Sports Predictions Made Easy / NHL 09-10 so far

I’m always frustrated at the lack of creativity when it comes to how annual yearbooks predict potential champions. I’m fairly certain they just use this formula, in three easy steps*:
1. Look up the finalists from last season
2. Say they will meet again*
3. Say the team that won last season will repeat.
*If you are The Sporting News, pick the most tired option in assuming that San Jose will make it to the Western Conference finals even though they’ve been at the top of the league or lead it in points but can’t manage to string any playoff wins together. Of course the Penguins could very well win again, but many predicted Detroit to repeat last year… so you see where this is headed.

We’re already to the Christmas break in the NHL and the Olympics are just around the corner. It kills me to think that I won’t get to see much of them, but I’m secretly hoping to download some of the games afterwards. Although it’s hard to really gauge since I can only follow from box scores, standings and statistics, but I feel like this has been one of the oddest years in recent history.

First, we have to talk about my team. With a huge trade to bring in this year’s predicted “missing piece,” it’s apparent that it will take more than Chris Pronger to take the Flyers anywhere. Losing Knuble and Lupul have certainly hurt. As time passes by, it appears that Simon Gagne is no longer a durable player. Spending so much has left little room for goaltending and the Flyers might really be sunk with Ray Emery on the shelf. Rumors had Jaroslav Halak being offered on a deal, which means that maybe his agent can make Tweets about Ray Emery too in the near future. In my opinion, the Flyers should have thought about Halak and Pavelec last year when the price would have been cheaper both for trading and signing. But it doesn’t matter how good a goalie is if there is little being done offensively, which has certainly been the case. The good news is that, just like when I missed the season in 2006 when I was in Germany, if I’m not there to see them fail, it’s like it doesn’t happen. Call it “distance-induced sports denial,” if you will.

That the Wings have been bringing up the rear is surprising. But that’s not the only eye-popper about the Western Conference standings. The Kings? The Coyotes? Believe me when I say I couldn’t be more surprised or happier about that. Phoenix is not the hockey town it was in its early days when the franchise had a lot of early success. Given the financial situation with home values in Phoenix and the recent failure of the team, it’s not surprising that the situation has become so dire. But on ice success will hopefully help to right the wrongs of poorly thought out overexpansion into unstable and sometimes unnecessary markets.

I continue to be amazed at the length of contracts. Hockey has become so complex during the age of the salary cap. The times were simpler when teams like the Rangers, Wings and Flyers were the highest spenders. The cap has brought an understandably huge collection of numbers with it. Cap hit? Average salary? LTIR (Mike Rathje, where are you?) The amount teams pay for players daily as worked out by their annual salary and the number of days in the season?

But with any system, teams will eventually find a way to push it as far as they can, and the answer to this problem: long, long contracts that lead to “it seemed like a good idea at the time” regrets. Consider it hockey’s idea of a 2 at 10 and a 10 at 2. I want to stab myself when I think that Danny Briere will be a Flyer for a few more years, but at the time it was a necessary signing given the team’s then-status as worst in the league. But you have to wonder how signing players until their late thirties to contracts into what’s increasingly become a young man’s game will do. To that extent, it will be a brave new long-term contract world in about five years or so. The length and amount of contracts also limits the mobility of a player. If you sign someone to a long-term deal and they start underperforming in year two, there is no painless solution to this problem.

For teams like Chicago, Pittsburgh, Washington, these deals are necessary because they overwhelmingly involve young players. Lest we forget, they are commodities in addition to being human beings. Their commitment to stay with the team means all kinds of profits: aside from the most obvious in ticket sales, merchandising accounts for a lot of money. Emerging teams stand to gain so much from locking up young players, even though it’s not without risk. Alex Ovechkin, at 24, has already missed a few games to injury so far this season. The thing that fans love about him might be what plagues him in the later years of his huge deal: his style of play. What happens when you sign young players and they either fizzle or become plagued with injury? In the game of long contracts, I’d still say it’s best to roll the dice on young players instead of signing veterans already on the downturn of their careers.

The Shadow of the Wind

A few months ago, the latest addition to the Priscilla Obeada honorary bookshelf arrived. In the package: The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano (his book 2666 is already circulating the ranks of PC Albania and is now on its fifth volunteer even though it comes in at 1,000 pages and is really three books); Austerlitz by Sebald and finally, The Shadow of the Wind by Zafon.

I first read about Zafon by chance while browsing the NYT’s online literary section. Another volunteer who has crazily similar literature tastes as me, Raino, asked me later that week if I had read it. Once the book arrived and I started it, I couldn’t put it down.

A lot of comparisons between Zafon and Borges have been made. The elaborate and winding plot and biblio-theme are really the only Borgesian elements. Zafon’s book, as Stephen King describes it, is “full of cheesy splendor.” I’m certain that any comparisons can’t possibly be made to the quality of the writing.

Set amongst the backdrop of Franco’s Spain, the overall mood of the book is gloom and darkness. Barcelona is frequently covered in rain and fog. Nature creates the mood and Zafon uses it often. At the center of the novel is a mysterious library of lost books: books that have perhaps only one existing copy left in the world and are guarded from complete extinction. One day a father takes his son, Daniel, to this near-sacred place and allows him to pick his own book to read, love and protect. This singular moment starts of a series of events that stretches into the past and affects the future while bringing countless mysterious people into Daniel’s life as he searches for more information about the author. Who wrote this book? Why have other works by the author been destroyed by a masked man? And why is that same man now following Daniel? Zafon takes his time to tie and untie this knot of a mystery, which is the strongest point of the book: its elaborate and challenging plot is capped off with a flurry of events that finally puts all the puzzle pieces into place.

While he’s certainly no Borges, Zafon certainly creates the character depth and element of mystery that is required to sustain reader interest for the almost five hundred pages of the book. A prequel, The Angel’s Game is now available and I hope to read it soon.

Some of my favorite quotes:
“Those who really love, love in silence, with deeds and not with words.”
“…the eternal stupidity of loving those who hurt us the most.”
“It’s funny how we judge other and don’t realize the extent of our disdain until they are no longer there, until they are taken from us. They are taken from us because they’ve never been ours.”
“Memories are worse than bullets.”
“Most of us have the good fortune of seeing our lives fall apart so slowly we barely notice.”

Here you will find many treasures

- Hearing Albanian rap music that is trying very hard to be American and is even laced with English-language profanity on a furgon

- A student having a USB drive called, “Gangsta XXX” (I blame that on American culture being omnipresent on TV and music around the world)

- The healing powers of being able to shop at EuroMax, a chain grocery store that has a huge selection of Western amenities. They are even decorated for Christmas just as intensely as American groceries stores are now

- If I haven’t mentioned it before, Albanians gently shake their heads from side to side to agree with you; if the answer to a question is “no,” they will usually make a clucking sound

- Seeing a scorpion inside a house

- Using bay leaves not only to cook with but also to make tea (it’s delicious)

- Home remedies: Albanians telling us to eat dairy products if our stomachs are upset; telling us our stomachs hurt because our feet aren’t being kept warm enough; and telling us not to drink cold water because it will hurt our tonsils

- The actual monetary system versus the colloquial monetary system: frequently in spoken Albanian, someone will say something costs 4,000Lek. What they really mean, however, is that something costs 400Lek, or a little over $4 instead of $40. “Old Lek” and “New Lek,” as they are called, have been causes for a lot of confusion no matter how long we’ve been here. You go to a store and see a price tag for 20Lek, but when you give it to the cashier, he will tell you to pay 200Lek, even though what he really means is the sticker price of 20Lek.

- In Albanian, a vacuum is called a “fshese me korent,” or a “broom with electric.” I’m still deciding whether or not I like that better than the German “Staubsauger,” which means “dust sucker.”

New Year’s Resolutions

Already nine months into service, there are a lot of things that are going well. Things that didn’t go well initially have been remedied for the most part. I’m pleased with my work and the life that I’ve created here so far but I know that there is still a lot to do and I look forward to taking on some more responsibilities in the coming year.

On a personal level, I’m enjoying the journey I am on even if there have been times of deep doubt. I have already learned a lot of things about myself, many of which I am proud of. I also know that I have a lot to work on when it comes to my negative behaviors, specifically patience and understanding. Sometimes it is not always easy for me to remain patient because I just don’t understand people. That frequently leads me to get annoyed. Already I’ve been in situations where I’ve had to work with others that are disrespectful, difficult to trust or grudge-bearing and I’ve had to adapt and learn how to make things work. It’s improved me for the better but there is still much more to do.

I’ve learned that it’s a fine line between doing what it takes to keep the peace and becoming a martyr, and I’ve often felt completely in the middle of these two things and unhappy because of it. I feel like I apologize far too much in an effort to please people and keep things running smoothly. While I have no trouble expressing my feelings and ideas, I feel that they aren’t always heard with the same respect that I listen to others. This also causes frustration for me because respect is so important. Sometimes I wonder where my spine has gone in the time since I’ve been here because I find myself tolerating far more things than I ever would have in the United States. There have also been times of great disappointment in people and sometimes in myself, so I also need to consider expectations and their dangers.

My resolution this year is really a couple of things: to work on being more patient and understanding; to not be afraid to stick up for myself, even if it isn’t what people want to hear; to not be so accommodating; to not be as demanding; and to be as realistic as possible with expectations. I’m also trying to work on a balance of giving back to people no more and no less what they give to me; I believe in reciprocity and equality in every kind of relationship.

For Invitees

Peace Corps sends out an information CD to people who have accepted their invitations. PC Albania asked us for input, so I wrote a letter to the new potential volunteers.

Here is an excerpt:

…”You will spend ten weeks completing training and then move to your permanent site where you will stay for two years. You will arrive at your permanent site at the beginning of summer which is a time when people are taking many vacations or working fewer hours. It is going to be slow and coping with that will take some adjustment. Even once September begins and holidays are over it still may take some time for you to define your role in your host organization and start identifying people to work with. Don’t be too hard on yourself if you don’t mesh instantly or see results until later—it is all part of adjusting. Since language is such a huge part of culture, you’ll come to understand the meaning of “avash, avash” once you enter the workplace, and although it might be a challenge, one shouldn’t forget that character is forged through challenges and that experiences, good and bad, present a tremendous opportunity for deep personal growth. This applies to all aspects of your life here, not exclusively to your professional life.

You may have specific ideas and goals in mind for your service, and setting goals is important. But it is also important not to set the bar too high—you are moving to a different country, with a different language and culture, and there will be many adjustments. Setting your expectations too high will make your life here difficult. Instead, take the opportunity to relax a little and realize that every day will bring something unexpected, often times for the good. I feel in many ways that what makes my life here so interesting is its unpredictability; I never know what to expect. Being a control freak, I can say that this experience has already taught me so many positive things about releasing my grip on the reins and just going with the flow that everyday life brings.

The time passes so quickly. Before you know it, you will be here. Staging and the last-minute soul searching before flying out; PST and swearing in; and before you know it, you’ll be writing a letter to the next group of volunteers after spending eight months in country. It is with this in mind that I wish you enjoyable months at home before embarking on this journey that will change your life in so many ways, many of which you couldn’t even conceive of now.”

My Office

All four of the foreign language teachers at my school share an office. Normally, our classes start at 8:30 (but we get here around 8:00) and run until 1:30. The Ministry of Education will require an additional hour of teaching starting in the New Year, meaning classes will finish at 2:15. I’m not exactly sure how this will work, but two other teachers re-arranged the office to make room to work with students in our office.

This re-arranging meant that the library bookshelves that I obsessively organized had to be gutted to put the shelves on top of a cabinet to gain more floor space. It certainly looked a lot nicer before they did that. Somewhere in the move a shelf got broken as well, so I’m afraid what that bottom shelf will soon look like (probably filled with junk).




It’s difficult for me to work in the office. We only have one computer and one power outlet. I’ve taken my laptop with me on some days, but there is only so much I can do without internet and only running in battery power. For these reasons, I do most of my written and research work at home because it’s easier. Also, now that it’s winter and the window in the picture is perpetually open, it’s even hard to type because my hands get so cold and you can see your breath indoors. It’s to the point where it doesn’t even matter what I wear to school anymore because I just keep my scarf and coat on all day anyhow.

Even more depressing than the constant rain outside is that it’s usually warmer outside than it is inside. I can see my breath. In the past couple weeks, while it’s been about 50 degrees in my room when I go to bed, I still have to sleep inside of my mummy bag with a ton of other blankets on top of me.

Cultural Day – Christmas and New Years

“Hey I don't know if you have a mixer, I am assuming that you don't, so I am thinking that you should use this recipe, this is your great Grammy Daeufer's recipe.”

Here is a brief list of ingredients I don’t have: chocolate chips, baking powder, brown sugar, molasses to make improvised brown sugar using white sugar, imitation vanilla, vanilla extract, confectioner’s sugar and Kitchen Aid mixers.

What I do have: broken up chocolate bars, Dr. Oetker’s Backpulver, plain white sugar that I’ve mixed with the small amount of remaining brown sugar that I had left, vanilla sugar to add at least some vanilla flavoring and my two hands.

If my host sister would have been home, I would have had her take several actions shots of me in the kitchen as I prepared chocolate chip cookies, chocolate cake, brownies and cut-outs for the teachers and students of my school. I couldn’t help but laughing about the mixer question as I broke down and mixed the 5 cups of flour in the cut-out dough by hand. I have to add that all baking and cooking is highly, highly improvised here. Ingredients, baking temperatures and times, baking surfaces. Everything. And for the most part, after six hours in the kitchen the last two days, it turned out really well. I put out a giant tray of cookies in the teacher’s room and got a bunch of “te lumshin duart,” an Albanian compliment that means “bless your hands.”



I then had a cultural day with around fifteen English students where we discussed American holiday traditions at this time of the year. I made a Power Point with pictures that I used to explain our traditions. Part of our goals as Peace Corps Volunteers is to explain and exchange American culture, and I think this cultural day was successful in doing that.

And you thought popcorn balls were bad…

My family and I are usually forced to make popcorn balls each year during Christmas at the hands of my taskmaster grandmother. What are popcorn balls, you ask? Well, you basically take two kinds of Karo syrup, pop more popcorn than you would see even in a movie theater popper, and then mix the two together. Did I mention that the syrup is molten lava hot, and to combat the stickiness of the sugar mixture you have to cover your hands in butter? Yeah, it’s like that. Mostly it’s a group of us gathered around the table swearing. I’ve developed a strategy of defaulting to my dad while I make one ball in the time it takes everyone else to make five. So far, no one has really noticed. The trick is making it look like you’re doing something. Everyone else is far too concerned with the pain to notice the shirking.

I walked downstairs for some coffee one afternoon and walked into a kitchen full of women laboring over a tepsie of baklava. This requires some back story.
1. Tepsie are baking pans that I’ve never seen in any other place before. They are always round and come in various sizes, from large to humongous. I once used a large tepsie to serve a breakfast that had two plates, other accoutrements and two mugs and still had tons of room. They are used to make byrek first and foremost.
2. Byrek is a ubiquitous Balkan pastry filled with any variety of things. My favorite is the byrek my host mom makes with tomatoes and onions, but there are pretty good byrek places on the street where you can buy byrek with eggs and a dairy product that tastes like cheese but has the texture of dry cottage cheese. It is a lot of work to make because you have to make several layers of dough to make it flaky and crispy, but it’s delicious.
3. “Byrek” is also a catch-all translation for any kind of desert. “Byrek me chocolate” (literally: byrek with chocolate) is what I’ve heard brownies called, “Byrek me kungull” (byrek with pumpkin, although “kungull” can really mean zucchini, pumpkin or any variety of anything that is remotely like this) is pumpkin pie. Still trying to rap my head around how the word for a layered, greasy pastry is used to describe American desserts, but that is the wonder of the Albanian language. Kate and I were laughing about this shoddy translation the other day.
4. Baklava is commonly made for Bajram, a holiday celebrated by Albanian Muslims, and for New Years.

And now to the important part: how do you make baklava? Here’s a recipe that the Peace Corps gave us, but it involves a serious amount of cheating because it tells us to buy frozen filo dough. My family not only made the dough, but shelled and chopped all the walnuts. I can’t stress how much work it is to make a completely homemade baklava.

Ingredients

* 4 cups finely chopped walnuts
* 1/4 cup sugar
* 1 tablespoon ground cinnamon
* 1 cup butter, melted
* 1 (16 ounce) package frozen filo dough.
* SYRUP:
* 1 cup sugar
* 1/2 cup water
* 1/4 cup honey
* 1 teaspoon lemon juice
* 1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Directions

1. In a bowl, combine the walnuts, sugar and cinnamon; set aside. Grease a 13-in. x 9-in. x 2-in. baking dish with some of the melted butter. Unroll filo dough sheets (keep dough covered with plastic wrap while assembling).
2. Place one sheet of filo in baking dish; brush with butter. Top with a second sheet; brush with butter. Fold short ends under to fit the dish. Sprinkle with about 1/4 cup nut mixture. Repeat 18 times, layering two sheets, brushing with butter and sprinkling with nut mixture. Top with remaining dough; brush with butter. Cut into 2-in. diamonds with a sharp knife.
3. Bake at 350 degrees F for 45-55 minutes or until golden brown. Meanwhile, in a saucepan, combine the syrup ingredients; bring to a boil until the water becomes red, well the color of caramel. Reduce heat; simmer, uncovered, for 10 minutes. Pour over warm baklava.

In reality, homemade baklava involves spending about 2 – 3 hours rolling out all the individual layers of dough by hand. You basically take a ball of dough the size of a large gumball and roll it out until it is over a foot wide… then you have to bake that single layer. Imagine having to repeat that process for twenty or so odd times.

Real Life Frogger

It looks like all those hours spent playing Frogger and using profanity accordingly have paid off. Why?

Because crossing a street in Albania is a real-life image of what is portrayed virtually in Frogger.

The main traffic circle around Skanderbeg Square in Tirana is sure to give you an adrenaline rush. Walking down the street on Thanksgiving Day in Tirana, I was astounded at the gridlock. And you thought the Surekill Expressway was a parking lot? People who live in Tirana routinely leave an hour early for work to compensate for the flow of traffic.

And the traffic insanity isn’t just limited to the capital city.

During the summer in my village, the Autostrada that is normally 2 lanes (one going in each direction) turns into 3, 4, 5 and even 6 lanes of traffic. It’s terrifying; you can sit and count the near collisions while waiting for the bus. One time we counted 6 near-accidents in forty minutes. The thing is that most Albanian drivers, although I’ve seen them do almost physics-defying maneuvers, are incredibly capable and well-adjusted to this system that, to the outsider, appears to be based solely on chaos. While the statistics about accidents in Albania aren’t great, I can say through my observations that they could be a whole lot worse.

Yes, we have traffic laws here. But does anyone follow them? No. Even if the green light for pedestrians is lit, you have to triple check before stepping onto the street. Red lights for cars? Well, they are basically just suggestions just like the rest of the signals.

Alex Ovechkin once said the difference between driving at home in Russia and in the US is that you can’t bribe a cop in America. Let’s just say Ovechkin’s observation isn’t limited to only Russia.

The best part is the popularity of horn-honking, a mentality that I never quite understood. Imagine you are sitting in your car with no sign of movement at all from the cars in front of you, and your way of confronting this scenario is to not only honk, but hold your horn. Perhaps in all the history of mankind a horn honk has never remedied this scenario. But that doesn’t stop people from trying. My friend Tnaya once suggested the following: that in each car, there is a mechanism that causes the car to self-destruct if the horn is honked. The kicker is that you don’t know when it will be. Maybe it will be a million honks, maybe it will be two honks. All you know is that after a certain number of honks, the next time you beep will cause your car to explode. She reasoned that it would cause people to think long and hard as to whether a single honk on their horn was as important as their life. Tirana would turn into the library of a retirement community if we lived in world where this would ever be legal.

Feedback 89

I was able to attend a few of the German October events in Tirana, where the German Embassy sponsored a ton of cultural events. This year’s was special because of the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall, but I’m already looking forward to next year.

I got to see a really interesting exhibit which was a mixture of art and artifacts once the exhibit was “opened.” I arrived at Hotel Dajti earlier in the afternoon, only for the guard to tell me “it’s not open right now, come back at 4.” I came back at 4:00, and interrupted the guard as he raked the leaves in front of the building. I suspected that it wouldn’t have caused any harm for me to just go in at 2:00, but since I sometimes live in one of Kafka’s creations made real, I still had to wait two hours to gain entrance.

In my aesthetics class we talked a lot about what makes art “art” and we talked about the role of museums in the process. The exhibit I saw was in an unusual venue: a practically abandoned, communist-era hotel sitting right in the center of Tirana. Closed after the fall of the regime, Hotel Dajti now houses traveling exhibits. Seeing an exhibit from Eastern European artists composed of pieces largely railing against this ideology is such an incredible juxtaposition. In this hotel, the most important guests of the regime were hosted in a luxury not available for normal people. And now the pride of a former government sits completely abandoned as the paint continues to crack and the weeds continue their assault on what must have been a lovely garden to the rear of the building. Time will eventually catch up to all of us and all the political systems we make.

“So where does this start?” I asked the guard. I was standing between large columns on the main floor and was completely clueless how to navigate. In no specific words, the guard said there were exhibits all over the building so I started by going up to the third floor.

I can’t describe how eerie a feeling it was to walk around an abandoned hotel. The third floor talked a lot about the Berlin art scene and each room on the right hand side of the hall was home to an installation from an Eastern European artist.

We can also talk about the nature of art. It feels to me so personal and yet so public all at once. Can someone create art and keep it on a personal level, or is it like a Pandora’s box, where once you show it to someone it escapes from where you wanted to keep it and becomes public? I prefer to discover art on a personal level, where I can look at it all by myself and not have to worry about what other people think about it or how they see it… of course I’m curious, but I first need to have time to digest and absorb. This would have been a great place to have such a personal experience in a public place if the guard wouldn’t have insisted on following me around. Just when I thought he would leave for good because I’d hear his boots on the stairs, some time would pass and I would hear them come back up the stairs again. The sound of it made me as crazy as the heart beat from the Tell Tale Heart. So the experience was almost as private an experience as you can get in such a large, public place.

My favorite part of the exhibit was seeing the work of Albanian artists. There were a lot of black and white photos chronicling communist times that were very interesting. Another artist had taken the communist writers of former leader Enver Hoxha and inserted Western candy wrappers in between the pages to create quite a statement. What would have happened had authorities seen this? Would the people who wrote those books ever have dreamed of a day when those kinds of Western goods, something so trifle as candy, were available in Albania? Did the artist, as a child, delight in collecting these little, foreign souvenirs?

Another great part of the exhibit was something I had read about before and forgotten until I saw it years later, here, on the other side of the world. After Germany’s reunification, West Germany gave East Germans 100DM of welcoming money. A few years ago a woman went around asking East Germans what they bought with this money and ended up getting thousands of items, some of which were on display. People bought stereos, records, blue jeans, wool sweaters and power tools. The best part, aside from seeing these actual items after all these years, were reading the captions. People talked about wanting to experience owning these goods that were never available to them before. Many people talked about the jeans or sweaters they bought and said they still wore them. A man said he wore a pair of blue jeans as long as he could, and when they got holes on them, he resigned himself to wearing them just around the house. They were completely destroyed. I wondered what I would have done with $50 in a consumer market many times the size I had known. I tried to imagine people getting the money, painstakingly making a decision, and then going to a store and simply buying it like it was a normal thing that had always been there to buy.

And that’s how I spent a warm, November afternoon in Tirana: in an abandoned hotel looking at post-Communist art. And yet somehow, here in Albania, it doesn’t seem the least bit odd.

Bajram

If Thanksgiving weren’t already enough, Albanians celebrated Kurban Bajram (Eid al-Adha) the next day. Determined by the Muslim lunar calendar (whereas Gregorian calendars are solar), this year it fell before two other Albanian holidays (Albanian liberation and independence days, November 28 and November 29). Because it is based on the moon, the date of Bajram will continue to shift. It is just a coincidence that it fell in between all of these holidays but it will keep moving up in the future.

Eid al-Adha commemorates Ibrahim’s (Abraham) willingness to sacrifice his son, Is’haq. Abraham is an important figure not only in Christianity and Judaism but also in Islam.

From Wikipedia:
One of the main trials of Prophet Ibrahim's life was to face the command of Allah to devote his dearest possession, his only son. Upon hearing this command, he prepared to submit to Allah's's will. During this preparation, when Satan tempted Prophet Ibrahim and his family, Hajar and Ismael drove Satan away by throwing pebbles at him. To remember this rejection of Satan, stones are thrown during Hajj.

At the time of sacrifice, Ibrahim discovered a sheep died instead of Ismail, whom he hacked through neck. When Ibrahim was fully prepared to complete the sacrifice, Allah revealed to him that his "sacrifice" had already been fulfilled. Ibrahim had shown that his love for his Lord superseded all others: that he would lay down his own life or the lives of those dear to him in order to submit to God. Muslims commemorate this superior act of sacrifice during Eid al-Adha.”

Typically, the best animals are to be slaughtered. This is also a time for Muslim charity where people make food donations so that the poor and hungry aren’t without food on this day. People visit their friends and family. My family served veal since we don’t own any livestock and spent many hours visiting family. The holiday also marks the end of Hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca that every able-bodied Muslim is required to do at least once.

Thanksgiving in Tirana

The week of Thanksgiving finished up a mild November. Walking around Tirana on Thanksgiving Day, it was so warm we needed to take our coats off. For a Northeasterner, it was unusual. Many volunteers from all over the country were in Albania’s capital, being hosted by people who worked at the US Embassy. The meal gave us a chance to meet new people, to enjoy real American food that was shipped in (like cranberry sauce and Butterball turkey) while avoiding Black Friday the following day. It was a great morale booster.

We stayed with a family who hosted a group of my friends, with four of us staying there in total. Some of us were a little anxious that we’d be spending the holiday with a family that had four children. After we got picked up at the embassy, the wife told us that there would be two Americans married to Albanians also in attendance, and that one of them brought her four kids with her. I love kids so I was kind of looking forward to it, plus it’s been years since I’ve been around a swarm little tater tots for the holidays.

As it turned out to many of our surprises, the kids were the best part.

One complained about a decorative turkey made out of construction paper that was hanging from the back of a door. “I hate construction paper and staples, they are never strong enough!” he said. Later, he informed us of his hatred for raisins when he went through little paper turkeys full of raisins and craisins looking for the one or two M&Ms that went along with them. We made turkeys using toothpicks for legs, an orange for the body and gum drops for feathers. By the time we got there, many of the gum drops had already been unwrapped and eaten. Later on, this same kid had the idea of stabbing an orange a couple thousand times with a toothpick and then squeezing it to make orange juice. He must have done that to about eight oranges to try and fill up a glass. But the quote of the night was when this kid must have been picking through the meat on the tray. His mom saw him and promptly informed him that “you can’t caress a piece of ham and then leave it on the plate.”

As for craisins, one of the younger kids dumped the whole bag out on the floor and then stepped in them. When one of the women came over to help him clean up, he started bouncing up and down and said, “This is FUN!” Another one who was three had whip cream on his pie and was picking it up with four fingers… then putting those four fingers in his mouth. We laughed a lot.

All of the guests interacted really well and we had some very interesting and very humorous conversations, about life in Albania as Americans, about the jobs of embassy workers and about our work as volunteers here. All in all, a really great holiday that I definitely want to repeat next year.

Winter Salad

Here's a popular winter recipe (and a very common dinner for me):
purple cabbage, sliced thinly
one large carrot, peeled and grated
diced cucumber
diced tomato
oil and salt
crumbled white cheese

I also steamed some vegetables (broccoli and cauliflower are in season, and sometimes you can find heads the size of basketballs). The drink is actually a dissolved and fizzy vitamin C.

Fruits and Veggies

A view in my fridge

One of my favorite things about Albania is all the fresh fruit and vegetables. We’ll go shopping and constantly be amazed at the quality and price of the food. A hangover from Ottoman times, you can find huge shopping bazaars and food tregus that are full of people, colors and life. Shopping is a social event and the vendors remember our faces and what we like. Less formally, there are tons of roadside stands selling fruit and vegetables as well as grilled corn.

Over the summer, we ate a lot of tomatoes, cucumbers, zucchini, eggplant and watermelon. As the seasons have changed, a trip to the market is an explosion of orange and purple with cabbage and carrots as well as potatoes, broccoli and cauliflower. For a shorter time, we had persimmons and pomegranates. There was also another kind of fruit that my mom made jelly out of (read: boiled the fruit in countless kilos of sugar). It was yellow and bumpy and I’m still looking for its translation. Now we have oranges, lemons (which Albanians will eat by biting right into it, although they often put salt on it first) and mandarins.

Sometimes, I’ve never seen the fruit that my family offers me. As a result, I don’t know how to eat it. It makes me think of a passage from Slavenka Drakulic’s book How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed. After the fall of communism, Western goods flooded the market and people were exposed to all kinds of things that they had never seen before. Drakulic describes how she saw a Polish man eating a banana with the peel on and then saying it was one of the best things he’d ever eaten. Something about this image has stuck with me.

I only have one complain about the food vendors here. Since we’ve been here, we’ve observed that Albanians eat their fruit and vegetables at varying degrees of ripeness. I’ve been told to eat a pear, only to bite into it and be surprised that my teeth haven’t snapped off completely. The same with peaches. I’ve had oranges that tasted like lemons because they were so sour and I’ve also been told that it’s alright to eat a green banana that you could barely peel. To be certain, we have lots of great indigenous food grown here, but the degree of ripeness is the X-factor. I talked to one of my Albanian friends about this, and he told me that everything is controlled by the market. If farmers know that there aren’t many oranges on the market, they will hurry to pick them even when they aren’t ripe because they can sell them at a higher price. It’s your textbook example of supply determining price but it can lead to heartache when all you really want is a ripe plum but instead you end up biting into something that is more like a purple baseball.

A Follow Up on Robert Enke

The German weekly news magazine, Der Spiegel, had a very intense, in-depth article after Robert Enke’s death (Spiegel #47, 2009) about the man himself and the suffering of thousands with depression.

Spiegel notes the following, albeit far more eloquently than I did:
- The role of a keeper. Baseball has pitchers, hockey has goalies, soccer has its goalkeepers. These are people that have very unique personalities and, by the position they play, are the most important parts of a team. Spiegel says that “there is no position more difficult in soccer,” and that a goalkeeper has to have “strong nerves” and “self-confidence.” A goalie goes for long stretches without any work until there is a flurry. “Enke rarely spoke about the loneliness of being a keeper.”
- Most people around Enke didn’t know the extent of his fear. Recently, it was a fear of not being able to play for the national team in next year’s World Cup (even though he was the favorite for the position). On some days, his anxiety to play in net would be so strong that he didn’t want to go to practice. At one point, he even asked his father if he would “be annoyed” with him if he quit soccer altogether (“My God, Robert, it is not the most important thing,” his father answered).
- Spiegel asks if soccer doesn’t “destroy its own protagonists.” Does the sport “swallow all its talent up and then spit it out as mental wrecks and committers of suicide?” Or is it from a society that “turns performance into a fetish which makes its celebrities sick and depressed?”
- Depression effects everyone, although people with lower incomes are more prone
- Although the WHO has noticed that the number of depression cases has increased, it doesn’t mean that more people are getting sick, it means that more people are being diagnosed
- In Germany, it’s estimated that depression is the cause of 90% of suicides
- General practitioners still don’t know enough about the illness to diagnose and treat it correctly
- One out of every seven people that suffer from severe depression end up taking their lives
- In Europe, suicide is more deadly than AIDS, drug use and traffic accidents… combined
- People with severe depression often have trouble with remembering and sometimes it is so bad that it is similar to dementia. The reason is that cortisone blocks the hippocampus in the brain, which is the part that records new information
- When something good happens, dopamine and serotonin flow through the brain. Depressed people have trouble enjoying anything or feeling good because these chemicals simply don’t flow
- Heavy depression requires medication because the brain makeup changes
- Men are less likely to seek treatment because they don’t want to be seen as weak

Fast Dairy Facts courtesy of Austria

I learned so much talking to the Austrian specialists, including:
There are four kinds of cheeses: hard, middle hard, soft and “fresh” cheese. The hardness depends on the amount of water
It’s not enough to have just milk to produce cheese, but you need to add acid to the milk (butter milk, yogurt)
After cheese sets up, you put it in a mold to drain off water. Then you put it in a salt bath because the salt brings out even more water
Hard cheeses like Parmesan take 2 – 3 years to age (although an Albanian professor kept insisting that it was 2 – 3 years to spoil)
Austria produces about 220 different kinds of cheese
The French are known for soft cheese (like camembert); Switzerland and Holland are other known cheese producers
The EU has strict guidelines about milk processing, for example: how many bacteria are allowed to be in 100ml of milk and the requirement of a sink near a milking area
You must wash your hands (in a sink) and udders of a cow (with a disposable towel) to prevent the spread of disease
The first milk that comes out should be put into a special container and shouldn’t come in contact with other milk because it has a lot of harmful bacteria
You should always milk a cow until there is nothing left because the last milk that comes out has a good, high fat content of around 12%
As soon as you are done milking, you should remove the milk from the stall immediately because the milk absorbs the smell of the stall
Milk is cooled afterwards to prevent the growth of bacteria
Before, you used to be able to cool the milk by putting it in cold water, but now it is required to keep it at about 8 – 12 degrees. This is done by machines

For me, last week was nice because I got to practice my German and practice my languages in a different way than what I’m used to. It’s value being able to use previous knowledge and experience and apply it in ways that I normally wouldn’t. I’m obsessed with learning new things, whether it’s new vocabulary or facts about cheese production. I want to learn everything and I’ve always been passionate about learning things I didn’t know before.

I was thinking how my host dad and uncle in Germany knew so much about agriculture and how my uncle had a dairy farm, and how my mom is really interested in cheese and yogurt production; and I thought about how much they would have enjoyed the presentations as well.

The week also provided the opportunity to talk with key figures of the school (the director and vice-director), which is something I hadn’t had the chance to do before. I went on a field trip with the vice-director and ended up talking about politics, immigration and economics. The director organized a final dinner on Saturday, and I sat as the only woman at the head of the table and had a great conversation with the director about religion and politics (“Politics? That’s her speciality,” the vice-director told the director from the end of the table). I also spent a lot of time talking to one of the Austrians, who coincidentally had a daughter with my name, a year younger than me, who had also lived in Philadelphia.

What is “hime”? What is “ermik”?

Part of the reason that I haven’t been writing much lately is not for a lack of material. It’s a lack of time, and to a lesser extent, a lack of desire. One thing that kept me busy in the last couple weeks was a series of translations from Albanian into German. When the Director told me that he wanted me to write something in English for our Austrian partners that work with us a couple times a year, I foolishly said that I could write it in German instead. That’s how I ended up getting to translate proposals written by our school’s experts on the following topics: cows (how much milk they produce, how much food they need); chickens (what food they need, what the ingredients of their food are, how many eggs they can lay) and setting up rows of grapes to eventually produce wine (tilling the earth, creating rows for the grapes between the rows of fig trees that are already growing). And translating words like “hime” and “ermik,” (semolina and bran) into German… even if most of the Albanians I asked didn’t even know what these words were in Albanian. Did I mention that I work at an agricultural school?

One method of English learning that is popular here is the “grammar translation” method. The main way of practice through this method is by translating. Although we kind of frown upon it since there are many ways to teach a language, it definitely has its advantages. Aside from speaking, which is often difficult for beginners, reading and writing are good ways to learn. Translation is the best, in my opinion, because you are working directly with grammatical structures and accurately understanding connotation. Working with Albanian texts is something that I haven’t done much but have found incredibly beneficial, even if I’m translating into German instead of English.

The Austrian work group arrived at our school last Tuesday, and I was called in to translate. At the beginning, it was incredibly hard. MADTV used to have a sketch where Bobby Lee played a Chinese translator who clearly was not translating with any accuracy, and that’s kind of how I felt at first. I had to rely on another English teacher to translate into Albanian, which wasn’t the most efficient system. On the second day of translating it went a lot better. The Austrians presented a lecture about cheese making and milking and I translated like lightning. I had never done this particular type of instant, face-to-face translating. I mostly was tied to a computer and LEO (a gigantic, online German dictionary) with all the time in the world to perfect the translations. The Austrians remarked on the second day that my language skills came back almost overnight and told me that we needn’t bother with using another translator; that I could just wing it from German into Albanian.

No Golden Arches

Over 63,000 outlets worldwide, but you won’t find any of them in Albania. According to the Financial Times, a crisis-racked Iceland joined Albania and Bosnia and Herzegovina in the small group of European countries without a McDonald’s. Many of us rarely eat McDonald’s in the States, but food cravings for greasy mystery meat and perfectly salted fries made according to a secret recipe only really kick in once they are out of reach.

According to rumors I heard months ago in Elbasan, a McDonald’s will soon be appearing in Durres. Jaded by all those rumors of Red Lobster going in on the strip back at home, I told the smiling Albanian that wanted to share the joyous, capitalistic news that I would “believe it when I see it.”

Perhaps the oddest aspect in all of this isn’t that we are in a foreign, McDonaldless land, but rather the whole-hearted attempts to fill this Value Meal void. There are completely random restaurants made to mirror American fast food establishments all over the country. I’ve seen them in numerous Albanian cities: maybe it’s a restaurant front that looks eerily like a KFC or something with a name easily mistaken for “McDonald’s” at first glance. Try as they might, when they sell me a “hamburger” made out of a ¼” thick spiced pork patty, I’m not going to approve. Maybe that’s just semantics. The best of the knock-off restaurants is in Tirana. Called “Kolonat,” its logo somehow resembles a letter “M,” (I don’t even know how the “M” would even figure into the equation since it’s a fast food restaurant starting with the letter K) and its color scheme is… you guessed it, yellow and red.

McDonald’s has come a long way in a short time, for better or for worse. But just not Albania. And even though I never eat there when I’m at home, you can have no doubts that I’m going to put a burger and fries away on the first day I’m in neighboring Macedonia.

On a somewhat related note: check out The Economist’s Big Mac Index.

Benoit Sokal

In general, video games are extensions of a mediascape that glorifies and sensationalizes violence. It’s not surprising that adventure games have gotten lost in the shuffle amongst wars and headshots in our news media and our video games. Point-and-click games are a dying breed compared to 1st and 3rd person shooters and their market continues to decrease. Should we really be surprised that games requiring some amount of thinking are being replaced by mindlessness and completely passive experiences?

It was the distaste for these topics that lead me to the work of game developer (although he’s described himself primarily as a “story teller”) Benoit Sokal.

Sokal takes us beyond the long-clichéd World War 2 battlefield or terrorist detention center and gives us something more. Whether in quaint village toy factory full of automatons, or the vast Siberian tundra, or a fictional African country or in an abandoned Art Deco hotel, Sokal’s environments are striking in their beauty, variation and scope.

Instead of scantily glad women like Lara Croft, Sokal’s heroines are first and foremost intelligent women with strong personalities. This is far from the norm in video games as well, and that’s what makes it so refreshing.

His creations are far more than video games. Aside from challenging puzzles and casts of memorable characters, they are works of art. In 2001’s Syberia, Sokal created an entire world full of beauty and mystery along with highly developed story lines. Can a video game be art? “As far as it creates emotion, it is 'art,’” according to Sokal.

Here is an example of that art that is already eight years old.

Robert Enke

So much has been going on and it’s downright shameful that it’s been almost a month and a half since I’ve updated last. Although there is much to write about, I feel compelled to write about Robert Enke.

Enke was a goalkeeper for Hannover 96 in the German Bundesliga. After a career of ups and downs, he had finally become settled. Last year, he was voted Goalkeeper of the Year. He was set to be Team Germany’s #1 in next summer’s World Cup. This on-field success makes it difficult to believe that he took his own life last week by jumping in front of a train.

His father, who had urged him to get help, said the circumstances of his life lead him to suicide. Enke’s grief for a young daughter he lost to heart problems in 2006 never fully ended. Although he told teammates and coaches he was fine, he never really recovered. There were injury setbacks and moves to different teams. According to his wife he had battled depression the last six years. He was afraid about the consequences of people knowing he was depressed. He feared that authorities would take the daughter that he and his wife had adopted.

It’s a terribly tragic situation but there is a lesson to be learned.

That Enke was so afraid of people finding out says a lot about how taboo mental health issues still are, even in today’s society. But perhaps even worse is the blood-thirsty media that we’ve created. How might a common rag like the Bild Zeitung handled the news if Enke went into treatment? What about the fans on internet forums? We have become so obsessed that privacy for athletes and other celebrities doesn’t exist. You aren’t even allowed to grieve in private anymore, and it’s disgusting. In some ways, it’s not just the circumstances of Enke’s life that lead him to those train tracks, but the invasion of privacy and over preoccupation with others that has become even more omnipresent in the digital age.

Imagine standing in a stadium full of thousands of fans and feeling completely alone. So often we equate “success” with money, performance and achievement and think that it is all we need to be happy. People wondered why Enke would have taken his life, considering his “success.” His wife, in a very memorable statement, said that they “always thought love would be enough to see things through, but it wasn’t.” Not money, not love, not success could alleviate the pain. Alone amongst thousands.

We scrutinize athletes constantly. Some people may argue that the athletes chose their professions and should be prepared for the criticism that comes with it, but no athlete signs up to be made into a god. No matter how long the list of achievements, no matter how many medals or how many trophies, they are only men. With all their highs, lows, perfections and imperfections. They are humans, not gods, and they walk a very fine line.

Von nun an gibt es kein zurück

There is a point, in the eternal ebb and flow of human connections, where two people come to the end of their common and temporary journeys. What started as a crack becomes a crevasse; a small cut becomes an open, infected wound. Neither of these things heals.

This ugliness that has sprouted up between us casts a shadow now and will continue to do so. It’s terribly sad, but perhaps inevitable. I have faith in better days ahead after the rain has passed by.

My friend I will tell you, because I love you even if you forsake me, that there is a price for everything in this world. There is a price that comes with solitude; it’s alienation. Let your friends in, no one is so strong to never need anything from anyone.

I’m right here!

I remember how it used to be Germany, back when I was a student there. I would be with a group of friends and a person would approach us.

“Can she speak German?” they’d ask my friends, even though I was standing right there.

Most of the time, they would tell the person to ask me on their own.

The same is occasionally the case here. Today I was working in the school’s main office, which is where my host mom works. When I’m on the computer using the internet, she is sitting right behind me at her desk. Someone comes into the office and tells my mom, “Oh, look how nice she [me] is dressed!” A little later, a colleague comes in and tells my mom, “Oh, she [me] is dressed so nicely today. She [me] has lost weight!” My mom informed her that, “she [me] doesn’t eat bread. Ever.” “What about pasta and rice?” my colleague asked. “Sometimes, but never a lot,” my mom said.

Not only am I there, in the room, not only can I hear you, but I can also understand you. But thanks for the compliments, though.
It goes both ways though. They will tell you you are fat and suggest that you don’t eat. Body image is something I’ll address in another post. They will ask you what you bought and how much it costs, and suggest other places to go if they think you paid too much. My sister told me that my skirt needed ironed this morning, even though I’ve already been Pavloved into ironing every morning anyhow.

Which brings me to some comments about clothing. When I first came to Albania, I wasn’t concerned about losing or gaining weight. They told us that women usually gain during training and then lose a little once they are on site. I just hoped that I wouldn’t gain so much that my dress clothes wouldn’t fit. It’s difficult anywhere to find pants that fit well, and that’s coming from a country with millions of stores and shopping malls. As the air becomes more crisp, I decided to try on my dress pants and think about getting ready for winter. Let’s just say I wasn’t expecting losing too much weight to fit into my clothes. Out of five pairs of slacks, only two could really work as they are now. My favorite pair, the classiest, needs to be taken in at least three or four inches at the waist. This is a problem that I’m not accustomed to.

And speaking of dressing, people dress very nice here. It is important to look good and people put a lot of work into it. I like it. Of course, it goes without saying that some volunteers, quite frankly, dress like dirtbags. It’s incredibly off-putting and fits the stereotypes that many people have about Americans when it comes to our overall laziness. Granted, I would never have won any best dressed awards during my life and especially during my Philly years, but that was then. In the law firm and at my Berlin office, I dressed well. In Albania, it’s been taken to a completely different level. And it’s good that way. I take time and spend money to get nice clothes, I iron them every morning and I spend more than the usual five minutes on my appearance (ok, so it’s more like fifteen, but still). I recently had a discussion about the self-confidence that dressing well gives you, and it’s something I never really appreciated before. I think people have a tendency to associate dressing well with being uncomfortable, but that isn’t really the case. It’s not going to hurt us to dress like Albanians for our time here.

The Lost Lesson

Last Friday was going to be the day. I would finally get in front of a class and be able to teach a lesson. In honor of European Day of Languages (26 September every year), I was going to teach a special lesson to a pre-selected group of students. The director signed off his approval to pull students out of class.

“Supposed to” are the keywords here.

I had just finished creating my teaching aides when my phone rang. It was a volunteer from Durres telling me we were having an emergency drill and I had to leave for Durres. Emergency plans are in place in every Peace Corps country in the event of disaster and political and social upheaval. In the event of an emergency, groups of volunteers travel to centralized locations and wait for direction.

There went my lesson, up in smoke.

The good to come out of it was that we got to talk with some Peace Corps staff responsible for safety and security, and they are two of the most awesome people in the Tirana office. I also got to network with another volunteer about potential projects in Durres, which comes at a good time because I am starting to get a little antsy.

NHL Apparel

I’ve seen some random NHL apparel here. When I was shopping at the second hand market in Kavaje, I spotted one of those hideous RBK Islanders jerseys. I bought a Red Wings Stanley Cup champion t-shirt at one of those same markets. And the other day, a student walked into the office in a Wings shirt. I doubt seriously if anyone knows what these teams really are. Which only breaks my heart even more as the first of two lost seasons for me opens.

But the best display of NHL apparel was what I saw today. Now, it’s not a secret that there are a lot of traffic accidents here. Turn on the news and you can see the latest horrors. But for all the accidents, there are infinite amounts of near misses. Sitting in the furgon on my way to Durres I saw a bunch of stopped cars. Apparently the cause for the stoppage was a car that tried to make a spontaneous u-turn and timed it badly. Although there was no accident, it must have come very close to taking out a car traveling in the opposite direction. The driver of the car making the u-turn was out of his car, along with his wife, and screaming in the face of another driver.

The driver that made the u-turn? A 350 pound Italian wearing a red number 23. I know he was huge because I could see him, and I know he was Italian because I could hear him. Seeing the number and the color scheme, I thought to myself, “Oh God, I really, really hope…” And my wish was granted when we got closer: on the back of the mammoth Italian was a #23 Scott Gomez New Jersey Devils t-shirt. I guess I could make a joke about shouting, overweight Italians that are Devils fans, but that would almost be too obvious, wouldn’t it?

This n’ That

Somewhere in all of this updating, I forgot to mention that I have officially experienced my first earthquake. There were a string of them throughout Albania at the beginning of September, and I was on the phone when I felt it. On the other end of the phone line, the quake was much more obvious. On my end, it was nothing more than a swaying back and forth for about 15 seconds. That doesn’t mean it was pleasant, though.

A few summers ago, my parents and I were vacationing at the beach. My dad took a nap in the hotel, and when he began to snore, my mom jabbed him with her elbow and said her usual “Steve, you’re snoring!” line. My dad woke up and told her that wasn’t snoring, he was “purring.” It’s become a long-running joke in our family. So imagine how hard I laughed when I was studying an Albanian verb book and found out that the word “gërhas” means “to snore, to purr.”

My sister and I were getting ready to go somewhere and I had my iPod on shuffle. Bohemian Rhapsody came up. In the middle of my air guitaring, I asked her if she ever heard it before. She hadn’t. I was in disbelief. Later on, I played what I thought was a somewhat obscure Spanish-language song called, “Porque te vas.” “Oh, I love this song,” she said. And again, I was in disbelief.

My village’s Avon representative is my ten-year-old student. Again, disbelief. “I want to be a lawyer. Or… how do I say it?... like a person who is a manager,” she told me during our “Professions” lesson. During a recent European geography lesson, I asked if she knew what was happening in Germany. “Yes… on Sunday they will have the election. I think Merkel will win.” Consider my mind blown, especially when she followed that up by telling me she tries to watch a half hour of English-language news a day.

Spanish-language telenovelas are incredibly, incredibly popular here.

Random photos

What is more Albanian than turkeys perched on top of a BMW?

The Beach

These pictures were taken about a ten minutes’ walk away from my house. Again, my friends and I laugh at the ideas we had about life in PC Albania versus the reality.

Chasing the Sea

One of the best things established by PCVs is the library in the Peace Corps office. It is in dire need of organization, but the library has hundreds of books donated by volunteers. And because I can never say no to a book, I now have my own fledging library in my room of books of my own, books from friends, books Priscilla has sent me, and books I’ve borrowed from the library. And when I’m done with all of those, I can start on all the Vietnam books my school’s English-language library has (don’t ask me why).

On my last trip to Tirana, I brought five books home with me. Good thing my host father had bookshelves built into my new room where I’ll be staying, in the family home, for the next year. Having my books near me provides such a comfort and reminds me of home. Maybe “home” is really where my book collection is.

So aside from a Guenther Grass and all those Weisse Massai books, I picked up Chasing the Sea by Tom Bissell. Bissell was a PCV in Uzbekistan in 1996 that ended up ETing (early terminating; or what I call “boomeranging,” which I definitely mean in the pejorative). Even though he only stayed seven months into service, he still managed to write a great book. It’s part travelogue, part memoir, part history, and part adventure story, as he returns to Uzbekistan five years later to examine the disappearance of the Aral Sea. Along the way, he recollects on his terminated service, details Central Asian history and introduces us to a whole set of characters and places that are at once exotic but yet familiar.

What I appreciate most is the parallels I can draw between his experiences there and mine here. I laughed out loud when he talked about how everyone knows where they’re going in Tashkent but no one knows where anything is (uhm, Tirana?!), or when he goes into detail about food preparation, PST and inter-PCV relationships, largely because it all seems so familiar. Part of me also wanted to read this because my first placement was to Central Asia (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan or Turkmenistan) and I often think about how different my experience would have been if I went there. This book gives me a lot to think about.

Deutscher Oktober

It’s a pretty big year for Germany: the Federal Republic has existed for 60 years, and in November, it will be 20 years since the Wall opened up and another domino in the series of events marking the end of communism fell.

Living abroad, one inevitably links other experiences abroad with current ones. How are things different? How are they the same? As I start to feel the crispiness of autumn air, I start to think about Germany once again.

Before I came here, I had been interested in seeing how I could use my languages and exploring cultural events. Luckily, I was placed close enough to Tirana to make this possible. When I visited the Germany Embassy’s website the other day, I was pleasantly surprised to see that there are two months of events commemorating this anniversary year. “Tetori Gjerman,” or German October, is the name of the collection of events taking place in October and November in various places throughout Tirana. There will be plays, movie screenings, concerts, photo exhibits, literature and poetry readings focusing on the end of communism in Germany and Albania. With some of my favorite subjects up for discussion, I’ve already planned on at least two trips to Tirana.

Back to School, Back to School

Last week was the first week of school. On the first day, I saw male students hanging curtains up in their classroom and heard “Take My Breath Away” as a ringtone on someone’s cell phone. The first week was relatively uneventful and I haven’t had very much formal classroom work just yet. That will pick up once lessons start and all the organization, logistics, registration and getting to know you things are over. So far, I’ve been doing research on grants and thinking about needs assessment and project planning.

And again, it becomes very obvious to me that PCVs cast very long shadows. In my first weeks in Golem, I was told and often directly compared to the two previous volunteers. In the beginning, I thought a lot about how the other volunteers would influence the way people think of me. People here remember them so well that I feel like I almost know them, even though they’ve been gone for some years. Luckily, the comparisons made directly to my face have been favorable, and I get the feeling that I am very different from them both in personality and ambition.

As the year began, it was also time to reflect on the fact that I’ve been here for six months already and am rapidly approaching the ¼ pole of my service. Mostly when I think about all that’s been happening, it feels like it’s gone by so quickly. But when I think that I’ll be staying here for two whole school years, it seems like it’s going to be forever until my service is finished. Of course the reality of time and how it elapses is somewhere in the middle. There is reason to believe, however, that if the summer went by at lightning speed and I wasn’t working the entire time, now that I’m working full-time it is really going to fly.

On the six-month anniversary of my departure, I thought about that day and what I was doing in the days leading up to it. I thought a lot about my parents. You’d think, at this point, that I’d be used to being away. I lived in Germany twice and studied away from home, and I never felt a particular sense of homesickness. What I’m feeling now isn’t really homesickness either, but more like peoplesickness. I miss the people in my life more than any particular place. Living all over the world drastically changes your concept of “home.” Largely because the people are spread out and not concentrated in one specific place and neither are you.

I miss, in no particular order: strawberries; roughhousing with Fernie; dinner and hockey games and any subsequent screaming at the television, good or bad, emanating therefrom; eating steaks and Dad’s barbecued chicken from the grill on the back porch; movie nights, borderline-obsessive amounts of telephone calls with the only person that I’m ever on the phone with (ever); being told the same stories about taking the academic course when Grammy should have taken the homemaking course; being able to know exactly what a store has and knowing things will be in stock; meals that don’t require hours of preparation, i.e. things you can just serve from the freezer or a can after heating; real book stores; sidewalks; and ground beef.

Things that I have learned and loved, in no particular order: balconies; sea breezes; listening to music with the bus or furgon windows rolled down; bean byrek; Red Bull; my students and their dreams and inspirations; the Albanian language; drinking high-test coffee with my mom / colleagues / friends; the simple joy of shopping at EuroMax and finding things that remind you a little bit of home (wherever or whatever “home” is); $3 pizzas; petulla (it’s kind of like funnel cake, but better); and the ability of Albanians to do so much with what they have: some of them make their own cheese, yogurt, grow their own chickens, hatch their own eggs, and make their own bread. Although many people want nothing more than to come to America, there is so much to be said and appreciated about life here, and self-sufficiency is but one aspect of my admiration.

It’s also time to reflect about our purpose and our goals, professional and personal, and the progress that we’ve made on them. At this point, I recognize that I have a lot to learn and a lot I want to give, but I am very pleased with the experience so far.

And finally, I think about my parents. It’s hard for me to talk about them without getting overly emotional. The only difference between now and the other times I was away is that it’s for a long time and that I’m older. I had initially planned to go right from university into Peace Corps—and was crushed when my departure date got pushed back not once, but twice. But with the perspective that time provides, I can look back on those six months that I spent at home and be grateful for the blessing in disguise. I met a whole group of new people at my job at an afterschool program and I got to spend some additional time at home. There is no saying what the arrangements will be when I go home, and it’s very certain that I won’t be spending such a long clip of time at home again. But it’s only now until I can look at that experience and really appreciate it. So thank you.

…many things, but never boring.

I always say that Albania is many things, but never boring. I’m in a constant state of learning and observing, and still in many ways feel like I’m a child again, having to learn a way of living from the start. Even the simplest of dialogues is a lesson for me: what are people saying? How are they saying it? What gestures are they using, and what do they mean? Is the conversation formal or informal? Everything from the start. It should go without saying that a lot of things are confusing or amusing in their originality as I continue to learn.

My friend visited a couple weeks ago and we decided to spend the day on the beach. As we sat in our chairs and opened up our impossibly heavy umbrella, I saw an animal being led on a leash. I have worn my sunglasses most of the summer and it’s no secret that I can’t see anything without them. But even my sorry, glassessless eyes could make the creature out: “Is that a be…,” I started, before cutting myself off to say: “Yeah, that’s definitely a bear on a chain.” It struck us as the oddest thing, largely because people are afraid of dogs here, and the ones that have dogs often don’t leash them. So what is this bear doing, walking up the beachside? Later, my host sister told us it was completely normal. “You can get you picture taken with it,” she said. “There’s a snake, too.” I don’t even want to think about the insurance issues that would present if one of those walked up and down Wildwood.

Later that night is when the real fun began. We walked down the beachfront to one of my favorite restaurants, only to find out the only food they had was spaghetti or tortellini with frutti di mare. We asked for just plain spaghetti with sauce. Didn’t have it. Pizzas? No, they didn’t have them either. Exasperated, the wheels began turning. “Wait,” I said. “Are we supposed to believe that they put seafood sauce on all the pasta they cooked? Why not just leave some of the pasta plain? I don’t understand!” At this point, though, we should know better. It’s late in the tourist season and menus are never what they seem, so I guess we shouldn’t have been so surprised. Instead of eating chopped up seafood, we left for another restaurant.

Mid-way through our meal, an adjacent table of middle to late middle aged men sent us a round of beers. At this point, I jokingly remarked that I liked “the one in the yellow shirt.” A few minutes later, they sent us over a round of ice creams, after which my host sister had to walk over to the table and thank them personally. Things got kicked up a notch when Yellow Shirt got up and walked over to the table. Kate told me that my chance had arrived. Yellow Shirt asked me for a dance, and when I rejected him several times even though he continued persisting and saying please, he said he’d be offended if I didn’t dance with him. So there I am, Peace Corps Volunteer, breaking out moves that I learned at my eighth grade dance on some Albanian that easily could have been on a Centrum Silver ad. As we turned in circle after circle, it became harder to see Kate and my host sister, largely because they had their backs to me and their faces buried in their hands with laughter. My exclamation telling them that Yellow Shirt had stepped on my toes twice only made them bury their faces deeper.

And I repeat: Albania is many things, but never, ever boring.

Normal!

I had a conversation with a friend the other day about blogging. “I haven’t written in my blog in over a month,” she told me. “I’m just as bad… I’ll go a month without writing anything, and then post several entries all at one time.” She said her parents would probably be annoyed that she hadn’t written much, which led me to say: “You know though… we can write, and write, and write… but no one will really understand what it’s like.”

I went on to elaborate that there’s no real way to try and describe what it’s like to live here, which I blame mostly on the fact that the things that seemed different and odd to us our first days here have now become to normal to us that we barely notice them. Chickens and livestock running all over the place? Huge holes in the sidewalk? Burning garbage? Extremely colorful houses? Water tanks on roofs? Water heaters in bathrooms? Water schedules? No clothes dryers? Salespeople walking through your village with a bullhorn, yelling that they have watermelon / fish / clothing for sale? All these are things that might have seemed foreign to us at first, but they’ve already sunken into our daily realities, so much so that we don’t even notice them anymore.

We are born in America and raised American, with the whole set of default programming that comes with that. We know how life is at home, but it’s hard to really think about what life in other countries is like, even when it comes to things as small as everyday logistics. So here are a few more things that might not be known:

1. Not every post office accepts packages. My site is so small that I have to travel to another town to get anything. And in general, I don’t think most people get much in the mail. Lucky them, they miss out on all that junk mail and advertising.

2. It’s common for ATMs to not work. Sometimes they just don’t work, but more often than not, they are just out of money. I’ve been told to arrive early in the day to increase my chances. My sister needed to take a significant amount of money out, but when she put the amount into the ATM, it said it didn’t work. When she tried a smaller amount, it did. Sometimes this means you have to try a few ATMs at a few different banks if you’re trying to get money after hours. In general though, the bank service is great and it’s easy to exchange money because of all the money being sent home by Albanians abroad.

3. Lining up. All I have to say is: thank god I spent time in Germany, because it’s good training for lines here. You’ve got to be brave and hold your ground, especially when it comes to that amazing byrek stand that I frequent in Elbasan.

4. WYSIWYG doesn’t always apply. Just because something is on a menu doesn’t mean it’s available. Just because a building is marked as a “bar / restaurant” doesn’t mean it has food. I’ve been to pizzerias that didn’t have pizza before… twice. This can lead to temporary heartache when the thing you really want can’t be had (more on that later).

5. Geography. One of the things that is completely underestimated about Albania is natural beauty. In just a half hour, you can go from miles of beaches to valleys lying between huge mountains. The landscape is green and flat for miles, until the valley floor meets the bottom of numerous peaks. In my first days here, I was most amazed at the land. I’m looking forward to discovering the nature that Albania has to offer.

Open Doors

One thing that has taken a little getting used to here has been the open doors and open windows policy. Even in the very cold mornings during the first days of training, and even when it was raining, my host family would frequently leave the house door open.

Here in my permanent site, the door is frequently open. It causes a problem for me because I am under constant attack from mosquitoes—one night in my room, I killed five of them and was very close to freaking out. Before I moved here, my family put a screen door in my room which allows air flow and keeps everything else out, but it still can’t compensate for all the insects coming in and out of the house during the day. I’ve tried using room spray, plug-in insecticide and Cutter and nothing has really worked. I’m not even sure the mosquito net that Peace Corps could give me would be able to accomplish much of anything either. So for the last two months, I’ve been fairly miserable. It’s one thing to get mosquito bites, but for me, they take weeks for the itching to subside and to heal. I’ll wake up in the middle of the night, no matter how much anti-itching cream I’ve applied, and still keep scratching. It’s pretty awful because there is no relief. Almost as bad as when I shave my legs and hit a few of the bites: my legs have a few craters from that that will take even longer to heal.

But today, it wasn’t the mosquitoes that came in through the door. I came upstairs to my room, and caught a glimpse of movement in my eye. I thought I saw a kitten. “Oh my God, Serg, please tell me you saw that,” I said to my host sister who was cleaning the house. “No, what are you talking about?” she asked. “I think there’s a kitten in my room!” And when we walked into my room, and I got on my stomach to peer under the bed, there was an incredibly tiny kitten. It must have been an effort to climb the 30+ stairs to get to the third floor of our house and into my room.

Then began a twenty minute effort in order to corral the kitten. It ran out of my room and into another, and then hid in a cupboard. Serg was trying to scare it by using the handle of a broom, which really wasn’t helping. I told her to be gentle with it. Gentle, until I slowly put my hand in the cupboard and the tiny creature started hissing at me! I tried to pick it up with a blanket so it wouldn’t bite or scratch me, but I couldn’t get a hold of it. It was incredibly tiny and frantically ran around the summer porch trying to escape, to no avail. It even tried jumping a foot in the air into the doors. Eventually it hid behind my shoes and Serg picked it up in a blanket once and for all, the kitten hissing the whole way down the stairs, down the outside stairs, and out into the street.

Now someone else might have to go through the same thing: as soon as we set it down in the street, it ran frantically back into the direction of our house, and narrowly pinched through our neighbor’s gate. Let’s see how they handle a kitten in their house.

2666

At the beginning of this blog, I said that I wanted to make this not just about my experience in Albania but also a wider range of topics. Unfortunately I’ve gotten away from that. It’s probably because I spend a small fraction of my time on the internet or on television and my access to information has changed my routine thought patterns accordingly.

Last night, I had a dream that I was talking about an author, Roberto Bolano. His final book, published posthumously, has devoured my thoughts for the last two months. Apparently it’s so embedded in my subconscious that I’m giving lectures in my sleep.

I was introduced to Bolano in a Latin American fiction class I took my pre-junior year of university. In my obsession to achieve the “perfect schedule,” (classes all day on Tuesdays and Thursdays and the rest of the week free) I took a random elective that fit into the schedule. Like many classes, it fit my schedule and was something I knew nothing about. And like the best professors, you find yourself thinking about them and their classes years later. It’s only with the passage of time that you can truly appreciate the gift that they have given.

Since then, I’ve read a few other pieces of Bolano’s work and learned more about this life and the world he created in his writings. “Ambitious” is certainly one adjective that comes to mind. 2666 was certainly a high note to go out on; one that would have been difficult to top. It’s a huge web of settings and characters, all touched by the spider Santa Teresa (a fictional Ciudad Juarez). Bolano creates a profound sense of desolation, as wide as the desert where the bodies of women continue to be found and as hopeless as the search for justice that organized crime, societal ambivalence, police corruption and overall governmental ineptitude prevent.

Some favorite quotes, amongst many:
“So everything lets us down, including curiosity and honesty and what we love best.” “Yes,” said the voice, “but cheer up, it’s fun in the end.”
“Only in chaos are we conceivable.”
“It has nothing to do with belief… it has to do with understanding, and then changing.”

The Return

I made my first visit back to my satellite site and my first host family last Friday. When I got there, my smallest host brother was the first one to see me. Playing with the hose, he yelled my name before jumping on me. Then I saw my brothers and my dad. My mom, as usual, was knee deep in work. “I have four brides this weekend, and eight next weekend!” After I walked into the salon, everyone commented on how good I looked. They were amazed at how much my language has improved in the last two months as well.

I drank a coffee with them, sitting in the salon, just like in the old days. They seemed upset when I said I had to leave (considering I didn’t pack a bag and I wasn’t sure when the furgons would stop running to Durres). I’m hoping to come and stay a weekend in September because my host mom will be less busy with weddings at that time. Plus I’ll really need to do something with my hair by then!

Reflecting on my way home, I thought about how happy the visit made me and the good fortune I had to live in their home. Seeing them two months later, it was like nothing had changed. I still felt just as comfortable as I did then. I had been by their house so many times over the last two months and I hadn’t stopped. I’m so grateful for how well they took care of me and how they made me feel like a member of the family in those first weeks here in country. I don’t think my experience would be as great as it has been without their love and support those first weeks. It really helped me create a good foundation.

I thought about the differences between my past family and my present family, and my apprehension about adjusting to life in a new family at my permanent site. Things have certainly changed since my first days here in my second family, largely in ways I wouldn’t have predicted. We have developed a very deep relationship, and I’m pleased to have two relationships with two different families. They have helped me in ways I’ll probably never be able to express. Even though I had some concerns about “me-time” and personal space, since I had to sacrifice those to spend 3 ½ more months in a family, I know I made the right decision. Before I came here, I knew I wanted to do this right. I kept that idea in my mind when it came to goal-setting. Living in another family has really benefited me on a lot of levels, and I feel genuinely blessed for the people that I have met here. They are a large reason why my transition has been so smooth, and for that I am very grateful.

This and That

Random things that don’t fit in any particular entry:

- Speaking about the dangers of living here in a previous entry, there’s something else to add. I tried to turn on my friend’s television and I heard a slight popping sound. The screen didn’t light up. I tried again to turn it on. Nothing. A few seconds later, I smelled something hot. I turned on the light and found the source of the smell: small tendrils of smoke curling out from the back of the television. I’d have to say that’s a new experience for me.

- Remember when I filled out several million forms to join the Peace Corps and my name was spelled wrong on everything? We all know how much I love that.

- I went into a bookstore recently. I’m really impressed with the selection, especially the availability of translated classics for good prices. I was less enthused about the entire shelf of Dreiser. And again I have to ask, “Who is reading this?!”

- I bought a can of peas a few weeks ago to cook at my house with spaghetti. When my family didn’t have a can opener, my host sister’s fiancé stabbed the can with a huge knife and sawed through the top to open it. That is a close second to the first time someone opened a can for me in this country: by pounding a knife into the can using a stone. I appreciate the resourcefulness.

- We have all kinds of tourists staying at our house in the first floor apartment that I’ll live in in just over a month. I recently had a conversation with an Albanian who lived in Macedonia. “You need to tell Americans that we are good, civilized people,” he said. “The best friend of America is Albania.” After a conversation about Iraq and the economic crisis, he was sufficiently impressed. “Stay here and marry and Albanian man,” he told me. Where have I heard that before?

- My friends and I will be reviving the Peace Corps Albania newsletter, which has been dormant for a little bit. I’m hoping that we will be able to make something really great that will serve as a good document to look back on when our service is over.

- Our country director recently sent us an e-mail about rooming assignments at conferences and other Peace Corps Albania events. The reason I mention this is that he told us how, in most cases, everything is random and rooming friends together wasn’t a consideration. I mention this because it makes my friendship with my best friend here, Kate, seem almost fated. We were together in Philly, together in Elbasan, spent PST in neighboring villages, and were together again during the Counterpart Conference in Tirana. It’s kind of amazing to think how frequently we’ve been put together, especially knowing that this was largely so random.

- Something you might not know? There is a Western Union in almost every village, no matter how small. If there isn’t one in the village, there is one within a reasonable traveling distance. Why? Albanians working abroad send massive amounts of money home to their relatives. In fact, it was the #2 source of income in the country next to tourism.

Mosquito Pills?

All throughout PST, my language teachers frequently told us that Albanian has far less words than English. Although I don’t know how it breaks down quantitatively, I know this fact is true just by speaking the language.

For example, when we went looking for gift wrap, I said that I didn’t know how to say “gift wrap” but that I hoped it was “leter.” Although I was joking, I was right anyhow. And that’s the reason I mention the word shortage. “Leter” can mean any of the following, depending on the circumstance and the word that it’s paired with: napkin, playing cards, paper, toilet paper, gift wrap, aluminum foil, a piece of paper or a game of card or sandpaper. What a wide variety! So it’s not enough to hear the word “leter,” but also the word that comes after it, since adjectives follow nouns in Albanian. One basic word noun with many different meanings.

Let’s move on to a verb that’s the same way. “Pi” means “to drink.” However, in conjunction with words like “cigarettes” and “pills” it means to drink or take medication. When my host mom saw how my legs had been annihilated by an army of mosquitoes, she asked me why I hadn’t “taken the pills for mosquitoes.” I had no idea what she was talking about. I thought to myself, “There are pills for mosquitoes?!” But what she really meant was “why haven’t you fumigated?” Apparently, not only does “pi ilac” mean “take medication,” but also “spray bug spray.”
But if you happen to hear about a pill for mosquitoes, let me know. I’ve been scratching so much that the only way to stop the scratching would be a pair of handcuffs.

Gift Wrap… the Silent Killer?

My friend’s host mom had a birthday recently, so she bought her a gift and we went on the search to procure gift wrap. Sometimes living here is a little work because you have to know enough stores and their inventory to be able to get what you want. Gift wrap isn’t the most prevalent thing around here, although it’s not impossible to find it.

We ducked into a gift store, or what appeared to be one. The front window had a mountain of stuffed animals, some furniture, and what appeared to be tubes of foil gift wrap. The inside of the store had house trinkets and jewelry and other things that look like they came straight from factories in China, potentially loaded with Melamine. We decided to double check and see if another gift store next door might have paper. The second store had spices, wholesale candy, balloons and birthday candles, but no paper. So we went back to the first store and found a box of “wrapping paper.” We started asking questions when we saw the design printed on the paper said, “ha ha happy birthday, this is not a firework.” That seemed like a weird message to have designed on wrapping paper, right? On the bottom, the tubes had different colors listed on them. One was labeled “red.” Another “white.” “What does that even mean?” I asked. Further investigative work concluded that it wasn’t wrapping paper, but something that exploded. When we looked at the other box in the store window that had initially drawn us in, it was again, not gift wrap, but something that exploded. Then the owner tried to tell us the exploding stuff was gift paper. There are so many random things here... where else could you buy a huge version of those plastic little exploding champagne bottles and think it was gift wrap? Thank god it’s still called “leter” in Albanian though (please see next entry).