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August 02, 2007
Gjakova
We arrived at about 7:30 on Tuesday night, having left Letchworth Garden City [after Anthony and I had washed our hair obviously] at 9:30 Saturday night. We actually arrived in Gjakova about 6:30, but it has a complicated one-way system and very narrow streets not always entirely suitable for a large van,
so we had a couple of interesting tours of the Old Town before we finally tipped up at Fikrije and Basri’s beautiful house.
Lots of hugs and smiles and glasses of chai [sweet boiled tea] and we were told the news… the Konvict, where the summer school had been based for the past two years, itself not exactly a palace, was not available. Er… ah… but don’t worry, the Gjakova team had been working hard and had found an old Kindergarten we could use. So, as the sun began to sink slowly behind the Maja Glava mountains in the West, we went to have a look.
The place had, ten years before, been at the cutting edge of Infant Education Architecture, sadly in that ten years, as we were to discover, the edges had become somewhat blurred, and in some cases completely blocked.
The space inside was excellent, lots of light and lots of places for workshops and five large classrooms for the students to sleep in – whoopee! If we could get some beds that is.
The Gjakova Team had done an excellent job cleaning the place but I didn’t sleep that night, furiously re-working all the schedules and plans to make sure that when all the staff and students arrived, in three days, we would be ready.
Posted by john at August 2, 2007 05:14 PM