31 August 2023 - 8 September 2023, Pristina
Studio Apartment 22.50€ [R450]

9-18 September 2023, Pristina
Studio Apartment 20€ [R400]

19-21 September 2023, Pristina
Studio Apartment 17€ [R340]

Kosovo shares borders with Serbia to the east and north, with Montenegro and Albania to the west and southwest, and with North Macedonia to the south. To reach Turkey without going through Greece, which would require a new (expensive) Schengen visa, we must pass through Bulgaria. Kosovo does not share a border with Bulgaria, meaning we must enter Bulgaria from either Serbia or Macedonia.
As relations between Serbia and Kosovo are somewhat strained, to put it mildly (someone we dealt with yesterday said her uncle had been killed by the Serbs and that all Kosovars have similar stories to tell and share a hatred of Serbians), there is no visa-issuing Serbian embassy in Kosovo, so Macedonia it is.
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We had been dreading applying for three visas in the city (Macedonia, Bulgaria, Turkey), so were excited to find that our studio apartment is literally 100m from a VFS Global visa agency [“Since 2001, we have processed over 268,607,014 applications”]. 
Unfortunately, this office deals only with Schengen countries and turned us away.
Like planets around the sun, a series of travel agents and visa agencies encircle VFS. We picked one at random. The young woman who served us was born in the US to Kosovar parents who fled the Kosovo-Serbia war. While she could assist with the visa applications and medical insurance, etc, in the end we decided to approach each embassy independently.
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We passed the enormous complex that is the US embassy on our way into town. Most other embassies are located on two parallel streets to the west of the city centre, a little over 1.5km from our apartment. We took a walk up the hill yesterday and visited the embassies in the order in which we reached them: Turkey, Bulgaria, Macedonia. All staff were friendly and helpful, but we still walked away with increasingly complex homework to do.
It looks as though the Turkish visa might be easy. We need to complete a form online and pay online and they will in theory email us a barcoded visa.
The Bulgarians gave us a form to complete and a list of supporting documents required and told us we needed to make an appointment to speak formally to an embassy employee. They could not make an appointment while we stood at their gate, saying we must do it through their call centre. The call centre has yet to answer the phone!
The Macedonians gave us a form to complete and a list of supporting documents required, but told us we needed confirmation from the police that we were in Kosovo legally before they could proceed further.

[cont.]