Kosovo is foggy. Foggy and smoggy.

When I first got here, and almost every morning since then, the air has been thick with fog. Like thick, soupy fog that you almost have to chisel your way through.

Kosovo is shaped like a giant bowl, and wind typically comes in from over the Italian Alps, where it gets kind of cold, and then blows over the Adriatic Sea, where it picks up moisture, and then it blows inland, where it promptly gets stuck by the ring of mountains that form the bowl. All this moist air gets caught, and mixes with the smog.

The smog? Kosovo has one main power plant, an old Yugoslav-era coal-fired plant that spews smoke into the air like a dragon with the world’s biggest cigar. It all gets mixed up and hovers in the atmosphere, and days like the one pictured are strangely normal, at least at this time of year.

We’ve had some good days with clear skies, but morning fog is very, very common. The first three days I was here, I didn’t know we are near the base of a giant mountain. Germany (at one point) provided Kosovo with some air scrubbers; the Kosovan government sold them (Kosovo is very poor). I doubt the air scrubbers would have done much good, regardless.

I’ve since been able to see most of Kosovo by air, but for the first several days I was surprised we were expected to do any air operations at all.