How I Get Around

OCTOBER 1, 2012

"You may find yourself living in a shotgun shack
You may find yourself in another part of the world
You may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile
You may find yourself in a beautiful house with a beautiful wife
You may ask yourself, well, how did I get here?"

Once in a Lifetime by Talking Heads

One of a dozen weak clear beers I was forced to drink in the stoutless Balkans

There are many reasons to visit a city.  It may get a good review on the travel blogs or sites like LonelyPlanet.com or TripAdvisor.com.  You may know someone who had a positive experience there.  Sometimes, you just have to go on a hunch.  And my hunch was that any town that brews their own beer and is settled at the foothills of the mountains is going to be my kind of place.  And of to Peja I went.

Just as there are many reasons to visit a city, there are many ways to get there.  The big cities are easy.  Just go to one of the sites listed above, type the name of the city and you have everything you need to know from travel routes to lodging and food.  In northwest Kosovo near the border of Montenegro it was not so simple.  And my complete lack of planning for this trip wasn’t helping either.  So, my new strategy went something like this: 

Roll into a city and connect with other travelers or English-speaking locals who share my same interests.  This is Caroline's picture to the right.  After running into her in both Skopje and Prishtina, I took it as a good sign she was also going on to Peje, a city already on my radar (although she would immediately press on to Montenegro).  Last night at dinner I met a mountain biker who said Peja was a gateway to the outdoors type of city.  Perfect.  That’s step one.  Now how do I get there?

Again, connecting big cities is easy.  Going to the smaller ones takes some work.  I followed signs in a circle to a non-digital (is there a word for non-digital? that's how effing obsolete this thing was. I don't even know what to call it) board that was completely blank.

Then there was this monitor also, which could have been for the trains or spaceships for all I knew.

Sometimes you get a little clue like this.

And other times it’s a total jackpot like this sign in Peje.  City names and times.  Perfect. 

You go to the counter and find the youngest ticket agent available, because they are more likely to speak English and are easier to flirt with, allowing a couple extra stupid questions to be asked before they make you move on.  Get your ticket, hop on the bus, and hope like hell you know when to get off the bus.  Once off the bus, secure lodging.  It’s kind of like backcountry survival in a sense – most people freak out about finding food, but reasonable shelter is all you need.   In Peje, there was basically nothing online.  Getting off the bus, I looked right….

….looked left….

and made the obvious decision to walk to the right since that's the direction the mountains were. 

  

The hotel accommodations in town were slim and overpriced, and there wasn’t a hostel to be found.  I stopped in a couple shops to ask if anyone knew of a guest house or wanted to put up a scruffy American for the night.  My first stop was a failure, although the guy was really sweet in trying to help.  He pulled up Google Translator on the computer/cash register in his store so we could “talk” back and forth.

Try this in Target store back in the U.S.

My second stop was somewhat of a success, as I secured the apartment I am typing this from right now.  Yes, apartment.  It’s big. It’s kinda nice.  But I paid for it.   That’s okay.  Sometimes I have to remind myself that I can splurge on a two bedroom apartment with full kitchen from time to time and live like the middle class American I am, and not sleep in dorms and eat out of a can like the broke ass dirt bag vagabond I see myself as. 

Of course, I still ate out of a can tonight.