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…..