In the very first episode of 30 Rock, there is a scene where Liz Lemon is waiting in line for a hotdog when someone cuts in front of her. She is annoyed at the lack of consideration. When the person refuses to acknowledge their rudeness, Liz decides to purchase all of the vendor’s hotdogs and distributes them to all the other people who were waiting patiently in line. Liz is driven by the concept of order, respect for a set of rules and for consideration.
Which really makes me wonder how Liz Lemon would fare on Albanian public transportation.
Spring has sprung in Albania, and when I say “spring,” I really mean “the two weeks between winter and summer.” And with it comes the seasonal transportation annoyance of the despicable lot that I like to call the “window shutters.”
In German, you tell someone “es zieht,” (“it pulls,” which means “there’s a draft.”) If you are riding in a car and you open the window, of course there will be a draft. But it’s been my experience that unlike in the US, when you open a window in a car traveling in Germany, there is this really strange sound that occurs which is extremely unpleasant to the ears. I swear, I’ve never had this same thing happen in the US. So maybe it’s not the draft so much as the sound associated with it.
In Romanian, it’s “current.” Priscilla tells me of her time working in her family’s bakery in upstate New York: “…Romanians… it was 200 degrees in the bakery, and we HAD TO SHUT the door.” These rules count even in summer.
Albanians just tell you to close the window. Not only that, but they will also demand (because they speak in the imperative form quite frequently, even to strangers) that you “not open it at all.” There are two problems with that. Firstly, traveling in a packed bus or furgon with no windows is incredibly unpleasant and frequently offensive to the nose. Secondly, Albanians will still dress with dress pants and jackets well into the summer months, which makes very little sense. But the most terrible, most unforgivable, are the window shutters.
I had my first window shutting incident of the season two days ago. On an almost empty bus, I carefully scoped out a seat next to one of the rear, overhead windows. I sat there specifically because there were only two windows that opened on the whole bus and I wanted to maximize my airflow. A perfect plan that completely goes awry. Even though there are a ton of empty seats, one woman and her daughter sit across the aisle from me. The bus quickly fills up and it starts to get warm, at which point the woman decides to close the window. And not only close it, but demand that it be kept completely shut.
Now, this annoys me. There were a zillion different seats. And also, there are 40 other people on the bus. Like Liz Lemon, I get annoyed with this kind of behavior. I am hot, I am cranky and I am annoyed at what I perceive as inconsideration. If this were New York and we were in line for hot dogs, I would have bought all of them just on principle. Instead, I did the next best thing and started a verbal tiff with the woman. I’m normally non-confrontational, and my American style forces me to be polite and accept the rude behavior of others rather than call them out, even though it makes me miserable to do so. So I yelled at her and told her that she wasn’t the only person on the bus, and that if the window was a problem, maybe she should have sat somewhere else. She acted like she couldn’t understand me, so the bus boy took the opportunity to translate and lay into her a little bit too as a bead of sweat dripped off of him. I’m probably going to write it down in my final Peace Corps trimester report: “cultural exchange with host country nationals about open window travel policy.”
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