Another Year, Another Blog!

I arrived in Pristina, Kosovo, three days ago and decided it was high time to start blogging anew. For the next ten months I am going to be working on the Future Voters team. Future Voters is a democracy development project based on Kids Voting in the U.S. Basically, we organize parallel elections for junior high and high school kids during municipal and national elections in Kosovo. We work with teachers and principals to implement elections curriculum.

I picked the name "The Young Europe" because this is Kosovo's new advertising slogan. Kosovo is young in two ways: they just declared their independence in 2008 and they have one of the youngest populations in Europe. I also figured it was a good idea to have a nice, generic blog title so that I could continue posting under this name for future travels. (For my Moldovan blog, which I'm going to try to meld with this one, click here.) Since I tend to favor Eastern European and Eurasian countries, I figured this would work. While the nations of Eastern Europe are by no means young, their nation-states certainly are, most having declared independence in 1989 with the dissolution of Yugoslavia and the fall of the Berlin Wall or in 1991 with the end of the Soviet Union. Being a twenty-something myself, I thought the adjective was apt to describe myself as well.

I'll keep posting my usual blend of travelogues and pictures. I hope to get some good pictures of Pristina once the gray cloud cover breaks!