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.
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