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).
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