MDA Retreat /
Hotel Bistra,
Mavrovo Ski Center / Macedonia.
Day 1
++++++++++
i was woken by a sweet sound of hera, a good 2year old who is on the room next to mine. i share mine with Shaqir, a colleague. 8:30am and i tried to force-sleep, but i could not do that. my body/mind were not cooperating. i lied in a feather-filled, warm bed. needed that a lot. breakfast was really great, and i ate an apple as well. me, agon, and fatos then went out and walked to the ski slopes with no snow. the locals were doing some adjustments to buildings and to the ski lifts. they were getting ready for snow. please snow, do fall now!
group sessions followed, and a lot of stuff was covered. at first, i felt strange sharing my thoughts on some things that bothered me at work, but i found it was a good step that the company management took. applaud that. swim-pooling followed. a lot of it. the pool was so warm, but too shallow, which made my poorly-orchestrated synchronized swimming moves easier to do. the "royal" jacuzzi had nothing "royal" about it. no king or queen there, just me and my back going crazy from the bubbles. we started playing water/football, but i could not stand the chlorine smell that was coming from the pool. the smell was not helping my throat at all, and at one moment i thought that chlorine had penetrated my last lung-cell and i choked. played a game of pingpong, then went to the room. barefoot. froze a lot, but the room was just right - warm.
we ate dinner, played pingpong again (beat some people, lost some games - but i'm proud that i beat all the female players at the company. it is an achievement i really cherish).
everyone went to sleep. i'm here, raki-induced, with the tv on /stranger than fiction/, and uploading some photos from today.

will sleep later, eat more more tomorrow. can't wait to get back home.
i miss people.

HELIOS II from the MALABAR Street Theater performed in Prishtina. Here's the list where they performed the same street theater play. pictures courtesy of Nita. it was one of the best nights of my life. me and nita got soaking wet and sooo cold - feet were cold and wet, plus nita's big camera and my small camera were dripping with water. i thought they might not work afterwards, but they did. but the 24m metal human-operated robot grasshopper kept attracting us to go after it. or no, it was the robot grasshopper that was chasing us. it felt so fun being chased! i felt so small. i felt as if we were running right under a running horse. it was that intense, no room for a mistake, or you would have been burned or stomped to death by the amazingly-dressed actors. of course, this was all part of the act, and they made that feeling so real, that me and nita really thought it was happening! as we were running for our lives, and witnessing a guy trying to steal pyrotechnic material from the grasshopper's rear end (which was a metalic casing with moving wheels), i came up with an idea that i am sure all of my fellow countrymen/women would support in this: get this theater group to play/perform and sing our national anthem on the day independence arrives! wouldn't that be cool? it must definitely would. i'm writing this from Mavrovo, Macedonia - in Hotel Bistra to be exact. it's a company retreat i'm attending. I think i have a theory on why do we have so much hope. it has to do with unfinished building we have in abundance.

change?
hope.


i've posted a previous post in which i showed a picture of some posters i put around school for edgesoup. today, i saw that someone played around with the red stickers near the posters. it was so nice to see that some students played around with the poster stickers, /+i've heard around that students liked the posters and talked about edgesoup. but that soon died out i guess/. for a moment, the posters became interactive, and i want to do more of these where students simply play around with poster stickers. Fascinating! it might help with the school spirit ron was looking to "harbor" amongst auk's "don't care about sheet" attitude. i so wish that would change. Awesome!
anyways, i thought this was nice to show. now, back to my school lessons. trade and production. well? not good actually. Four exams are making their way next week, and i have so few days to study.

SegoFest/
Provopodcast is such gravy and great treats!/

Min-e was hit by the biggest batch of bird poop ever. i could barely see on my left window screen, and barely smell at all because of poop smell. i washed her as soon as i finished classes.
Sego Festival ~ Provo, Utah ~ is over. joe said that rain washed their hopes of it ever stopping and made the festival awful but so much fun! now, i hate rain, not because it might fall out of nowhere and mess up min-e that i just washed, but because it rained at Sego. it rained when joe and bardhi left as well. sadness succumbs. i was listening to the latest provopodcast uploads, and it was a promo for Sego Festival that played, being read by a brilliant verions of barney the dinosaur? i like that the dinosaur - almost at the end of his speech - sends a HOLLA for us ~ Kosova ~ people! i was so amazed that i listened to it for 12 more times, and showed it to others who listened it. that podcast got a lot of play, i guess. thank you joe for adding that. miss you dog.
can't wait to see Sego youtubes and maybe photos?
nita has another photoshot scheduled for today. let's hope it turns out the way she wants it. +a friend of her will write something for edgesoup. Joyness! i wish people would write/contribute more. we should work more as well. huh.
Note: A friend at work is speaking in the Albanian/tosk dialect, whilst on the phone. She is getting good responses from the conversations she is having. It's the tosk dialect which makes peoples' knee shake. don't know why, but people love it when a they hear a female voice with that dialect. makes them feel stupid to say no or be rude. man!

murphed! we were.

it just happens that sometimes things are so inter-twined with each other, that they are not aware of that. Or we might not be aware of that. This past Saturday just showed us that. As me and nita and rina were hovering around time in min-e, the damn camera we were looking for never appeared. nita had previously scheduled a photo shooting with rina +model+, and needed to get her camera from her office. to her luck, just last night, the company she works for - ogilvy - staged an opening ceremony for a local block producing company. direct foreign investment! yes. the reason i mentioned this has to do with nita's photo-shooting. +someone forgot the charger-cable at the factory, and now the camera was almost dead. no photo-shooting possible+. we picked-up rina and had no camera.

i took a wrong turn.
took longer to get to nita's office.
nita started bashing my head real hard.
rina died laughing.
i became an inflatable hippo.
no, this is not what happened at all.
lying here.

we went to nita's office, met etro +boy+, got the camera, took victorious poses, got in min-e and moved away and straight into the open city market. i could smell carrots and lettuce and onions and peppers as we passed people by. rina said that she never took that road, and would be lost if left here there. we did not leave her there. after a couple of meters, nita found out that there is no cable for the camera. damn. we went back to the office but the cable was not there. damn. i called Rasha, a friend, and asked if we could borrow his Canon or Nikon. he was not help because he could not, his sister had the camera. otherwise he would give us, as he latter did on Sunday. thank you Rasha. with no camera, me nita and rina were stuck in the car, cruising around. nita decided to treat us all for a ice nescaffe from the Odysea bakery. no luck again, since they closed the place down for remodeling - they were building this wooden extension. we wanted to go to ginger and order some books but did not do that +rina also told us that anita might have started to work there+. that is good. retro was our only option, and it saved the day. we then changed our table three times because:

the first one made us too cold,
the second one made us too hot, and
the third one made us just righ.

a lot of talk and laughter followed, but i felt sad as well because nita could not finish the photo-shooting for Saturday. me and nita also felt sad for rina, because she did not go to Skopje, just so nita could take photos of her for her school work. (eventhough rina did not say that. she was being super nice). it was not a good Satur-day, because we drove our car all day, and done nothing. but maybe that's the good part of it. i liked it how things intertwined. we were sort of murphed. but it was not bad at all.

Note: nita finished her photo-shooting with rina on Sunday. me and nita met with tefta on Sunday at Strip and talked about edgesoup, wrote stuff down, got motivated.

People and Lands! and Seas!
Flowers and bees and trees!
Cows and your young ones!



Edgesoup, the independent auk student zine, is open for submissions. we will accept all shapes and sizes and colors and smells and languages. if you can contribute to the second issue of the revamped edgesoup zine, then please do. we would be more than pleased. in fact, we would be filled with happy spots all around our bodies. we already have an issue out, and we want to continue putting another one out at the end of fall semester. You can submit your article here. and visit the website here.

thanks. we owe you a bowl of soup.

As i was sitting in min-e, waiting to make a left turn, i witness as she min-e jolted a bit. i turn back and see that i was hit by the guy in the picture, with the car (in the picture). It was so nothing that it could not be categorized as a traffic accident. Sabri Fejzullahu remember!, the righteous name probably given by his toothless grandma, is THE kosova son that made it! in Kosova, Zürich, Düsseldorf, and other cities where kosovar's are MUCH! Really, people love him and he zemrat_loqkat e mia loves us too. SO, i get out of the car, all smiles, and the first his mouth utters is "loqka jeme, a je mire?" i was okay, the cars were okay, not much to discuss about, but he being a celebrity wanted to make sure i won't press "charges" /oh-no/, by asking questions and repeatedly inspecting the "hit" places. people were stopping and looking curiously. wow, i caused a PSS (Public Staring Scene!!!).

so, i had a Celebrity HIT!. shout back if you had one too. this is the place for sharing.

belated Rizoma poster. i could finally see bardhi's work, and dance around it. next time, we're getting a better place for the exhibit. it was a pleasant experience.