The Statue of Bill Clinton in Kosovo

"The Aussies I'm sharing a room with came in at three AM roaring, so I came out to the common room. It's louder out here. The receptionist is listening to an old Treehouse of Horror. It was frustrating not to find peace, but I heard a witch say she had a boyfriend named 'George Cauldron,' and I laughed and laughed."

Chapter 6 - Delay Leads to Carrots, Gordon, A Statue of Bill Clinton

Woke up early in the Green Room of Nis and caught up on all the US gossip, packed up, cleaned up and took the quiet, winding way to the bus depot. Across the tracks, past the Soviet air force monument, through the deserted shopping district, over the footbridge.

I bought some rolls in paper. One had a raspberry filling, the other had seeds.

For the first time, the Magic Bus Schedule site let me down. The 8am bus to Prishtina didn't leave until 9:30. So I wandered around a little produce market and bought some carrots. They were orange and delicious. Grown from nutrient-rich Serbian soil.

There were still about two hours to kill, so I stopped into a little hamburger joint. I pointed to what looked like a strip steak. There was a window full of dripping meat and a sizzling grill behind it. Sausages, hamburger patties, and stripmeat.

The very tall lady put it back on the grill for me and patted her belly. I patted mine. I arranged my bags and went back to collect it. She stuck it in a roll, and added onions and some sort of white spread. I paid and sat down. There was an ashtray on the table. It's so funny what used to be normal.

I was full from the rolls and carrots but... eating is fun as hell. So, I took a bite. It was... not delicious. I'm still not sure what it was. Liver? There was an "iron" taste, and the meat was sort of... soft... and flaky? I started to make myself sick thinking it was, like, compressed hearts or something. A big slab of organ meat.

I ate half anyway figuring there was enough time to know if I was going to be sick before I got on the bus. It would never do to be sick on the bus. I wrapped the second half very carefully and put in my jacket pocket.

As loathsome as it was, I might want it later. Might get stuck in customs. I thought how dreary that would be, to be in some Customs House prison, sadly chewing on my cold heart sandwich.

Still oceans of time to cross, so I sat in a dark waiting room and read a book called In the Orchard, the Swallows. It was a simple, powerful little novel, and I wept at the end. I sat on an orange bench, alone in a Serbian train station with tears in my eyes over a slim little allegory.

Would I have liked it as much if I hadn't read it on one sitting? Would I have been as affected by it reading it on the balcony at home? On the bus to work? Who knows? Reading is as much about the environment in which you read as it is the text. I love books I read in school, simply because I read them in school, etserbia.

Behind me, an old woman started yelling at her husband and the spell was broken.

It was time now for the bus.

A colorful figure, long of hair and limbs, was asking the driver what time the bus returned to Nis.

Why would anyone want to come back?

My own concern was that Prishtina wasn't the ultimate destination for this bus. It goes to some monastery. An alarmist guide book warned that Prishtina isn't very popular, despite its Bill Clinton statue!!, and sometimes a bus will fly right past it if they don't know anyone on the bus wants to go there.

Fortunately, this dude did, and was sure to be remembered.

I smiled real big and said "Prishtina!" when I got on, and the driver smiled back. A lot of the city names make me think of Sean Connery impressions. "You should see Pushy Galore, Mish Moneypenny. Her body is immaculate, quite prishtine."

The colorful man spoke English and we sat next to one another. His name was Gordon and he came from Berlin. We became fast friends and all thoughts of napping flew away like the leaves.

We were just digging one another's stories and it turned out we were visiting the same places in roughly the same order. He's been all over and told me in Southeast Asia, everyone visits the same four cities and they call it the Pineapple Cake Route. Cute. He also showed me a picture of an enormous mango statue he stood next to in Australia. The world's biggest mango statue!

Very nice bond, the kind you only form when you're travelling alone and meet another solo traveler. We compared notes. He suggests using a couch surfing site instead of the apartment sharing site. He says you meet lots of girls that way. He showed me pictures of girls.

I'm probably too old for that. I thought about the old man I met in Romania, the one in his late 70s who just rides the rails and stays in hostels. His famous line was, "Hostels are perfect to stay in, except for the late-night pillow fights." What will that be like, I wonder, to be too old to be desirable?

I'll tell you in three years. I'll tell you tomorrow.

Oh, how we chatted away the hours and how we laughed. He's a student in Berlin and a passionate atheist and vegetarian. Outside, the hills and farms slid by. Three Serbian cops stopped the bus on a random street and I joked they were looking for laborers for the lumber mill.

"We just need one, and you can go."

Gordon loved this, so I was like. "We also need fifty Euro, and we don't care if each of you pays ten or one person coughs up the fifty, but it's got to be fifty and it's got to be now."

and he was like, "for all three of us. all three of us cops!"

and I was like, "yes, for all three of us. So, let's see, fifty plus fifty plus fifty equals four hundred Euros, so you pay now."

Oh, how we laughed away the hours with our corrupt cop impressions.

There was no trouble, and we moved on past haystacks and lemon trees. The light filtered through the leaves and made little shadows and patterns.

At last we reached the border.

The deal is, Serbia doesn't acknowledge Kosovo as its own country, so their position is when you enter Kosovo, you're really still in Serbia, so there's no need to give you an exit stamp. This can mean difficulty getting back in Serbia later. But why would you want to go back to Nis?

Gordon did. He'd met a girl on a couch, and she was waiting for him. That's why he had engaged the driver so colorfully earlier. He needed to get back. So, there was some concern true love would be spoiled by politics.

There was no trouble, though, and there was no trouble as we rolled through the Kosovoian customs either. He took a picture of their guardhouse and we joked about using that picture to come back and attack it later, and then we were done laughing about cops and guards for the rest of the trip.

He said very sadly he didn't think he would last under torture if "the boys from ISIS stormed the bus." I told him I was sure he would last longer than I would, though I would last longer in the lumber mill. And THEN we were done laughing about cops and guards for the rest of the trip.

The bus climbed hills and sifted through bus-sized villages. Every now and again someone got off. Houses clustered together like sheep in the hills. Mosques dotted the landscapes. A lime-green minaret pricked the sky.

And then we were in Prishtina.

He was told right away there was no bus back to Nis. Whatever else he may have heard wherever else. No bus back to Nis. The guy at the counter could not have been grumpier. The guy at the info counter was like a malevolent Droopy. Just... this place wasn't working out.

Gordon asked if he could hang with me instead and follow me to Skopje. Of course. We bought tickets for a bus leaving in two hours. Figured we could grab some snaps and get out. Snagged a cab. The driver wore a pink sweater and scramblespoke in German. He was from here and had fled to Bavaria during the war, but when it was over he came back to rebuild.

This was a theme. Every single person we met outside of the bus station was earnest and friendly and animated and excited. They love their country and they love visitors and... it was wonderful. We passed a sign that read "American Hospital" and Gordon said he would know where to take me if something happened.

I said it was a good thing he knew where to go, because when I saw the Bill Clinton statue, my heart was sure to stop.

And speaking of hearts... I gave a stray dog my heartsandwich. He fucking loved it.

Everywhere we went, girls stared at Gordon with lust. No joke. It was weird to see their unbroken gazes and invitations. Oh to be young! Men and women in the street walked in pairs holding hands. They were friends. The men hold hands here. It was so human. Girls would look over at Gordon, chatter excitedly in... Albanian? and punch one another in the arm.

"It is my hair," he said, "there are no men here with long hair."

It was true. They all looked like club people. Short hair plastered down or swooping up. Clean shaven. Colorful tight clothing. I said everyone looked European, and Gordon, quite rightly, checked me. "Europe is a big place," he said. He's right.

We ate pizza with hot peppers and black olives. I drank a macchiato. We took pictures of the Bill Clinton statue.

Quick turn around the city center and the Grand Hotel and the Newborn sculpture, and then it was already time to go. If we'd known it was going to be so nice, we would have stayed longer, there are supposed to be some beautiful mosques, but that first impression was so depressing.

So, we headed back, and then we only had fifteen minutes, so we were really booking it, and seeing him in motion excited another cloud of school girls. It was like being on tour with the Beatles. Fortunately, none of them blocked our path. We were at the highway and we had ten minutes.

There was a large muddy field between us and the station. The taxi had skipped it, of course, but we were on foot now. We could see the buses in the distance. Black smoke rising from the exhaust pipes. We had six minutes.

The mud. My lord, the mud. Each step was fuck-fuck-slide, and each racing heartbeat was "godgodgod, godgodgod"

We made it. Boots caked with mud. But... had we made it? The tickets were unreadable, and there was no schedule board at the station. Where was the bus to Skopje?

Two minutes. We ran up and down the lines of buses looking for the word Skopje. But it was just a stop and not a final destination, so it wasn't listed anywhere. Everyone we asked pointed somewhere else. Thirty seconds. I ran back to droopy dog.  "Skopje!?!"

He held up a hand to say, "One minute." He was on his cell phone. Rage. One minute passed, He held up three fingers. Did he mean Stall Three or three more minutes? Rage!

A man took my arm. Skopje?  Yes! Yes, Skopje!
I take you in my car for thirty euro.
Get the fuck off of me.

We ran back outside. A guy at a gyro stand was like, "HUNGRY?  EAT, YOU COME IN!" and we were like, "Skopje?" and a man behind us tried to pull us into his restaurant, "NO, NO, HERE IS BETTER. EAT HERE. YOU COME IN."

We could not have looked less like people who needed a fucking gyro. It was like everyone at that station was determined to be a monster.

There was one empty slot. A mini van pulled into it. Skopje?!

Yes. He needed a break, though, so we would be leaving in half an hour.

Motherf...cool. We're cool. We found the bus. Collapsed inside it on a pile of leather bags.

We thought we'd sleep, but the driver played Toni Braxton's greatest hits at full volume. Then that old electro "Praise You" song, which cracked me up. So funny to speed past churches and mosques and gift shops and machine shops and hear a distorted voice singing, "I've got to praise you like I shouuullllddd."

Driver came back at a stop to tell Gordon to get his bags off the seat. Why? Just to be a Kosovo bus station person. The coffee and pizza and statue people were so nice. What is it about that station? Built on a Serbian burial ground? (probably)

We went through some dark tunnels, and when we emerged we looked to see if there were lights we could turn on next time. There were, and there was also a button with a coffee cup on it. We laughed as only two exhausted boys can.

"Driver!" I whispered, "Driver! I should like some coffee. Driver, can you draw me a little leaf in the foam, Driver? Driver! I take two sugars."

Gordon was rolling and rocking back and forth. We were dying.

Then he reached up and pushed the button.