Saturday, July 15, Pristina

Walking in downtown Pristina I came upon a front yard with two statues of this fellow. He looks vaguely familiar though he is probably some sort of Kosovo patriot.

It was too hot to do much walking today so I decided to take a bench on the main promenade and watch the Kosovoan world go by. I was there for about three hours. My mathematical sample says I saw about 4, 000 people pass by. What I saw was:

• zero burkas and but three women heavily scarved. Of the remaining 1,997 females I estimate 1,000 wore skirts or shorts; 497 wore jeans. Why is this place so westernized? It was under Ottoman/Turkish control for 700 years yet it is more like Croatia than Bosnia (where about 20% of the women wore scarves). The neighborhood around my guesthouse resembles Noe Valley in San Francisco, upscale, middle class, tidy, owner-occupied. 
• only about 10% of the people were smoking. My sense is that the smoker percentage for the city is similar to Oakland or Philly, maybe 25% of men altogether and a lesser percentage of women. In Sarajevo and in Croatia the percentage was much higher. I'd guess nearly 75% of men and 50% of women in Sarajevo smoked. Why the difference? (One clue might be that, during the Serb bombardment of Sarajevo, the defenders had no cash so they paid for supplies with locally manufactured cigarettes. Thus perhaps smoking is associated with Bosnian identity. But that doesn't explain Croatia--or the high rate in Budapest.)
• family sizes seemed small with most couples shepherding one or two kids. 
• like many cities Pristina seems mostly populated by young adults, ages 20-35. There were some older folks but they were in the minority. 

The heat is sucking all the energy out of me. I sleep late and often take a siesta in the late afternoon. I feel like I'm not doing my usual tourist investigating. I'm tempted to make a run for the coast tomorrow hoping for cooling breezes, but I noticed a couple interesting places inland so my plan is to head for the city of Peja (Pec) on the Albanian border before plunging into Albanian proper on Monday.