Ten Days In

March 31, 2006

I so badly want to be able to use this language in the just the most simplest way. There have been some baby steps made since last Sunday, I can greet people appropriately, ask how they’re doing, probably not understand what they say, and respond with “Mire” – (nice) – and then walk away. I’m pretty much a two-year-old in terms of verbal skills around my host family. I’m just anxious to be able to make simple requests and understand and reply to simple questions.

Every afternoon, after five hours of language class, I come bounding out of the school in L---- F---- armed with new words and phrases like: “This is my backpack, I enjoy eating bananas, does your sister have a telephone?” I’ll run into the same group of kids playing marbles, – did anyone know that there is actually a game you play with marbles? – I’ll hit them with a few new phrases, and a laugh riot ensues. The kids are by far the most eager to talk, the older men around town are too busy lighting their next cigarette, and truly, the women don’t leave the houses very much at all. The other day in class we worked out simple question and answer scripts to try on the kids. Naturally, the little buggers did not reply to the questions the way they were supposed to in the script, and I had to resort to saying “thank you” and running away.

The language barrier does create some moments of great unintentional comedy. I’ve been having dinner with a guy who I think is either my host father’s brother or brother-in-law, last night we were having some kind of stew with rice, vegetables, and a meat that I couldn’t quite place, it sort of looked like chicken, but was definitely not chicken. I was able to string together a question about what exactly it was we were eating. This lead to the following exchange:

Brother/Brother-in-law: Blah, blah, blah (Albanian gibberish).
Me: Blank stare….chicken?
Brother/Brother-in-law: Blank stare….blah, blah, blah (more gibberish).
Me: Flapping my arms like a chicken then shrugging shoulders?
Brother/Brother-in-law: Getting down on the floor on all floors and crawling around.
Me: Mooing like a cow?
Brother/Brother-in-law: Shaking his head, baaa, baaa (like a lamb).

A Breakthrough! We were eating Lamb! However, this did not look or taste like lamb. The Brother/Brother-in-law continued crawling around on the floor and baaaing, then he pointed to his head, baaaed again, pointed to his head again. It occurred to me that I was likely eating meat from the head of the lamb, or perhaps something from inside the head lamb. It wasn’t bad, I cleaned my plate.

So there’s that.

April 1, 2006

This morning before language class I was having coffee with our instructor, I’ll call her Nancy. Nancy has excellent English and a better understanding of English grammar than most American college students. She also has that great stereotypical Eastern European accent, as well as the tendency to misplace words in a sentence, put the wrong ending on a word, or just throw in unnecessary words, she’s really fun to listen to. Nancy was explaining to me this “special thing” they do in Albania today where as she put it: “peoples are playing the jokes and tricks all the day.” I wasn’t following, today was Saturday, did she mean that they play these “jokes and tricks” every Saturday? “No,” she explained, “it is because April 1st in Albania is the special day that we play the jokes and tricks.” Now I knew what she was getting at, I explained that we’ve got the day of jokes and tricks in the United States as well, we call it April Fools Day. I’m thinking: “this is a great cross-cultural exchange that I’m having! This is definitely portfolio worthy. Then Nancy explained that she had thought that the day of jokes and tricks was a uniquely Albanian phenomenon, she looked genuinely disappointed.

April 2, 2006
7:30 a.m.

I haven’t really described the village of L---- F---- in any detail. The word “village” might actually be a little misleading. L---- F---- is pretty much a crossroads of about maybe a 1,000 people ten or fifteen minutes outside of the bigger city of E----, just off of the main road heading West out of E----. The town is a three or four square block maze of dirt paths winding through one-story concrete and brick homes, chickens, sheep, goats and the occasional cow are sprinkled throughout the town. The center of town consists of a small school – maybe six or seven classrooms – with a dirt kind of courtyard in front that’s used mostly by the local kids for playing marbles or staring at me as I walk in and out of school, a few cafés, a very small mosque that I have not seen anyone come in or out of, and what looks to be an abandoned concrete building with the word “Spital” (hospital) spray painted on the outside – I never want to get sick in this country.

L---- F---- is set just off the banks of a medium-sized river and is one of a number of small villages scattered throughout the area outside of E---- that have been built on the few patches of flat land amongst what I would consider mountains, but what Nancy informed me were just some pretty modest foothills. L---- F---- is right at the base of one of the bigger “hills,” from the village you can see some kind of radio or cell phone antennae on the top, which of course meant that someone had been to the top of that bastard. The temptation was too great for the Texan, and he and I went for another hike up this particular hill the other day. It took about half an hour to get to the radio tower, the reward was an amazing view of the river carving through the hills, to the East we see the sprawl of E----, and to the West snow-capped peaks, which I guess are what people consider mountains. Whatever, I still say I climbed a mountain, there may be bigger mountains around, but still.

The Texan took some really good photos, I should be able to post those once he e-mails them to me. I’ve been having battery issues with my camera. Specifically, the rechargeable batteries I brought don’t seem to be charged right out of the package – does this seem unfair to anyone else – and since I forgot to use the power converter with my battery charger when I first plugged it in, it has now been fried and isn’t working at all. My goal today is to successfully buy batteries.

7:30 p.m.

Twelve hours later I have returned to the shtepia – house – with no batteries, it was however an eventful Sunday. With the day off from language class my plan was to walk into the larger city of E----, have some coffee, buy batteries, find some lunch and do a lot of people watching. The walk to E---- was a bad choice, it was a lot longer than I had thought and hardly pleasant, pretty much walking along the shoulder of a two-lane freeway. It seems that outside of intercity roads or main roads in bigger towns there is very little paved terrain, and forget about sidewalks. Today was a particularly hot and dusty day, which I do find preferable to the wet and very muddy days.

I got to E----, picked out a nice looking café, and enjoyed a Café Turk – Turkish coffee – while people stared at me and I stared back. Another American guy living in the nearby village of K---- called me to see if I wanted to head out to his site and wander around the town a little bit, sounded good to me. The inter-city transportation in Albania is handled by either antiquated buses that look like something Rosa Parks might have rode, or privately owned minivans called furgons. The furgons I’ve rode in so far have all had the seats removed in favor of milk crates, trunks, saw horses, or something of the like – I’ve have yet to ride in a furgon with fewer than ten people. The quality of the furgons ranges from “this van is really disgusting and I’m surprised it actually runs,” to “I didn’t know you could make a mini-van out of cardboard.

I headed over to the area of town that seems to have been set aside for the furgon drivers to park their vans and smoke, and started saying: “Une nevoj furgone ne K----” - I need a furgon to K----. This attracted a lot of attention and incited a handful of arguments over who was going to take the American for a ride. I eventually found a furgon that was actually going to K----, piled in, and tried to ignore the staring long enough to get through a paragraph in my book. It took about twenty minutes to get to the first stop – which I assumed was K---- - when I hopped out I attempted to check with the driver to make sure I wasn’t getting off too soon. “Ne, K----, po?” – here, K----, yes – I asked. This question got a few chuckles out of the rest of the furgon passengers. After a ten minute exercise in miming with an exasperated driver and about eight other passengers I figured out that we had passed the village I trying to get to and this was essentially the end of the line. One guy on the furgon spoke just enough English to assure me that the driver would be heading back to E---- shortly and I could get dropped off at K---- on the way back.

I’m not sure what town I was in, the furgon driver may have lived there, at any rate he knew a lot of people in town and wanted to show off the American that didn’t know when to get off the furgon to all his friends in town. So I was introduced to three or four guys, talked at really fast, stared at a lot, had two Turkish coffees, and an hour later we were back in the Furgon heading to K----. I did finally manage to meet the people I’d been trying to track down all day, had time to chat for an hour, then had to get going before it got dark and vehicular traffic in the country pretty much stops.

I wanted to avoid furgons on the trip back to L---- F---- and opted for the more predictable Autobus. The World War I era bus I caught made it about 200 yards down the street before breaking down, leaving the passengers to walk along the road until another furgon came along. I crammed in the first furgon that came along and was hit with the inevitable stares and questions about what I was doing in this country. I told people my name and that I was living in L---- F----, before I could get to my age a guy pipes in: “po, Amerikan vullnetare, pese vullnetare ne L---- F----” – yes, the American volunteer, there’s five of them in L---- F----. Someone else on the bus knew what family I was living with in L---- F----, and another guy wanted to know where the other four Americans were, if they had gotten lost he knew their host families. I was in a completely different village about an hour from L---- F---- and these guys knew my whole story, I had great sense of self-importance at this point.

First solo trip out of the village, no batteries but I’m back alive. Phew, I got tired writing that.