Join us on our trip through a culture of a young and unknown country! There is a lot to discover.....
We are Muhamet and Lisa, two students from University of Applied Science of Ludwigsburg and University of Luneburg. Thanks to a scholarship we have obtained the chance to realize a project here in Pristhina, Kosovo.
For further information on our projects have a look on the right side under 'Projekt Alternative Cityguide' and 'Projekt Sozialreportage'.
On this blog we want to share little anecdotes, stories, thoughts and experiences during our 90 days stay in Prishtina with you.
We hope it will be interesting, funny, setting you thinking from time to time, illuminate your own knowledge and so on. Have fun and thank you for any comments on our blog!!
The first 4 weeks......13.09.2010
We have been here 4 weeks now and we have experienced so many interesting things, which i will not be able to all put on this blog. However I will try to give a little summary to get things started and then keep you updated a little bit more frequent.
Our project ideas are set so far. I am going to start with making the interviews this week, for that I still need to print flyers in order to inform people about what my plan is. Also, I want to try to attract sponsors for paying the printing and everthing else. Then I need to start collecting general information for my guide and also keep discovering the city on my own so that I have enough to report about.
What has impressed me most so far is the incredible hospitality of the people here - Well along with the calmness of the people and the way things work here through easy communication – you say it, you do it, right away, without any planning or bureaucracy. On the other hand you should always be prepared that things can change quiet quickly – in a positive or negative way. You never know. What impressed me in a negative way is the not existing awareness for garbage disposal....you just throw your garbage wherever you walk. I think that is a serious problem, where the young government needs to show some action. Otherwise contamination of nature will get worse and worse and thus threaten life condition of the people here more and more.
Anyway, I was talking about the hospitality....Past thursday it was 'Bajram', the sugar festival, which marks the end of the fastening time Ramadan in the Muslim world, so it is a time when families traditional gather together, go and visit other family members in their house, have coffee, drinks and a lot of sweets. Since a big part of Muhamet's family still lives in the north of Kosovo we went there for Bajram. During 3 hours we visited 5 different places of the family members. Even though some families lived in quite poorly conditions they would never hesitate to shower us with sweets, coffee and laughter. We sat around little tables and chatted for a while (well in fact it was Muhamet talking, since my knowledge of the Albanian language is still very rudimentary – however conversation with hands and feet didn't keep anyone from talking to me, and when I said at least one Albanian word excitement and laughter were incredible :) Everyone invited us to stay for dinner or to come back so we could have a meal all together. In some families I even got presents like a tshirt or a handbag, because – as they told me – it is tradition, that persons who enter a house for the first time, get a nice present. I was so impressed after that afternoon. People, whose lifes have been war-ravaged in a way a lot of us can probably not imagine and who have hardly more than 'nothing', do not hesitate to share everything they have got.
