A Politically (In)Correct Guide to Kosova- Drinking Coffee

Drinking coffee, a daily activity believed to be a remedy for the high unemployment rate and catastrophic boredom prevailing in Kosova. Alpha and omega of every outing, mantra in every meeting proposal and date arrangement. But make no mistake; we are not caffeine junkies longing for the next dose with goose bumps all over our body. Actually, this phenomenon has nothing to do with the Brazilian coffee plantations, or the less-advertised Yemenite brand, or the sophisticated Italian implementations.

Drinking coffee as understood in Kosova is a deeper undertaking transcending the ephemeral and superficial definition a staunch consumerist or scientistist would provide.

Drinking coffee is such a comprehensive and open system that it embraces the sin without deliverance: ordering orange juice, ice tea or Red Bull, and/or smoking cigarettes in an operation strategically named and called drinking coffee throughout.

Drinking coffee is raison d’être of the Kosovar social life. I can’t think of any politician, intellectual, analyst, artist, citizen, villager, liberal, conservative, nationalist, cosmopolite… in Kosova who has ever imagined her life without drinking coffee (I’m lazy enough to neglect the prefixes pseudo- and anti- here). Please, note again, that our issue is not coffee per se, but drinking coffee, an intricately designed matrix, usually materialized by being prepared and served hot, aimed at giving some semblance of normality  to the miserable lives of our poor souls.

Me plumb, pa plumb, me shkumë, pa shkumë, cappuccino, macchiato are routinely uttered every day in our coffee bars (although we deal, more or less, with coffee in our homes, indulging in drinking coffee is monopolized by coffee bars).

We drink coffee 2,3,4,5 times a day, taking asymmetrical sips as we mercilessly ignore the postmodern background music and (most often) bullshit about everything under the sun (people tend to think that some of the most productive drinking coffee sessions are centered around Green Card—a double escapade-ish endeavor).

We drink, and drink, and drink coffee, even after midnight. We don’t mind the self-inflicted insomnias and the alteration of our biological clocks stemming from them.

As you read these lines, perhaps some dude in Kosova might be texting her significant other: A vjen dalim me pi kafe? (Shall we go and drink coffee?).

Why not?

Kosova doesn’t have a Starbucks, yet (one might say, luckily so). But a poor, pathetic, and most probably illegal imitation of it stunned me somewhere in the suburbs of capital Prishtina, where I (used to) live.