The night the coffeebars were quiet

Coffeebar row, a stretch of a main street with around 15 coffeebars, has been hoppin' like crazy these past 2 weeks. It's almost impossible to find a table, so a bulk of young people don't even try. Instead, they strut up and down the sidewalk - often overtaking the road. It's what people do. And, much to my chagrin, it's what I often do, too :)


Tonight, however, was different. As I walked along coffeebar row, I noticed how few people were there. I even saw 2 places closed. I asked if there was some holiday (but there couldn't be because people had school). Then I saw/heard it: "the concert." Wow-honkin'-zers. I was walking with 2 young friends, and the three of us stood staring for a couple of seconds. There were thousands of people - nearly all between 12-18 years old - at the main intersection in Gjilan for a big concert. A political party, PDK, put it on with 6 or 7 singers and groups performing. I have not seen a crowd like that in ages - a herd of shoulder to shoulder young people. I do not have a good estimate of how many people were there, but I'm fairly convinced that most of the young people of Gjilan were present.


It was funny to be standing in a mass of screaming 13-year-old girls. If I was a good foot shorter, it might have been fun to scream along with them. At another point, after a popular "It's great to be Albanian" rap song (that perhaps goes a little too far), a politician dude came on stage and started to speak. People were totally wound up, and I assumed he was another singer. I started waving my hand and hollering like the best of them (the lemming that I've become). After the cameras whipped around the crowd several times and I realized that he was not singing, I decided that, golly, it's probably not a good thing for me to be acting like that. Even if I knew something about him and thought he was a good dude, it probably wouldn't be good for me to be seen on TV going bazerko over some politician dude. ...i have quite a genius head on my shoulders, huh.

A highlight was seeing some high school peeps that I sort of know. It was a bizarre realization - i could look out on the crowd and pick out dozens of people that I've met before. It was also interesting to stand there looking at the 'multitude' and imagine a similarly rowdy crowd of young peeps coming out for a different sort of event. ...sigh, dream... Yet after listening to rap-ish music (rappers here have watched way too many Eminem videos) and watching female "singers" lipsynch and wiggle among several thousand middle and high schoolers for an hour and a half, I was very ready to go home.