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.