Happy Forever Wishes!

Today my host mom came into my room and changed my bed sheets. I laughed when I saw the mattress sheet, because it was adorned with a giant rose and the words, “Happy forever wishes!” I’m not even sure what that means, but I thought it was funny. Oh, the collection of improper English I’m going to have by the end of these two years…

This entry will be mainly about lighter and/or funny things, because there have been a lot of them. One thing I really love about my family is how much they laugh. It seems like they are always laughing! And my host mom has one of the best laughs—she’s just this petite little woman, but she’ll rock back and forth and almost cry with laughter. It’s very contagious.

First off, my host brother helps translating things. He was talking about a fest, which he translated as a party. I said that a fest can also be called a “celebration,” depending on what time of party it is. At this, my host mom asked my brother if I said “Sali Berisha,” since the name sounds so similar to the English word “celebration.” This caused my host family to chuckle: Sali Berisha is a well-known politician up for re-election this summer.

Living in this village is like living in a fishbowl, which is perfectly fine with me. It’s just different. Everyone knows that you are American just by looking at you, and most people know what family you “belong to” in the village. I always try to be on my best behavior because I don’t want anything to reflect badly on my family. Word travels like lightning, especially since so many people have large families and are often related. But when you are foreign and don’t speak the language well, and you’re in a group of foreigners, you end up unintentionally looking like a moron much of the time. For example, one day after school we were all starving. The six volunteers in my site all wanted to go for food. So what do we do? We walk a little ways down the road, then cross it. The whole time everyone is watching to see what we are doing. We cross the road and enter a place that was both a bar and a restaurant. Mind you, this was after five minutes of standing outside trying to decide where to go. We walk into the “restaurant” and sit down. When it comes time to order, we are trying to think of the names of any food items we know. When we ask “rice?” with our voice intonation going up as to indicate a question, since we had no idea how to form a proper one, the waiter says “no.” We ask for “meat?” and he says “no.” After exhausting our rather short list, we figured out that this place was just a bar and not a restaurant. Too embarrassed to leave after they had turned on the lights and pulled two tables together for us, we resigned ourselves to ordering a coffee before doing the walk of shame across the street to the other restaurant in the village.

Thirdly, people are very keen to learn English. This results in us being a type of rock star, added to the fact that we unintentionally stick out like sore thumbs. A local school allows us to use one of their rooms to learn Albanian. Oftentimes, however, the local students’ curiosity gets the better of them. In the middle of class, we’ve had many students who push the doors open, stick their hands in the door, wave through the windows or simply stand close to them and listen to our lesson. It’s rather funny. I imagine that since we are foreign and since our interactions have been limited, they are just curious about us. One day when we came back from lunch, the lock on our door was closed and we couldn’t get in the room. When we waited in the hallway for our teacher to come, we were practically mobbed by a sea of students. It was great. They had all kinds of questions for us, including one of the most common you will here in Albania: “Do you have any brothers and sisters?” So here we are, six of us, standing out in the hallway as the students gather around us and give us a real interrogation. And I couldn’t have been happier interacting with them. The day afterwards, a group of us were on the furgon coming home after a day of training. There was a group of school girls on the bus. After everyone else got off and I was the last one left, they all moved to sit next to me and asked me questions in near perfect English. It was only too bad that we could only talk a few minutes before my stop.

Fourthly, we were leaving our lessons and walking to the restaurant that we always go to when we saw a person with a live turkey in a plastic bag. He was just standing there, for what ended up being about thirty minutes, just chilling on the side of the road. We didn’t know quite what to make of it because we had never seen it before.

I’ve also enjoyed experimenting with food. Food safety and butchering techniques are definitely different from at home, so there is just a bit of a learning curve. I had thought about telling my family that I was a vegetarian, but I kind of adopted the attitude of “If you get sick, you get sick.” I wouldn’t want a few bouts with sickness to scare me away from jumping head first into the culture. So far, I’ve eaten a lot of veal, one rooster and a giant piece of sheep. And all of them were very good (although admittedly, the sheep was a lot fattier than I would normally like).

And in closing, they told us that it’s not uncommon for Albanian women to weigh themselves on a scale in the supermarket. So on my second trip to the store, I saw this in action. I was encouraged to hop up there, too. I did it because I don’t really care. Most of the Albanian women I’ve seen are pretty skinny, so skinny that I’d never weigh as much as them (nor would I want to—we know my opinions on this). So I hopped up on that scale and took one more step on the road to maybe not sticking out quite as much.