Black Nerd’s Survival Guide to: Kosovo

I had the pleasure of visiting and exploring the country of Kosovo for the first time this year; the following is a chronicle of that experience. Before I even introduce any of the various international sources of sustenance to feed your Black nerd brain, I need you to understand one important instruction: prepare yourself for the staring. Now, I’m not talking about hostile, in-your-face staring so much as harmless uninterrupted gawking that assumes you must be a movie star, athlete, or Obama’s cousin based on appearance (although if you’re anything like me you’ll constantly have to convince yourself that you’re not actually being challenged to a showdown of the martial arts and/or card game variety). Luckily the writer of Bashkëbisedim  has this very detailed video to demonstrate exactly what I’m talking about, though I can only really attest to the first one at around 1:06 (for a better explanation of the more complicated nuances of race in Albanian culture, I suggest her blog post here).

Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, the fun part: what’s a Black nerd to do all the way in a newborn Eastern European country? Television, that old stanby of media consumption, is in fact a bit of a coin toss; while there are plenty of American movie channels that have been dubbed or subtitled as well as your standard throwback cartoons on Boomerang, I highly suggest checking out Bang Bang (channel 21) or Çufo (channel 22). Çufo is a 24 hour children’s network that runs shows based…