--Sunday, 19 March 00-- (Continued)
I stopped into an upscale restaurant and ordered a bacon (really a ham) pizza. Disaster struck when I tried to pay the 12 DM bill. I offered a 100 DM note and the waiter nearly had a stroke. He asked for something smaller and I found a 50 DM note and explained that that was the smallest I had. His heart seemed to fribulate and he asked for something smaller and I found a ten DM note. He took it and asked if I had change for the difference, which I didn't. He was perturbed and said that I should pay the difference on my next visit.

Small change is a problem here. Because the currency is imported, the cost of importing is an important issue and coins end up on the short end of the list. I get sticks of gum or bits of chocolate or small collections of breath mints as change regularly. They do make pleasant gifts to office personnel and others.

Kimeta and her husband, Smile.

--Tuesday, 21 March 00--
The Vernal Equinox and Ishmail's birthday
Ishmail had said that he and his wife would come to the Grand at 7 PM tonight to treat me to dinner in celebration of his birthday. Just before 7 PM I was downstairs people-watching but they didn't show. I watched how the people coming in and going out responded to the big sign on the door asking them in Albanian and English to please close the door. Only about one in ten heeded the sign although more people closed the door behind them if they found it closed on entering.

I went back upstairs and was enjoying a beer when the knock came at the door. It was Ishmail coming to get me. He said that his wife and his niece were downstairs waiting for us. We went down to the lobby and joined Kimeta, his wife, and a niece of hers. We walked out of the hotel and I asked where we were going. "You decide," Ishmail said. I went toward the Government building toward the pizza place I thought was good (and where I could pay the waiter the two DM I owed him).

As we neared the restaurant, Ishmail led us down a side street and then along the connecting street. We turned a corner and then walked upstairs in a building that had bars and restaurants along a central corridor. We walked all through it but he didn't seem to find the place he was looking for so we exited and retraced our steps until we were at a restaurant popular enough to be nearly full.

We stood in the arch connecting the two rooms and I noticed that the table nearest us was nearly ready to leave. I pointed this out but Kimeta pointed out that the air was visibly heavy with cigarette smoke. She was right on the money. We left and they suggested that I choose a place so we walked back toward the hotel and went to the Monaco.

The Monaco is near the UN Headquarters and the Central Bank so it gets a lot of customers. The food is also excellent and reasonably priced (for an expat). There was no free table so the waiter asked a man sitting alone eating shrimp scampi at a table for six if he would mind if we sat with him. He didn't, so we were seated.

Smile, Ishmail's nickname, was not himself on two hours sleep which was unfortunate because I think everyone's birthday should be a special, positive day. He bought a beer for the guy at the table who told us he was Swedish. The guy smiled a lot but struck me as somewhat creepy though I can't say exactly why. He described himself as "just an engineer" and I thought of Uriah Heep.

The dinner did pass pleasantly. I had a tortellini al forno that was wonderful. The evening ended early as Smile needed to get some sleep.


--Wednesday, 22 March 00--
Today I met Gus and Hans of the Fire Service. They told me that they had been working all night. I asked about what they did and they said that some Serbs in the village on the way to the airport were trying to sell their houses and someone (you guess who) were torching their houses so that they would get less money. Three times last night alone. Such is the hate here.


--Thursday, 23 March 00--
Yesterday, Alan Pearson signed the letter to the bank informing them that I could sign for expenditures and today George went to Peje (pay-ah) to establish a regional office so I was the man on the spot for authorizing expenditures. Then a guy walked in and asked for 10.6 million DMs. That's a cool $5 million. It wasn't exactly what I had planned for my first day of authorization. I brought the guy and the paperwork to Alan and he recognized everything and we finished of the transaction expeditiously. Government finance in Kosovo is like no where else in the world.


--Friday, 24 March 00--
The Balkans seem to be a land where the "foundation thinking" is the Old Testament injunction, "An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth." And everywhere you look there are eyes and teeth littering the landscape, the mental as well, as the physical, landscape.

And it goes on and on. Religion seems divides this region into Moslems, Catholics, and Orthodox. Ethnicity doesn't explain the situation because Croats, Bosnians and Serbs are all ethnically Slav (which does leave the Albanian Kosovars who are ethnically Illyrian (possibly closely related to the pre-Roman Etruscans) out in the ethnic cold).

Yet there are clear lines of cleavage between various of these groups. Croats and Serbs speak the same language but Croats tend to be Catholic and use the Latin alphabet while Serbs tend to be Orthodox and use the Cyrillic alphabet. Bosnian Moslems are left out of both groups and have suffered mightily for that in the last decade. History is a great burden here.

Ishmail came by tonight before he went to work and told me that he and Kimeta have to be out of their apartment in 30 days. He says that he will build a two room home on some land that he owns about 1500 meters from where he lives now. He said he would do it in 30 days but I questioned that and he changed it to 45 days.

How will all this happen?

Joe