New Eyes

The amount of adults that lose their sense of mystery and wonder when looking at the world is tragically common. We grow up and get “real jobs” with real lives and real responsibilities. Our day to day becomes a routine of necessary tasks, often with little room for creativity or variation. I’m guilty of this as much as everyone else is. But strangely, something relatively insignificant has allowed me to see my life here with a differently: bike rides.

I was lucky enough to get a bike from Peace Corps, which makes my life a lot easier. It’s also a great form of exercise, especially considering the bike only has one gear and Golem has quite a few hills of varying degrees. Having a bike has made me into an explorer of my site, a place that I’ve lived in for over a year but have seen relatively little of.

Riding a couple miles behind town, I ran into a group of boys when I was taking a water break. One of them had tried to race me a few nights before. Ever Albanian, their first questions to me were about my bike. Specifically, how much it costs. I responded by asking a kid on a bike so beat up it was amazing it had rotating wheels how much he bought his for, and we all laughed. I always have to laugh about the price questions, because money and size and numbers are topics of fair game right off the bat. Then they asked me if I was a cyclist and I had to stifle my laughter. A few nights before on that same road, I was standing there with my bike trying to decide where to go. In a very Albanian way, a man walking by did a shoulder shrug with open hands, palms up, which is a questioning gesture that asks: “What are you doing?” I explained that I was just riding around and wasn’t sure where to go. Although he tried to steer me back into the direction of the town, I took another road that plunged deeper into the valley. He smiled at me when I met him on my way back into town when I had gone the length of the other road and turned back around.

Sometimes we need to see things from another side. See them with child eyes. After spending a year here and barely going past the trash can on my way to school, I’ve been exploring Golem with my bike. It’s allowed me to experience my site in a completely different way. In the late afternoons I explore and I see things I never noticed. I take some time to clear my head. Just breathe in the cool air and watch farmers gathering grass for their animals or neighbors lost in conversation. I like looking at the houses on the sides of rolling hills. Being amazed at “grapevine house” every time I go past it (its front yard is literally covered in grape vines and so is the roof, it’s impressive). In a weird way, riding my bike behind the town reminds me of being home and being in Germany the first time. It’s funny to think that my current Albanian village dwarfs my German one by several thousand people. Fortunately, both smell like cows. I don’t know why, but I like the way animals smell. Luckily there are plenty of them on my nightly route as well. How strange it is that I’ve lived here for a year and hadn’t seen any of the hidden beauty that had been right under my nose all along. How sad it is that people waste their lives not seeing any of it at all… because they don’t look for it.