Fruits and Veggies

A view in my fridge

One of my favorite things about Albania is all the fresh fruit and vegetables. We’ll go shopping and constantly be amazed at the quality and price of the food. A hangover from Ottoman times, you can find huge shopping bazaars and food tregus that are full of people, colors and life. Shopping is a social event and the vendors remember our faces and what we like. Less formally, there are tons of roadside stands selling fruit and vegetables as well as grilled corn.

Over the summer, we ate a lot of tomatoes, cucumbers, zucchini, eggplant and watermelon. As the seasons have changed, a trip to the market is an explosion of orange and purple with cabbage and carrots as well as potatoes, broccoli and cauliflower. For a shorter time, we had persimmons and pomegranates. There was also another kind of fruit that my mom made jelly out of (read: boiled the fruit in countless kilos of sugar). It was yellow and bumpy and I’m still looking for its translation. Now we have oranges, lemons (which Albanians will eat by biting right into it, although they often put salt on it first) and mandarins.

Sometimes, I’ve never seen the fruit that my family offers me. As a result, I don’t know how to eat it. It makes me think of a passage from Slavenka Drakulic’s book How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed. After the fall of communism, Western goods flooded the market and people were exposed to all kinds of things that they had never seen before. Drakulic describes how she saw a Polish man eating a banana with the peel on and then saying it was one of the best things he’d ever eaten. Something about this image has stuck with me.

I only have one complain about the food vendors here. Since we’ve been here, we’ve observed that Albanians eat their fruit and vegetables at varying degrees of ripeness. I’ve been told to eat a pear, only to bite into it and be surprised that my teeth haven’t snapped off completely. The same with peaches. I’ve had oranges that tasted like lemons because they were so sour and I’ve also been told that it’s alright to eat a green banana that you could barely peel. To be certain, we have lots of great indigenous food grown here, but the degree of ripeness is the X-factor. I talked to one of my Albanian friends about this, and he told me that everything is controlled by the market. If farmers know that there aren’t many oranges on the market, they will hurry to pick them even when they aren’t ripe because they can sell them at a higher price. It’s your textbook example of supply determining price but it can lead to heartache when all you really want is a ripe plum but instead you end up biting into something that is more like a purple baseball.

A Follow Up on Robert Enke

The German weekly news magazine, Der Spiegel, had a very intense, in-depth article after Robert Enke’s death (Spiegel #47, 2009) about the man himself and the suffering of thousands with depression.

Spiegel notes the following, albeit far more eloquently than I did:
- The role of a keeper. Baseball has pitchers, hockey has goalies, soccer has its goalkeepers. These are people that have very unique personalities and, by the position they play, are the most important parts of a team. Spiegel says that “there is no position more difficult in soccer,” and that a goalkeeper has to have “strong nerves” and “self-confidence.” A goalie goes for long stretches without any work until there is a flurry. “Enke rarely spoke about the loneliness of being a keeper.”
- Most people around Enke didn’t know the extent of his fear. Recently, it was a fear of not being able to play for the national team in next year’s World Cup (even though he was the favorite for the position). On some days, his anxiety to play in net would be so strong that he didn’t want to go to practice. At one point, he even asked his father if he would “be annoyed” with him if he quit soccer altogether (“My God, Robert, it is not the most important thing,” his father answered).
- Spiegel asks if soccer doesn’t “destroy its own protagonists.” Does the sport “swallow all its talent up and then spit it out as mental wrecks and committers of suicide?” Or is it from a society that “turns performance into a fetish which makes its celebrities sick and depressed?”
- Depression effects everyone, although people with lower incomes are more prone
- Although the WHO has noticed that the number of depression cases has increased, it doesn’t mean that more people are getting sick, it means that more people are being diagnosed
- In Germany, it’s estimated that depression is the cause of 90% of suicides
- General practitioners still don’t know enough about the illness to diagnose and treat it correctly
- One out of every seven people that suffer from severe depression end up taking their lives
- In Europe, suicide is more deadly than AIDS, drug use and traffic accidents… combined
- People with severe depression often have trouble with remembering and sometimes it is so bad that it is similar to dementia. The reason is that cortisone blocks the hippocampus in the brain, which is the part that records new information
- When something good happens, dopamine and serotonin flow through the brain. Depressed people have trouble enjoying anything or feeling good because these chemicals simply don’t flow
- Heavy depression requires medication because the brain makeup changes
- Men are less likely to seek treatment because they don’t want to be seen as weak

Fast Dairy Facts courtesy of Austria

I learned so much talking to the Austrian specialists, including:
There are four kinds of cheeses: hard, middle hard, soft and “fresh” cheese. The hardness depends on the amount of water
It’s not enough to have just milk to produce cheese, but you need to add acid to the milk (butter milk, yogurt)
After cheese sets up, you put it in a mold to drain off water. Then you put it in a salt bath because the salt brings out even more water
Hard cheeses like Parmesan take 2 – 3 years to age (although an Albanian professor kept insisting that it was 2 – 3 years to spoil)
Austria produces about 220 different kinds of cheese
The French are known for soft cheese (like camembert); Switzerland and Holland are other known cheese producers
The EU has strict guidelines about milk processing, for example: how many bacteria are allowed to be in 100ml of milk and the requirement of a sink near a milking area
You must wash your hands (in a sink) and udders of a cow (with a disposable towel) to prevent the spread of disease
The first milk that comes out should be put into a special container and shouldn’t come in contact with other milk because it has a lot of harmful bacteria
You should always milk a cow until there is nothing left because the last milk that comes out has a good, high fat content of around 12%
As soon as you are done milking, you should remove the milk from the stall immediately because the milk absorbs the smell of the stall
Milk is cooled afterwards to prevent the growth of bacteria
Before, you used to be able to cool the milk by putting it in cold water, but now it is required to keep it at about 8 – 12 degrees. This is done by machines

For me, last week was nice because I got to practice my German and practice my languages in a different way than what I’m used to. It’s value being able to use previous knowledge and experience and apply it in ways that I normally wouldn’t. I’m obsessed with learning new things, whether it’s new vocabulary or facts about cheese production. I want to learn everything and I’ve always been passionate about learning things I didn’t know before.

I was thinking how my host dad and uncle in Germany knew so much about agriculture and how my uncle had a dairy farm, and how my mom is really interested in cheese and yogurt production; and I thought about how much they would have enjoyed the presentations as well.

The week also provided the opportunity to talk with key figures of the school (the director and vice-director), which is something I hadn’t had the chance to do before. I went on a field trip with the vice-director and ended up talking about politics, immigration and economics. The director organized a final dinner on Saturday, and I sat as the only woman at the head of the table and had a great conversation with the director about religion and politics (“Politics? That’s her speciality,” the vice-director told the director from the end of the table). I also spent a lot of time talking to one of the Austrians, who coincidentally had a daughter with my name, a year younger than me, who had also lived in Philadelphia.

What is “hime”? What is “ermik”?

Part of the reason that I haven’t been writing much lately is not for a lack of material. It’s a lack of time, and to a lesser extent, a lack of desire. One thing that kept me busy in the last couple weeks was a series of translations from Albanian into German. When the Director told me that he wanted me to write something in English for our Austrian partners that work with us a couple times a year, I foolishly said that I could write it in German instead. That’s how I ended up getting to translate proposals written by our school’s experts on the following topics: cows (how much milk they produce, how much food they need); chickens (what food they need, what the ingredients of their food are, how many eggs they can lay) and setting up rows of grapes to eventually produce wine (tilling the earth, creating rows for the grapes between the rows of fig trees that are already growing). And translating words like “hime” and “ermik,” (semolina and bran) into German… even if most of the Albanians I asked didn’t even know what these words were in Albanian. Did I mention that I work at an agricultural school?

One method of English learning that is popular here is the “grammar translation” method. The main way of practice through this method is by translating. Although we kind of frown upon it since there are many ways to teach a language, it definitely has its advantages. Aside from speaking, which is often difficult for beginners, reading and writing are good ways to learn. Translation is the best, in my opinion, because you are working directly with grammatical structures and accurately understanding connotation. Working with Albanian texts is something that I haven’t done much but have found incredibly beneficial, even if I’m translating into German instead of English.

The Austrian work group arrived at our school last Tuesday, and I was called in to translate. At the beginning, it was incredibly hard. MADTV used to have a sketch where Bobby Lee played a Chinese translator who clearly was not translating with any accuracy, and that’s kind of how I felt at first. I had to rely on another English teacher to translate into Albanian, which wasn’t the most efficient system. On the second day of translating it went a lot better. The Austrians presented a lecture about cheese making and milking and I translated like lightning. I had never done this particular type of instant, face-to-face translating. I mostly was tied to a computer and LEO (a gigantic, online German dictionary) with all the time in the world to perfect the translations. The Austrians remarked on the second day that my language skills came back almost overnight and told me that we needn’t bother with using another translator; that I could just wing it from German into Albanian.

No Golden Arches

Over 63,000 outlets worldwide, but you won’t find any of them in Albania. According to the Financial Times, a crisis-racked Iceland joined Albania and Bosnia and Herzegovina in the small group of European countries without a McDonald’s. Many of us rarely eat McDonald’s in the States, but food cravings for greasy mystery meat and perfectly salted fries made according to a secret recipe only really kick in once they are out of reach.

According to rumors I heard months ago in Elbasan, a McDonald’s will soon be appearing in Durres. Jaded by all those rumors of Red Lobster going in on the strip back at home, I told the smiling Albanian that wanted to share the joyous, capitalistic news that I would “believe it when I see it.”

Perhaps the oddest aspect in all of this isn’t that we are in a foreign, McDonaldless land, but rather the whole-hearted attempts to fill this Value Meal void. There are completely random restaurants made to mirror American fast food establishments all over the country. I’ve seen them in numerous Albanian cities: maybe it’s a restaurant front that looks eerily like a KFC or something with a name easily mistaken for “McDonald’s” at first glance. Try as they might, when they sell me a “hamburger” made out of a ¼” thick spiced pork patty, I’m not going to approve. Maybe that’s just semantics. The best of the knock-off restaurants is in Tirana. Called “Kolonat,” its logo somehow resembles a letter “M,” (I don’t even know how the “M” would even figure into the equation since it’s a fast food restaurant starting with the letter K) and its color scheme is… you guessed it, yellow and red.

McDonald’s has come a long way in a short time, for better or for worse. But just not Albania. And even though I never eat there when I’m at home, you can have no doubts that I’m going to put a burger and fries away on the first day I’m in neighboring Macedonia.

On a somewhat related note: check out The Economist’s Big Mac Index.

Benoit Sokal

In general, video games are extensions of a mediascape that glorifies and sensationalizes violence. It’s not surprising that adventure games have gotten lost in the shuffle amongst wars and headshots in our news media and our video games. Point-and-click games are a dying breed compared to 1st and 3rd person shooters and their market continues to decrease. Should we really be surprised that games requiring some amount of thinking are being replaced by mindlessness and completely passive experiences?

It was the distaste for these topics that lead me to the work of game developer (although he’s described himself primarily as a “story teller”) Benoit Sokal.

Sokal takes us beyond the long-clichéd World War 2 battlefield or terrorist detention center and gives us something more. Whether in quaint village toy factory full of automatons, or the vast Siberian tundra, or a fictional African country or in an abandoned Art Deco hotel, Sokal’s environments are striking in their beauty, variation and scope.

Instead of scantily glad women like Lara Croft, Sokal’s heroines are first and foremost intelligent women with strong personalities. This is far from the norm in video games as well, and that’s what makes it so refreshing.

His creations are far more than video games. Aside from challenging puzzles and casts of memorable characters, they are works of art. In 2001’s Syberia, Sokal created an entire world full of beauty and mystery along with highly developed story lines. Can a video game be art? “As far as it creates emotion, it is 'art,’” according to Sokal.

Here is an example of that art that is already eight years old.

Robert Enke

So much has been going on and it’s downright shameful that it’s been almost a month and a half since I’ve updated last. Although there is much to write about, I feel compelled to write about Robert Enke.

Enke was a goalkeeper for Hannover 96 in the German Bundesliga. After a career of ups and downs, he had finally become settled. Last year, he was voted Goalkeeper of the Year. He was set to be Team Germany’s #1 in next summer’s World Cup. This on-field success makes it difficult to believe that he took his own life last week by jumping in front of a train.

His father, who had urged him to get help, said the circumstances of his life lead him to suicide. Enke’s grief for a young daughter he lost to heart problems in 2006 never fully ended. Although he told teammates and coaches he was fine, he never really recovered. There were injury setbacks and moves to different teams. According to his wife he had battled depression the last six years. He was afraid about the consequences of people knowing he was depressed. He feared that authorities would take the daughter that he and his wife had adopted.

It’s a terribly tragic situation but there is a lesson to be learned.

That Enke was so afraid of people finding out says a lot about how taboo mental health issues still are, even in today’s society. But perhaps even worse is the blood-thirsty media that we’ve created. How might a common rag like the Bild Zeitung handled the news if Enke went into treatment? What about the fans on internet forums? We have become so obsessed that privacy for athletes and other celebrities doesn’t exist. You aren’t even allowed to grieve in private anymore, and it’s disgusting. In some ways, it’s not just the circumstances of Enke’s life that lead him to those train tracks, but the invasion of privacy and over preoccupation with others that has become even more omnipresent in the digital age.

Imagine standing in a stadium full of thousands of fans and feeling completely alone. So often we equate “success” with money, performance and achievement and think that it is all we need to be happy. People wondered why Enke would have taken his life, considering his “success.” His wife, in a very memorable statement, said that they “always thought love would be enough to see things through, but it wasn’t.” Not money, not love, not success could alleviate the pain. Alone amongst thousands.

We scrutinize athletes constantly. Some people may argue that the athletes chose their professions and should be prepared for the criticism that comes with it, but no athlete signs up to be made into a god. No matter how long the list of achievements, no matter how many medals or how many trophies, they are only men. With all their highs, lows, perfections and imperfections. They are humans, not gods, and they walk a very fine line.