onto the website (hopefully) and get my Paula Deen fix! Yay!

My own private Kosovo

Wish I could post some photos but at the moment I am mired down in a tangle of Kosovo bugaboos. Violeta, one of the press officers at Tom's office, offered me this Albanian word for my predicament: guzhume. It means when there is a mixture of a lot of different problems coming together into one.
The internet access at Tom's flat is basically out of commission, the power is off on a fairly frequent basis and Tom's laptop is running about as slowly as possible. So I had to come to Tom's office today to use Kelly's computer so everyone wouldn't think I had dropped off the planet.
Tom's German friend Hagen is working on his laptop to hopefully speed things up a bit and Tom is going to hit up the landlord Arten about getting wireless internet access. Tom says he has heard that it is really slow but it has to be better than nothing. And nothing is what I have right now.
I arrived a day late to Pristina due to freezing fog at the airport. It didn't look so hot at Vienna, either, but nevertheless, we did take off from Vienna and got within maybe a half hour of Pristina when we went back to Vienna. After much pushing and shoving at the shuttle on the tarmack, we arrived back at the terminal and got booked on the next flight out which was supposed to depart at about 7:30 p.m. Not having had any sleep for about 30 hours I decided to camp out at the gate and try to get a little nap. Within minutes someone bumped my seat which caused me to look up and see that the flight had been cancelled. After trudging down to Baggage I had to pick my GIANT suitcase off a cart and then I was directed to a hotel across the street. The cold just about sucked the breath out of me the moment the door opened but I was so tired by then, I could have probably lay down in the street and gone to sleep. The good news is that the hotel was really nice, the bed had the best linens I think I have ever felt and it had a full sized bathtub. I poured the entire bottle of foaming bath gel into it and had a marvelous soak before going to bed. I put in a 9:00 wake up call and it was a good thing because I was still asleep when they called.
Back to the airport I went and after wasting some time in a smoky cafe (Europeans haven't gotten the word yet about the dangers of smoking) we took off an hour late. By some extraordinary feat the pilot punched it and we arrived 40 minutes early! I haven't figured that one out yet. More shoving ensued trying to get off the plane and of course, standing in line at Passport Control I was summarily pressed upon by a family of Albanians who didn't appreciate "personal space". My GIANT suitcase (oh, did I mention it weighed 60 pounds?) came off the conveyor belt right away and bip! I was out the door and there was Tom and Kelly and Marcia waiting for me....standing outside freezing to death practically! It sure was good to get here. Seemed like I had been on my journey for a week!
I have taken a few photos and I will post them as soon as I can.