More in Kosovo

Like I mentioned before, I'm now in Kosovo. Internet is more consistant, unfortunately it is still a bit finicky. These next couple days are going to be fairly interesting, they went ahead and gave us the tour of the camp today and went over some things and now I have the rest of the day off.

Apparently, these next 12 months are going to yield a few things to us, including educational opportunities, a chance to get my butt in some serious ass-kicking shape, a mission that includes like seven countries (including possibly Italy), and a lot of free time.

The task force has designated this to be a non drinking deployment, which appears to be upsetting some people, but I don't care as it doesn't matter to me one way or the other. I don't drink. Which makes a lot of people starving for things to do. The Task Force we're replacing appears to be seriously beefed up, they must get a lot of time in the gym.

I have a feeling that Amazon and Ebay will become near and dear to me. The PX is good, supposedly the best in the Balkans and the second highest grossing one in the chain (because the other multinational forces like to shop there too, as well as eat our food).

And I've seen quite a few people in foreign uniforms wandering the region. We share this specific sector with Greece, Ukraine, Poland, Lithuania, and a fifth country that escapes my mind at present (only because they represent 1% of the task force here). The Norwegians are here on post too. I see a lot of Germans, Italians and French wandering around as well.

What's really hilarious is the locals. So far they appear to be really cool, and they LOVE the Americans. Its kind of an interesting thing we've got going on here. The Albanians love us because we came in and bombed the crap out of the Serbians back in '99. The Serbians love us (though they don't love us as much as the Albanians do) because we are preventing the Albanians from completely over taking Kosovo. That, and we protect their churches and other various places of importance. Long story.

In Pristina, largest city in Kosovo, they have a shrine to Bill Clinton with various signs exclaiming "thank you" and a big picture of him hanging off of one of the buildings. They love him here.

I will get plenty of opportunities to talk to the locals. They have both Serbs and Albanians on post working under contract so I'll get a chance to interact with them. They don't always speak great english, but we'll see how much Albanian and Serbian I can pick up before I leave.

This should be an interesting year. I'm looking forward to getting to work.