SKENA UP
Theater and Movie Festival
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Day three

The annual theater and film festival "Skena Up", was supposed to start on November 17, coinciding with the Election Day. So, it was postponed for a later day. There seem to be quite interesting plays and movies, and the organizers really worked hard to continue doing this festival on a yearly basis. In the beginning, I must admit that I kind of had this feeling that this won’t last for a year or so. But it did and I’m glad. People have new places to go, and for a little while forget the smoke filled cafes that have become so ordinary. This year’s theme is dedicated to Faruk Begolli, a great actor that passed away a few months back. I wanted to go see the plays and moves from the first day so bad, but could not, but finally tonight nita and me managed to go see two plays: One was from Serbia: “The Story of Tea” (played at the ODA theatre – insert link), and the other one was from Iran: “The Last Royal Smile of the Moon” (played at the National Theater).

We were gonna see two plays at ODA Theatre, and actually we wanted to see a play that was directed by a friend of ours, but were surprised to find out that he was rescheduled at a later date.

We enjoyed the story of tea a lot (an adaptation of “The Three Sisters”), particularly the way the four actors moved and danced around, and they had great costumes. I don’t know much about acting, but you could easily tell that the three middle-aged/super-vital ladies, and the bald/Yugoslav named actor were real professionals. One of the actresses had more biceps muscles than me, and was super thin. The only male part of the play was acting in a quite feminine way as well. The performance was fantastic, as they depicted the wars/tragedies during the war in Bosnia. My eyes were watery at one moment, during a beautifully choreographed scene where a woman laid clothes and the others wept. The actors briefly explained the history of tea, and I was glad that they mentioned that green tea is good, because I drink a lot. Fresh/hot tea was handed to the public, and in the end, actors put candles on those cups of tea, making an eerie yet “in memoriam” scene for all of those who died during the wars. It was so perfectly performed and the story was implicitly stated. One more thing that’s worth mentioning is the bilingual dialogue the actors used: Most lines were in English, but then there were lines where they spoke in Serbian, which was okay. Pictures courtesy of Nita.



We rushed to get nita a pill for her headache, and then went to the other play at the National Theater. Roozbeh Nasseri’s play disappointed. The theater itself was cold /I could feel my nose freezing/, and the play was dull. It did not help that the whole act was in Iranian, which me and nita cannot understand. The music was awful – they choose songs that were shit, shit, and shit. Then the actors (more than six), did not impress. I slept for a minute or two, and then we left. I really did not want to do that, but if we stayed there a little longer, we would have slept or died from the cold.
The festival is running until the 27^th of November. So there should be lots of great movies/plays to go and see.
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TOPIC: ELECTIONS
DAYS PASSED: 4
SIDE: WINNER'S
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A couple of days passed and both people and politicians cannot stop talking about the elections. don't blame them, since what else is there anything to talk about around here /lots/? i confess that even i had a hard time trying to stay away from all that /but i voted/, but most of the time i could steer away from hard-boiled conversations where one side tries to defend what they lost, and the other beats its chest about the victory. I had no clue who is was gonna vote for, but I had a 10min walk to the polling station to make up my mind. Since my last post, election results have not changed much:

PDK is still leading by a 12% margin over LDK;
AKR is waiting in line for that invitation to form a government;
ORA has been sent to the emergency room for some finger-nail and hair implants.

But, that's how people voted. Now, a lot of people ask me who did i vote for /most of the people here tend to ask that question and they tell you who they voted for even if the question is not asked to them/. It was strange because in the beginning i did not want to vote > i only changed my mind when i figured that i could inflict more damage if i voted, than if i did not vote. This time round, people that are around me, felt more joyous, more inclined to tell that they voted PDK, and some were just still shocked about ORA's performance. This is the first time after 8 years, that people punished the big guy for not doing what they are supposed to do. Now again, a lot of people say that there is not a clear line that distinguishes the previous winners (LDK), to the new ones (PDK), and that might be true, but the previous party led the /country/ for 8 years and we were not bathing in the things they promised.

stick/
stick/
stick/

i'm kind of curious what the new government will do differently from the last one, but if they under-perform or fail to keep the promises, well, i just hope that people will not vote for them. no matter what party they belong to.

KOSOVA ELECTIONS ARE OVER&OVER.
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the results keep coming in. everyone has his or her number, but one thins is official:
The momentum has shifted, the balance has tipped!
These are the current stats that are circulating on the media frequencies and people's tongues.
PDK 37% / LDK 22% / AKR 15% / LDD 10% / AAK 9% / ORA 4%

PDK gained, and they're happy about this.
LDK lost ground, and are in ass-kicking mode towards LDD.
AKR are the surprise that is now standing on the shoulders of giants?
ORA is engaged in a fingernail-eating frenzy.

official results are yet to follow, but these preliminary results will not change for a large %.
now i can sleep.

++
honesty.honey

i was in the school's fourth-floor bathroom, unzipping to perform the pre-exam urination ritual.
lights went out. my world was my toilet seat. there i stood, half an inch outside my target, like in a dream. a very weird dream. who i feel really sorry for is for the nice cleaning ladies. had to run for the exam. hate it when the lights do that!

+++
Hallofween bash at Olta's. sip sip and sip some more. me and nita were two goth/zombies.

+++
The next day. Skopje, Macedonia.

view from my triangular-shaped workplace.

+this is how
it should be.

+bayram.

i thought i might get more sleep today because i felt better, but that did not happen. RATS! anyways, today was bajram - a festive muslim holiday. i don't want to get into all the details of explaining that. i was happy because i saw my cousins Bert and Ben, my newly appointed security adviser uncle, and my grandpa and grandma. their garden looked lovely - oh, so lovely, i would live there - and we ate specially made treats, some of which were hand-made by my two young cousins /the deserts had deformed shapes, but they were sweet/. i also got a phone call from vesa, a cousin who has the luck to call croatia her home and have a croatian passport, and told me that my online order had arrived! (i gave the address of her father's workplace in Osijek, Croatia, because packages do not arrive in Prishtina, Kosova). so happy, historical online-purchase moment for me, and probably my family. but they were not aware about that. later, ate lunch with my brother and parents. people usually make tons of food for this kind of holiday, but my mother made enough, not too much, and i was not hungry that much. all i wanted was some sleep. and sleep came, in the form of a one hour nap, that could have gone into a serious night-sleep, but i did not let that happen. the city was crowded, music up loud, mud on the ground, cars carrying people and mud to places, drinks drinks drinks and drinks some more! as we were cruising with eluise, a group of young people were running amok and were jaywalking, running. eluise passed the streetlights, and suddenly, she herd a bump in her back door: a boy that was running like crazy had just crashed/splatted himself into eluise's rear left door! it was such a bang that scared the jeepers out of me and nita, and made us feel so so sad. luckily, the boy was off and running by the minute he hit the car, and just kept running like he was being chased by wilderbeasts. we felt sorry for the guy, but also hated him for scaring us so badly. man. anyways, we wanted to do something else, to escape from the usual bayram-routine, and i did. me and nita chose the cinema as our date with this holiday. there were hardly any people, so we had a cool cinema-party-movie-watching night! knocked up, made me bite my tongue a couple of times. it was fun. glad it's over.
another exam is on my trail, but i will lose it this Sunday. muddy Sunday.
for all of you that missed this day, here's some treats. enjoy.

+done.

just done with a commodity market exam. it was plain easy, but my eye has an, well, eye to miss details and screw up the answers. then i hate myself, but not that much. today was also the last day of my job at MDA. over the week that i went there and stayed a while, i was pretty emotional about leaving them. they treated me with respect, and i'm thankfull that i've been part of that great and growing company for the past 16months.
so full of germs ruin my body-party and brain-dance. the bird flu, sorry, the flu, has hit my entire defence mechanism and i think i'm loosing that battle. i won't succumb at this stupid flu, weather-caused probably, and dust-particle assisted as well. makes my legs all shivery, shivery to cold, cold to hot and the all over again.
can't wait to start on the new job. new week. next week.

alas! t'was joe's birthday. was.
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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.
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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
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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.