alas! t'was joe's birthday. was.
+++
so we were like: joe, we are gonna tear Prishtina apart!
joe was like: but i love Prishtina, more than Tirana even, why tear it apart?
we were like: dude! it's your birthday-day!
and he was like: oh yeah! totally forgot! damn, fetch, motherfetcher fetch! let's do it dudes! lets..
we ALL were like: PARTEEEY!
let's go!
min-e was in the zone, and she was behaving in a way proper cars behave. birthday-day dude and bardhi dude came down, and got in, music up, wheels off! the joscef was looking shinier than his castor self that day of days. it was a sign we were ready to roll. since it was a special day, we did not make the usual stops (ginger, retro, bakery, retro, strip?, zcaffe?), but we changed the route (ginger, bakery, retro, retro, aroma!). at ginger, we saw that mathematics et cetera cds were flying off shelves like the breaking ice-shelves in Greenland! that fast. they needed another batch of 10,000 copies. man, that joscef had really made it in Prishtina. sold more copies that meda himself. amazing! we said hi to gingerguys, and gingerthedog said hi and bye at the same time, which was quite confusing. did i forget to mention that joscef played a sold out crowd earlier this summer at ginger's back garden? it's true. i forgot to mention that.
as great as that friday-day was, the bakery were so kind as to treat us all to chocolate-chip cookies, chocolate sufle!, cheese sandwiches and, oh man, the most heavenly cheesecake our taste buds tasted! we all wanted to go, live at the bakery and make cakes forever, and ever for. nita drew a painting of us eating cake. bardhi ate more cake, and i wanted to eat more cake. joe sang a cake-song.
retro was next. joscef was constantly phacebook chatting with this mysterious friend he was talking about. "joe, if you don't leave that wireless technology off your mind and soul, we will not cut more pieces of cake for your birthday". and so he did. another place trashed, and it was time to pay for the cokes and move on to our next spot. nita must have been partying too hard, because she could not remember where she left her wallet, (actually, min-e stole it from her. I'll deal with you later min-e, and hand you proper amnesty-international bound justice), so she could not pay for the drink. as amazing as joscef is, he took out his wallet full of fliff! and just started spending as much fliff as your braincells could comprehend! $ching$ching$ching$swish!$
strip depo was welcoming as well. but we did not stay there too long. crappy music is for crappy people. we don't belong in that group, of people. aroma had great sandwiches which we ate and took some with us. aurora sucks! and you know what i mean by that!
long story. make it short? It was one fun-day-of-a-day. we wish you all the best joe. we wish you a place in Prishtina, and a sandy, beach-house in Dhermi. come back. this is what we independence-craving people of Kosova call a parteeyy! time well spend. more than that even. peanuts, and coke, and other beverages were at our disposal.

we were like: dancy dances for everyone and sing-alongs!
joe was like: kosova is cool!est!
bardhi was like: cannot talk. mouthful. eating cake, lots of cake and bread and ajvar.
nita was like: what? joe? strsh-strsh joe!
i was like: everybody else was like: we were like: good times were like: passed.

great glory of all glory decorated glore-objects!
i found my long-lost ID, driving license and credit card, all stacked together in the underground parking garage at my father's workplace. it reassured me that my mental abilities to rewind the memory tape is still on /which is more than just flickering/.

i told the bank that i found my card,
i tried to tell the police that i found my stuffs,
i tried to drink a whole water-mellon with one sip.
++

back home/
similarities
++++++++
two hours after i got back home, i lost my id, driving license and credit card, all-in-one. this reminded me of another minor "incident" we had while we were going to mavrovo: having to travel an extra 30km of mountain-road because of some navigational problems we had, almost two hours before we arrived at our destination. no more min-e or eluise. at least for a week.

had to wake up too early today. carried and counted governmental newspaper editions. which - again - reminds me of the time yesterday, that i had to carry and count cosmetics/hair products from a "long-vehicle" truck. i also saw this dream that a real good friend of mine chipped his tooth. so scary. exams are near, so i better run fast. i loved this trip because i got to meet one of the beeeeaaarstrooonauuuuts! space crew member. i love the professors brothers. so good!

i want to bubble my way into a real royal jacuzzi.

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.

P.S.: bardhi's exhibit poster coming real soon.

i needed a english premiership football team i could cheer for, because it sucks not having a favorite team. roni said i should chose everton. i did

boots.to.the.moon

there are times when movie makers think the atmosphere is ripe enough to put another installment to their latest movies. that's the same thought-pattern our foreign friend Joscef Castor is following. i guess. or not. anyways, the things is that BOOTS TO THE MOON will play his second show in Prishtina, Kosovo. this time, he will astonish the crowds at TUKS cafe. prishtina loves you joe. PEOPLE! if you happen to be in prishtina on august 31st, come to TUKS /near Strip Depo/ at around 22:00 and see boots.to.the.moon. i know that i am going.
(poster design: Nita Salihu).

pizza boy ron/sick boy joe

+It was no surprise that our foreign friend Joe's stomach was not feeling his usual self today, because last night our foreign friend joe was super tired and did not go to bed early. me, Joe and Bardhi were gonna go to Ron's house to eat Ron's self-made pizza's and watch soccer, but Joe could not come. see, that's what happens when you don't listen. thankfully, the Castor got better with love and paracetamol. we felt relieved because the word did not get out to the press about this international incident. because if it did, we would have american troops invading out lands. wait, we have US troops here and they did not invade us. we asked for them and they liberated us. I lov-e e US-A freedom!

+Even though Joe could not come, me and Bardhi decided it was better to go to Ron's house because he had already made two pizzas. cannot let two pizzas go to waste! this is Ron with his final product. Quite frankly, I was surprised of Ron's culinary abilities. the pizza tasted good, not great because "I did not give my best" was ron's excuse. but we love him anyway. Bardhi did not stick the official Pizza Club Poo Poo'd sticker on his door, but after leaving Bardhi left the sticker in Ron's room. left it, not stick it! Arsenal FC won the match, which is important for Ron, and we had a great time with Riniii and Eedn after the lunch session. thanks for today Ron. we owe you big time!

+Ginger Embargo, the sole book/CD store that really has great books and CDs, started playing movies on weekends. slacker was the movie that they played tonight. i heard that it was a great movie and i just recently read about it's influence and role on the independent film making in america. we were only four people watching the movie. i would watch it again and again. the lines were amazing. /along with the whole plot - which did not exist/. if you happen to be in Prishtina, i would highly recommend that you visit Ginger music/book shop (located at Qyteza Pejton)

photos follow.

Ron's culinary abilities

Ginger movie nights / Slacker

BACK with a big K+

back from the tri-country trip, /macedonia/albania/montenegro/ and back with the blog. i missed my blog and i'm glad the blog missed me. will continue posting from now on. be sure to check out our exciting adventures in Kosovo and the region right here.

relocated. for the summer

www.creepercreeper.blogspot.com

dear bardhi/joe, welcome.

it's almost two days before Bardhi and Joe land in K-Land /bardhi holds the full right to the last word/. i am super extra excited! i can't wait actually. +this heat is making this wait even worse. oh, the 5 hours of water disposable + the bush fires make this waiting EVEN/EVEN worse. but anyways, forget about that.

Bardhi and Joe are bringing a car with them that they will sell for $1,000, and bardhi will bring a lot of money because that's his staunch duty as a fellow countrymen: to help his dear old K-Land. hey, all the other expatriates are doing it. they bring money and cars from Austria to Germany to other places of which i have no clue about their license plates. But yeah, Bardhi's bringing money alright. a lot of money. he better be, or his fellow countrymen/women will kick his /llatin/ ass real hard! oh, not to forget the car with big shinny spinning rims.

thanks bardhi. thanks joe. you're great friends.
i'm meeting you very soon.

office /plant flower/ work

while washing my hands at the bathroom, i noticed that the red Domestos /kills all known germs/, had a piece of paper attached to it. they were giving away free flower seeds, isn't that neat? they kill germs and then they give you flower seeds. anyway, i took them and planted all of them in our small back-garden at the office. dug a hole /with some help from merita/, and put them in. i repeated this again.

the label read that they were chinese /karanfili/. i want them to water them and hope they'll bloom into beautiful flowers. i named the flowers. "/nii/". mhmm.

draw or i'll draw mine and shoot.

i found this blog /http://www.ironicsans.com/ that is quite amazing. it has some quite interesting posts and the one my curiosity could not let go was this one about the "terrorist organizations logos". this sure does give terrorists more attention, but i could not help it but post some of the logos.

they've even put UCK /KLA/ logo in it. this generated some angry posts from some of our fellow albanians living in the US. i wanted to post a more moderate response, but after seeing that there are enough posts about why KLA's logo is among other terrorist organization logos, i decided that it is not worth it. really.

there were striking similarities in the logos of the Palestinian armed movements /the hand+Kalashnikov grip/. who knows under what pressure are the /designers/ of these logos. they probably have a gun on their head as they draw/create these logos. i would also assume that there would be no competition or logo-selection committee, or even a complaint committee for that matter. such ruthlessness. great collection though. nice blog. ironic sans.

nita's new friend. not the coolest,
but it beats going back to her
office after work.

submissions@edgesoup.com

nita was preparing edgesoup for uploading in edgesoup.com, i was goofing around and listening to panda bear's bros.

vetevendosje v3.0

another attempt. this time the crowds were modest, but at least there weren't less people than the last time. this is my second time i was present at such "gathering". what differed this time was the "more artistic" label tagged to this protest. the organization pulled off some pretty well-thought and provoking stunts. i sort of liked them. of course, not that i was really behind them when chantings like: down with unmik, were shouted. i do not want to be down with unmik, because you cannot be down with them. i am down with our government. so, so down. [pictures courtesy of nita. 97% of them]

People were not that angry, but they sort of followed this flow. there was not real anger or anything, but these old people that time forgot kept chanting spit-combined slogans like: freedom is freedom. and this guy continued all the way, without dropping dead even once. that's what i call self/determination/vete/vendosje. funky police pose and colorful walls.