Started the day by heading up to the fortress I saw last night. It's got a great view of the whole area and mountains in the background. I liked climbing around the structures, though all the info placards were totally illegible due to weathering. I saw a few young guys climb to the top and make a hand symbol that I recognized as an Albanian nationalism thing; they REALLY want to be Albanian around here. I went to the grocery store to poke around and buy some fruit and snacks. They had a surprising number of snack foods produced domestically, which I wasn't expecting since the country is so tiny and not especially prosperous. Produce has generally looked terrible ever since I left Croatia, but I finally found some very good apples here. I wandered back to the hostel to eat and find somewhere else to go, but the city doesn't seem to have much going on. It's charming, but yeah, not much to do or see. I walked into a nearby mosque that's very old but not remarkable in any other way before heading to a different store to buy food for dinner. I wanted to make burritos, but I couldn't find any salsa (they did have something called "Mexico sauce") or tortillas, so it pivoted to a burrito bowl thing. I did find some "sour creaming", and the hostel had plenty of free rice. After picking as many of the weevils out the free rice as I could, I used the terrible kitchen to the best of my ability. It was nice to slow down and zone out while cooking, so I was glad not to be doing too much today.

Jimena, the Mexican girl from yesterday showed up at one point and I gave her some leftovers. She's going to Pristina tomorrow, and that Irish guy I met on the bus is also doing a day trip there from Skopje. Since Skopje is probably my next stop, I figure I'll check out the big city of Pristina with jimena and head back south with him. I suggested that we try hitchhiking up there since there are only a couple cities in Kosovo and it's not that far off, so presumably there's a lot of people going between the two. She's onboard and we're going to leave tomorrow morning. A few other people in the hostel tonight, but nobody else I talked too much with.

Miscellaneous notes about Albania and Kosovo - these are the first countries I've been to where the sewage system can't handle toilet paper and you have to throw it out. I think the only other time I've seen this is Peru. Also, I know I said I could make out a fair number of words in Albanian the other day, but it's extremely difficult to understand in larger blocks of text - store names and menu items seem to have a fair number of cognates, but outside of that it's almost completely indecipherable. Food prices are extremely cheap at restaurants here, but I find that they actually aren't that cheap at grocery stores. I've been to a few places in this trip where groceries seem super expensive (Geneva), but nowhere has food seemed that much cheaper than in the states.

Anyway, Pristina and then Skopje tomorrow.