Kosovo. "Where is that?"*

The country was a big, black box of uncertainty to my family and friends before I landed in the capital city of Pristina last May. At times I simply said, “It’s in eastern Europe,” and the conversation ended.

Yet people abroad know Ohio. It’s not the most glamorous of 50 states, but Europeans joke about our corn even all the way in Kosovo.

A program coordinator told me that people become attached to the first place they go abroad because it feels like a second home. Maybe it’s why now, I can’t stop talking about Kosovo.

Living between mountains

Kosovo has an energy I’ve never felt anywhere else. It’s a young country that has to look up to great powers during international talks, but its people and mountains stand tall. Once my plane puttered to a stop at Adem Jashari airport, I could easily spot these green peaks everywhere I looked.

Most of Ohio is flatter than a tortilla. Whenever I come home, more suburbs and schools soak up light that used to hit soybeans and cornfields.

In Kosovo, surrounded by mountains, I felt like I was looking through a 4D lens every time I looked out a bus window on the new highway. Or when I looked past a beautiful, rushing river in the city of Peja. Or a regular window in the room I woke up in everyday.

I still dream about those mountains.

Pulling away from secrets in “caffes”

Countless signs misspelled “cafe” (my favorites didn’t), but each had an endless supply of espresso and mostly English-speaking waiters. A few switched on string lights at night and transformed these spaces into bars, with music turned up so loud that I had to lean in close to hear anyone speak.

In these close and crowded spaces with people I’d met weeks before, I found myself yelling secrets I had never admitted back home.

When I returned to Ohio, I finally could. Erblin and Ardi, thank you.

Especially in a place where hosts treat guests better than family, you learn how to make friends and ask for help faster than should be possible. You have to, especially if you need help understanding why Albanians go crazy when traditional music comes on at a festival —Shqipdona and Zana, we never knew until you showed us — or something a bit more complicated, like traditional Albanian dancing steps — Vjosa and Donjeta, you are my favorite people to dance down the sidewalk with.

It’s also important to accept that you may never understand some things, like how to pronounce the Albanian ‘L’. Ardi, if I am a crazy woman, you are an absolute fool. We wasted 30 minutes rolling ‘L’s at each other across the room when we and Jessica could have binge-watched 1.5 more episodes of “That 70’s Show.”

My friends were the hardest to leave. I can’t list them all, but they know who they are.

Navigating a complicated past and present

Spending the Fourth of July in another country is not exactly patriotic. I’m not pleased with the state of the union, but I made up for my clear lack of patriotism by singing the U.S. national anthem at the top of my lungs — just as our founding fathers intended.

Kosovo celebrated with me by shooting off fireworks that night. Earlier that day, a giant U.S. flag streamed down the parliamentary building. Below it, on Mother Theresa Boulevard, some Kosovars sported “Thank You, USA” T-shirts.

In 1999, then-U.S. President Bill Clinton pushed for NATO bombings that stopped Serbian soldiers’ ethnic genocide of Kosovan Albanians, and Kosovo still remembers. I was still in diapers in 1999, but Kosovo veterans often stopped to thank me and other Americans, who represent a country that sponsors Kosovo’s independence from Serbia.

Petar, my coworker, guide and friend who is Serbian, has an understandably complex reaction to Kosovo’s history.

He pointed out new refugee camps for displaced Kosovan Serbians while he was helping me navigate the North side of Mitrovica. Moments later, he and his friend Milos asked, “What do you think of Bill Clinton?”

He wasn’t another grateful stranger. This loaded question deserved a complex response.

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Kosovo is a Schroedinger’s cat of a country to most of the world. Why go and see? What’s there, except great scrapes of mountains, coffee, people and a tangled history that makes life there as interesting to me as it is difficult for those same people?

I’ve been in the box with the cat. I won’t lock it up again.

*This is the writer’s cut of a version initially published in The Miami Student newspaper which was featured in Balkan Insider’s 8/28/2019 Balkan Blast newsletter.