Service With a Smile

February 17, 2007

There’s a new face around town. A few weeks ago my site spouse John and I were having beers at a café after work. This has become the routine. Lezha loses power around 4:00 p.m., while we wait for the lights come back on we kill time over beers.

(I don’t know any Albanian city that has electricity twenty-four hours a day. In most places there are six to eight hours of no power. It’s usually on a schedule, and one just gets used to arranging their life around when the lights will be on. While I have adjusted, the whole power thing will always be puzzling to me. I’m sure the infrastructure is antiquated, but it’s good enough to work most of the time. And whoever is in control is able to keep the electricity on a schedule. The lights stay on all day for Christmas and New Year’s Eve. So I don’t get it. If there’s not enough power, just make more. Right? If you’re buying power from other countries – and how does that work exactly – buy enough to keep the lights on all the time. I don’t know. I should have learned by now that trying to figure something like this out is an exercise in futility).

We usually go to the same café, we like this place because they give you a little bowl of peanuts with your beer. On this occasion we met a guy who had recently returned to Lezha after living in the U.S. for the last sixteen years. Having overheard us speaking English, the Albanian expat approached us and introduced himself. It was immediately clear from his English that he had lived in the U.S. for several years. He didn’t speak with the formality and awkwardness that is evident among the even the best English speakers who have learned the language, but have never lived in an English-speaking country.

He seemed like a nice enough guy, a little chatty, but a nice guy. I honestly can’t remember his name – he doesn’t know mine either, he just calls me “Michigan” – so lets call him Martin. We got Martin’s whole story. He was given political asylum in the early 1990s, he ended up in Florida with his grandfather, and was back in Lezha for what he said was a “short visit.”

“So what are you guys doing here?” Traveling? Passing through to someplace else? Your not Albanian-American are you?” Martin asked.

“Uh, no, we’re not Albanian” I said. John, who is Asian, just stared at him.

“Yeah I figured,” Martin replied. “He’s Chinese and all..”

“South Korean.”

“Right, so why are you guys in Lezha?”

“We live here actually,” I said. “We’ve been in Albania for almost a year.”

“Oh, you missionaries or something? Your church send you here?”

“Nope. We’re here working. By choice. We came here to live for two years,” John replied.

This was confounding to Martin. “Well…, what the hell guys?”

Since our first meeting we’ve seen Martin around town quite a bit. In fact, the guy turns up seemingly out of nowhere. ALL THE TIME. He’s one of those people, and I think we’ve all known one, who will be suddenly standing right next to me as I turn my head to cross the street. I walk in any number of the different cafés in town and Martin is always there. I’ll go for a run five miles out of town and Martin is there, standing on the side of the road, waving, yelling “Michigan” as I run by. I’ve began to question whether or not this Martin character was a real person.

Did I just hallucinate that night at the café? Maybe he’s just some imaginary guy I keep seeing. But John was at the café to. I don’t know. Weird.

This is what I had been wrestling with recently. “No dude, he’s real. And he’s all over the place,” John confirmed.

“You know his name? I can’t remember. He just calls me ‘Michigan.’”

“No idea. He calls me ‘China.’”

John and I continue to see Martin everywhere we go, most assuredly at our favorite beer and peanuts, lights out café. Last week some new light was shed on Martin’s “short visit” Albania.

“So you’ve been around here for a few weeks man, when are you heading back to Florida?” I asked.

“Well yeah. It’s not really just a visit,” Martin replied. “I’ll probably be here for awhile. I don’t how long exactly.”

“Oh really, how come?”

“Well, you know. I was sent back to Albania. Deported really. You know.”

Now I felt bad. For a month I’d been going out of my way to avoid Martin, and the poor guy had been deported. I was sure it was an unjust thing.

“Why man? What happened? I mean, you’d been there for sixteen years.”

“Yeah I know man. But the judge, he was so unfair. It wasn’t a big deal, and he says ‘you have to go back to Albania.’”

“Why?”

“Well…, here’s the thing…I was convicted of a misdemeanor.”

“Ohhhh,” I said, trying to nod in a way that conveyed sympathy and not the skepticism/wariness I felt.

“You know, second degree assault. So I beat a guy up. You know. Not a big deal. Right? And the judge, he takes my papers and says I have to come back here.”

Martin had gotten a little worked up. John and I exchanged glances. We had altogether lost our compassion for Martin’s situation. And, we were now a little scared of the guy.

Martin is apparently here to stay, and continues to always be around. I’ve decided he’s harmless, but I am a little jumpy around the guy, and I try to be very agreeable. He sees me running and he’ll make the outlandish claim to have run twenty miles the other day. “Wow, that’s great,” I say, trying my best to feign admiration and hide the “no fucking way” sentiment. He’ll offer to be my personal translator. To follow me around and help me buy extension cords and order lunch. “Yeah sure, I’ll keep you in mind if I need any translating. Thanks a lot,” I say. About the last thing in the world I could ever want is to have Martin at my side any more than he already is.

But, I don’t think we’re going to be able to shake him. He speaks perfect English, so I can’t pretend that I don’t understand what’s he’s saying – I’ve gotten good at this game of possum – and, I don’t want him to beat me up.

February 18, 2007

It’s Election Day in Albania and I’ve been warned about traveling and to stay away from polling places. I’m looking out my window and don’t see any cause for alarm, things seem like any other Sunday. Lezha isn’t burning or anything. Two weeks ago I wrote, maybe a little mockingly, how there are two guys running for mayor of the capital city who have almost the same name, Sokol Oldashi and Sokol Oldashin. It turns out that Sokol Oldashin is not another person. The posters I had seen with a picture of a guy that said “Vote for Sokol Oldashin” are actually endorsement posters for Sokol Oldashi. The posters that confused me have a picture of a guy, who I thought was a Mr. Oldashin, a bizarro version of the real Mr. Oldashi. But, it turns out that these are just posters with a picture of some guy who has some prominence and he’s saying: “vote for Sokol Oldashi.” I was thrown off because his name is spelled with an “n” on the end.

I had been going around for weeks telling people how I couldn’t believe that two parties would field candidates with very nearly the same name. Finally, it was explained to me that in Albanian, when a person is the object of a sentence a consonant is thrown on the end of their name. If your name ends in a consonant then you’re given almost a completely new name. “I am Ben’s friend” would be “I am Benit friend.” I’m told that this is a pretty fundamental concept of the language. So, I can barely speak Albanian and certainly have zero understanding of grammar. Not that different from my capacities with English really.

The Albanian private service industry has developed quickly and haphazardly. A hotel and restaurant boom of this kind, in a country that until recently was closed to the rest of the world, has meant that the smiley, eager to please service staff that was familiar to me is absent. The concept of “the customer is always right” is interpreted more as “I’m doing you such a favor by bringing you coffee. You better not ask too many questions or I’m going to get really annoyed.” (To be fair, the overfriendliness that we associate with waiters and waitresses in America is absent in most of Europe. It has everything to do with the fact that American service staff work for tips).

I miss the whole “Hi there, my name is Jill and I’m going to be taking care of you tonight” that I used to find grating. In most restaurants I’ve been to, Jill has been replaced by a surly Albanian who seems barely able to muster breathing. A typical encounter with a waiter – I can’t think of any place I’ve been to that had waitresses – will go as follows:

Waiter: Appears standing over me, looking down. I’m not sure, but I think he’s in a coma.
Me: Hi, do you have menus?
Waiter: Shakes his head.
Me: Ok, what do you have for food?
Waiter: Rice, sausage, french fries, salad, meat soup, cheese.
Me: I’ll have a green salad an…
Waiter: Not have
Me: No green salad?
Waiter: Not have.

This will go on until I have asked for everything that he said they had only to find out that the only thing they can make is rice. So I eat a lot of rice. Sometimes, at the places that are a little more eager to please, they’ll let you order a salad. But this means that the guy in the kitchen has to leave the restaurant, run down to the bazaar, buy vegetables, and return twenty minutes later to make your salad. At that point I wish I had ordered the rice.

The brusque treatment isn’t reserved for foreigners. At dinner one night with a few Albanian friends from work we sat for two hours as each of our orders were brought out separately, about every half hour. The restaurant was clearly making each thing one at time, bringing it out, going back and boiling the same order of meat and potatoes over again. One of my friends ordered fish and the waiter, who deserves credit for his candor, when he brought the fish said: “we’ve never really made fish before, I’m not sure if this is cooked all the way or any good at all.” At that point I was ready to stand and applause.

One thing that waiters are very much on top of is switching out ashtrays. You will never see an ashtray overflowing with cigarette butts in Albania. I’ll sit down to a coffee, dump in a packet of sugar, put the wrapper in the ashtray, and before I sip the coffee the waiter has swooped in and replaced the “dirty” ashtray with a fresh one. If I am actually smoking the ashtray is replaced between every puff. A lot of times I’ll sit down to a table with a clean ashtray and they’ll just take it away and bring an identical clean one. For what waiters in Albania lack in most aspects of being waiters, they make up for in their diligence of switching out ashtrays. Clean ashtrays are the height of customer service.

Exercise Your Right to Vote

February 3, 2007

The water pressure in my apartment has been dwindling since, it seems, the first day I moved in. In October, when I began my apartment search, I had a walk through the place that is now my home. It’s a newly constructed two-story home, a family used to live on the first floor but they’ve disappeared.

(It’s too bad. They were nice folks. They brought me candles when the power went out and one morning I was greeted by their eleven year-old daughter arms overflowing with my underwear which had blown off my clothesline and fallen to their front yard. I returned from work a few weeks ago to find the bottom floor completely vacated. They vanished in literally an afternoon. I speculate that someone in the family won the American Residence Visa Lottery. The “American Lottery” is BIG in this country. I’d compare the anticipation for the results to that of the expectancy that consumes Americans leading up to a Friends or Sex in the City Finale. So yeah, BIG. When people win the American Lottery – and “win” should be qualified, as this only grants permission to come to a country in which gainful employment for a comparatively unskilled Albanian will not be easy to find. And, where a week’s worth of groceries at Whole Foods costs the same as what I pay in rent. For six months. But, when you win the lottery, it seems you also have to leave in twelve hours).

But, it wasn’t the hardships of Albanians that compelled me to sit down and write something for the first time in two months. I’ve got water pressure issues. For the first few months I lived in the apartment I enjoyed a shower with good water pressure. It was a new shower head that could be adjusted to different water stream patterns, and the hot water tank was big enough to allow me to keep the water running throughout my showers, rather than having to get wet, turn it off, lather up and then rinse. Quite naturally, it lacked a shower curtain – characteristic of all Albanian showers, it is simply a shallow basin with a showerhead. Curtains or doors are never involved. These would be some of those little things, like price tags, that I miss.

So for three months I had the luxury of, not great, but good showers. Last week it all came crashing down. My shower and one of my sinks are now just a trickle. One sink just makes coughing noises. It takes about ten minutes to fill a glass of water. Making coffee and doing dishes have become hour-long processes. This really doesn’t bother me that much – if I was so inclined, I could ask any woman in town to come over and do my dishes for me. I’m already looked at askance because rumor has it I do my own laundry. But showering under a few warm drops of water is just dreadful.

February 7, 2007

Country wide local elections are approaching, scheduled for February 18. This is after months of delays – elections were supposed to happen sometime last fall, and at the very least before the end of 2006 – for reasons I have no idea about. As I understand it, every city and town has their local elections for mayor and other officials in the same year on the same date. For the last several months TV news was dominated by parliamentary sessions featuring bickering party representatives, highlighted by a Battle Royal last August in which chairs and fake plants were tossed around. Now that the disagreements over whatever have been resolved, the country is in full campaign mode.

Things have happened quickly. For what they lack in the American tradition of television and radio advertisements and interviews, Albanian campaigns make up for in sheer volume of posters. In the last week Lezha has seen several of its buildings wallpapered in posters. Whoever the campaign consultants are, the prevailing piece of advice seems to be: “you need posters. Lots of them. You don’t even need to make clear who you are or what office your running for. Just put your mug shot on a poster, use an ambiguous slogan like ‘together for Lezha,’ and then put about seventy of them on the same wall of a building.”

Judging by building coverage, there are two leading candidates for, what I can only assume is, mayor of Lezha. One guy got a jump on his competition, securing the three large billboards in town, usually devoted to a cigarette add featuring alternately swimmers, cyclists, or soccer players. And I should say, this candidate has made excellent use of this prime space. His billboard posters feature a smiling picture of the candidate off to the side with his left arm extended presenting a computer rendered vision of “Lezha of the Future.” The background of the billboard is a panorama of a city that resembles Lezha. Kind of. In this version the city has taken on a new greenness and sports an impressive skyline of colorful buildings. There’s a large fountain in the middle of a riverside park. Cafés line that same river, which I had mistakenly thought for seven months was a sewage drainage canal. Someone figured out how to use Photoshop.

In Tirana, the capital, the frontrunners in the mayoral race are two candidates with national prominence. The race is receiving a lot of attention and money from the competing parties. There are the usual posters and billboards, but also, city buses have been completely painted in support of one candidate or another. To its credit, The Public Transportation Agency has remained unaligned, as both candidates have bus lines campaigning on their behalf. Again, beyond the name recognition, it would take some research on the part of the uninformed voter to figure out who exactly the two guys are, what office they’re running for, let alone what the differences are between them. Maybe there aren’t any. It’s not like you can draw lines between American political candidates.

Further complicating the Tirana Mayoral election – and I don’t know why I’m the only one who seems to have noticed this and think it’s hilarious – is that two of the candidates have almost exactly the same name. There’s Sokol Oldashi and then you have Sokol Oldashin. Mr. Oldashi is one of the nationally prominent candidates who is in a tight race with his rival. Mr. Oldashin is one of a handful of candidates from smaller parties who have little hope of winning the Mayor’s office. It would be like if in 2004 there was a third party Presidential candidate named Jon Kerry. How upset would the real John Kerry have been? I have to believe this is an obstacle for Mr. Oldashi. Aren’t there going to have be at least a few votes that were meant for him that are going to bizarro Oldashin? Isn’t this a conceivable mistake? One that I would make myself? I think yes.

I have to say, the growing pains of a fifteen-year-old democracy do offer their lighter moments.

February 13, 2007

I have never appreciated so much the luxury of being able to escape the elements of weather. In America – I now refer to my home as “America” rather than the United States or the U.S. In my culturally sensitive days I used to think this was a little inappropriate, like South Korea calling themselves “Asia,” but everyone else does it – I took for granted being able to escape the uncomfortable hotness or bitter coldness. I’m pretty sure there are entire American cities that are linked by gerbil tubes.

The hotness and coldness of the concrete Albanian buildings is understandable, – it’s like living in a parking structure – but the weather that I have come to hate the most is the rain. Somehow Albanian rain makes me wetter. It has a sideways approach pattern that renders umbrellas useless. Matters aren’t helped any by the fact that, and I admit this is due to my own stubbornness, my only jacket is too short, not warm and not waterproof. It really has no value as a jacket. And most people think it looks strange.

Weather patterns in Albania aren’t in and out in few hours, or even a day. The same clouds settle in over an area for a long weekend. To be fair, the country’s weather is by and large pleasant, certainly better than that of the Upper Midwest where it’s just accepted that we don’t see the sun from November through April, and the weeks of sunshine are pleasant. But when the rain moves in it stays for a few days. A hard, violent rain is rare, it’s usually constant drizzle and wind that will get more intense whenever I’m walking across town with a forty-pound box from America – love you Mom.

After three or four days of rain the drainage issues of cities becomes apparent. A downhill street becomes maybe a class two rapid. Not strong enough to take away a person, but cats and dogs have no chance. The unpaved streets and back lots are impassable without those fly-fishing pants. The wetness of a rainy week is all-consuming, in that it has an effect on my personality. I know that as soon as I take ten steps outside I’m going to be wet, my umbrella is going to turn inside out, I’m going to drop something that I was really looking forward to – like a good sandwich – in a puddle, and I’ll be reminded of all this by the first Albanian I see who will point out that “Beni, it’s raining.” I’ll then sit and work and scare people as I turn into Jack Nicholas from The Shining.

So I just shouldn’t leave the apartment, right? Just stay in and maybe take a nice long hot shower. Oh wait…..