An Elevated Status in the Kosovo of Olden Times
What happens when we take luxuries for granted?
To get to Pristina then required taking a certain slow and winding route; and when you got there you found everyone there was en route to a promotion, or hoped to be. Excepting myself, of course, for I had never been clever enough to even apply for any of the thousands of jobs that were then freely available, if you didn’t mind the risk of depleted uranium exposure or (more likely) death by bureaucratic paper-cuts. But I have a story about that for another time.
Anyway, well before Pristina had five-star hotels with fancy electronically-motivated elevators with swipe-card functionality and coded buttons, it was a post-Yugoslav city, but somewhat more unpredictable than most of its concrete relatives spread across the Balkans. From the erratic electricity supply that defined life in the early years of Kosovo’s UNMIK and NATO occupation to the ruffians who sold imitation designer watches for three euros to the peacekeepers, or whoever would buy them, it was a place where almost anything could happen.
In the early years of the UN’s presence, despite the poverty, hardship, grey skies and ongoing inter-ethnic clashes between the majority Albanians and minority Serbs (inevitably narrated away as ‘isolated incidents’ in the official internal staff logs), Kosovo was hardly considered a bad posting, if that was your kind of work. In fact, for a while it was known as ‘paradise mission,’ being in Europe, relatively close to the beaches of Montenegro and Greece, a quick flight to everywhere else, and rewarding enough with an endless line of hastily-constructed bars that catered to the wealthy international peacekeepers. For a while, these were gathered along one main street, under a sort of great variegated awning, as if some bizarre cross-breeding experiment between a Turkish bazaar and Greek package-tourist strip.
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