It's been raining in Prishtina, and as always, the streets are slopping with mud. When it's dry, the dust and grit blows around, getting into your hair, your eyes, your throat, making you cough. When it rains, walking the streets is a constant test, trying and failing to avoid being splattered by passing cars, mud covering your footwear, splashed up to your knees. There's always some challenge.
Worst is the gauntlet that has to be walked every evening under the trees full of cacophonous crows, avoiding the torrents of shit they send down on to hapless humans below. I've worked out a route from my office down the road to my favourite café, dodging from one bit of open, treeless space to another. There's only one point where passing beneath a tree is unavoidable. Oh how I hate them, how they torment me. Before I go to bed I have to deal with the multitude of crows that spend the night in the branches next to my fourth-floor bedroom window. If I leave them be, I get a dawn call of cawing. Flashing them with a torch works quite well, but there are usually a few hold-outs, blasé in the face of human efforts to trick them. I keep a supply of plastic bottles to throw at them. But fifteen minutes later I have to repeat the exercise with the hard cases who have returned in the meantime.
Well, this is Kosovo after all, the "Field of Blackbirds". A Serb told me recently that the crows are the souls of dead Serbs, come back to haunt the Albanians and foreigners who have taken over their sacred land. Well, apparently they are not very discriminating, as he has been their victim too. Of course, the reason for their proliferation is the filthy state of the city. But where are all the cats? Don't they have any pride, allowing their town to be taken over by birds? I can't help thinking that a few men with shot guns one morning could wreak havoc among them. I'd volunteer.
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