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.