London, Kosova, a large lake, and the Serbian border.

So I've arrived in Pristina after two lovely days in London.  I was able to have lunch with Rachel and her son Tom, and afterwards we went to the Tate Modern, (right across the Themes from Hal's school) and managed to spend almost an hour and a half at the gift shop.  Notice, we did not actually go to the exhibits.... but I plan on going when I return to London!  PLUS I got to walk over the wibble wobble foot bridge to the south bank, which was very cool, (for those of you that don't know, it used to wobble too much and the London city government had to close it down and tighten the cables.  AND it was the one that the death eaters blew up in the Harry Potter movie.  I know, I'm lame.)  After meeting Hal, (Rachel's youngest son) I got on an older double decker bus to Trafalgar Square and after walking around there for a while took the tube back to Philip and Amanda's flat.  Which was followed by an amazing dinner, good conversation and watch football, (YES American football!!) with Philip who, apparently is the only English person to ever like our kind of football.  I actually prefer English football to ours as well...  Then the next morning I flew to Pristina.  Getting to Gatwick Airport was amusing, as Amanda said, "just put on a mean face, clutch your bag and get in there" and sure enough I shoved my way into three different underground trains in order to get to Victoria Station.  Apologies to all those people I smacked with my mother of a backpack... I know, I was that annoying person on the Subway!  After landing and arriving into the middle of Pristina, which by the way has HORRIBLE traffic, I met Shley(!!!!!!) and we went out for drinks and dinner.  Which ended up being a gyro-type sandwich.  Quite tasty.  This morning we met with some of her friends, respectively from, Germany, Israel and Belgium.  To describe what we did would take too long so I'll bullet point.  Old Serbian Monument outside Pristina, with a very good looking Slovakian guard at the top of the tower listening to "How Bizarre" by OMC, Mitrovica (the divided Serbian, Albanian town about an hour outside of Pristina)  VERY interesting experience, and I could understand mostly everything on the Serbian side.  AND I stumbled across the face of Putin almost every block... Then we headed for our main destination, a large lake which is supposed to be the most beautiful place in Kosova, which was also surrounded by amazing foliage and lots of Serbian towns.  The view there was great and we all relaxed on the bank for about an hour.  Then we decided to see if we could get across the Serbian border.  Just a quick lesson - if you have a Kosova stamp in your passport, you might be able to get across but the Serbs might not let you return to Kosova because they consider you illegally in their country, (since you wouldn't have received a Serbian entry stamp on the Kosova side).  Well we decided to test this but only got as far as the first border check where we chatted with the EULEX members there, who were from the US, Finland and Italy.  Very nice people, the American Guard was from Michigan and SUPER chill, he is a retired Police officer and was offered a position in Kosova after 2004.  Right now he gets paid a pension back home, and for being a EULEX officer.  Pretty crazy if you ask me.  But, they didn't advise us to try and cross it wouldn't have worked out and since there were some random mortar rounds shot a few days ago they just recommended a good restaurant to have dinner at on our way back.  We decided to go the food route, instead of the possible no return route.  Good decision, I think.  Any way, now I'm back at Shley's apt and about to go take a shower and head out for a night on the town!  Tomorrow we're going out for my birthday, and having dinner at a place called... 212.... !!!!!  Yay New York!!!  Speaking of, sending lots of good ju ju to the Yankees!!  Sorry for the long entry, congrats if you got this far!