We started the day by dragging our bags somewhat north of downtown and then trying to flag down a car to give us a ride. A woman came up to us and told us that we wouldn't get anywhere with this approach, but the good folks at hitchwiki.org said that it was really easy around here so I figured she was wrong. Sure enough, a couple minutes after she told us nobody would stop, a few cars in a row pulled over and offered us a ride. Unfortunately, neither of them were going to Pristina. This country is tiny and has very few cities of any significance so I'm not sure where else they could've been going, but we kept pressing further outside the city in the direction of a truck stop/gas station. According to hitchwiki, things get good once you're north of the NATO peacekeeping military base on the outskirts of town. Shortly after we made it this far, though, an extremely friendly construction worker (half the city seems to be under construction, which I suppose is encouraging) started up a conversation with us.

I think he was primarily interested in speaking to tourists, but when I told him I'm American he got really excited and took a smoke break to talk with us. He talked about his travels to the US and how a lot of his friends have left Kosovo for elsewhere in Europe. A few minutes later it was his lunch break so he invited us to lunch with him. Jimena and I were a little concerned about time since we weren't exactly sure about the bus schedule (our fallback plan if hitchhiking didn't work out), but we piled into the work truck anyway and went to lunch with these construction workers. He drove us to a nearby restaurant and ordered us all something that was basically the filling to a chicken pot pie. We ate and he talked about how much he loves America some more, and then extensively about how much he hates Serbia and thinks it shouldn't be allowed as an independent country. There was also a long thing about how American fast food is amazing and it's a tragedy that Kosovo is one of the only places on earth that doesn't have McDonald's. He insisted on paying for our food, which I felt a little weird about since my income is probably an order of magnitude higher than his (gdp per capita in Kosovo is a little over $6000), but there was no dissuading him. He went back to work and we caught the bus since it had started to rain and Jimena was rather tired of the hitchhiking experiment. It was only €5 so it wasn't a huge deal.

Pristina is a surprisingly nice city. A lot of it was destroyed in the war, so it's more modern than Pirzren. Much of it wouldn't look out of place in Back Bay or along the Pike west of Boston. It really wasn't what I was expecting at all, and the American symbolism everywhere was a little excessive. There were American flags everywhere, a fake statue of Liberty, and of course, the giant Bill Clinton statue with a 5 story tall banner for him as a backdrop. There's no subway here, but there is a bus system. I had to meet Irish guy (Oscar) nearby at the Bill Clinton statue so I wasn't interested in the bus, but Jimena and someone else from Pirzren needed to take it into town to get to their hostels. Rather than just pointing on the map, the bus driver walked us over to the nearest bus stop (which happened to be in the direction of the Bill Clinton statue anyway), despite it being almost a mile off. He insisted on carrying my suitcase for large portions of the time despite the fact that I'm obviously capable of doing it myself. He didn't say much other than to beckon us in a certain direction, and we had no clue what was happening until we got to the bus stop and he wordlessly left. Strange experience but I suppose a friendly one.

I met Oscar by Bill Clinton, which was hilarious, and then we went over to get some food and beer. We found a fairly cozy little restaurant and had some mediocre local beer along with some decent food. The English menu was terribly translated so I'm not sure what most of the items on it were (chicken keel?), but it was reasonably priced and did the job. People kept walking in from the outside with buckets of peanuts or packs of cigarettes and hawking them table to table. I'm not sure why this is allowed but it seems to be a very common occurrence around here. I debated spending the night in Pristina since I hadn't actually booked anything for Skopje and hated the idea of running my bags across the city in the rain again, but ultimately decided to head out with Oscar. On Friday he's going to a lake in the southwest of Macedonia which is supposed to be very nice and then to Thessaloniki, which was almost exactly my plan - I think I'll mimic his route, especially since he has a classical history degree and seems very excited about the prospect of showing me around a Greek city. Crossing the Macedonian border was easy and the whole trip was surprisingly short. I booked the closest hostel to the bus station, found that I'm the only one there except a Turkish guy who gave me some burek, and then went to bed. No idea what's in Skopje, but I guess I'll find out tomorrow.