Oh Canada

May 15, 2007

I’ve written before about my frustrations with coffee in Albania. It has nothing to do with the café culture of this country, or any European country I’ve been to for that matter. (I’ve never been accused of being a workaholic, and I’m totally fine with taking twenty or fifty minutes a few times a day to sit with a drink and watch people go by.) But, I also like coffee, and the Happy Meal-sized espressos that are enough for Albanians – and which they somehow manage to nurse longer than the 1.5 seconds I usually take to down one – just don’t leave me feeling like I really had a coffee.

This whole thing was a much larger issue in my life about six months ago, before I moved out of my host family’s house and got my own apartment. Now that I’m all grown up and living on my own in the big city, I’m able to make my own coffee every morning. I got French press hand me down from some American missionaries and my Mom sent me a small thermos, so now every morning I make coffee. Not an espresso, not a macchiato, but coffee. I take my thermos to work, drawing the usual stares for walking down the street with a thing that looks to people like a small missile, and have two enjoyable cups while I sit at my desk and wake up. It’s probably the best part of every one of my days.

My co-workers are aghast at the amount of coffee I drink. And we’re talking about two normal-sized cups. How many people routinely drink twice this amount in America? My hand is raised. Nonetheless, my coffee consumption has been a cause for concern among my friends at work.

“Beni, dude. You know dude, I think this coffee you drink is going to make an attack on your heart.” This is what my friend Gary says to me every day.

This week brought a visitor to the NGO I work at. A fellow employee of WV, he’s a Canadian that works in some kind of regional office in Cyprus or Crete – aren’t those just different names for the same place? Joking. Although who didn’t know the difference maybe just a few years ago? My hand is raised. – The Canuck showed up at the office yesterday morning, let’s go with Zach for his name, so Zach arrives and I learn he will be in town for a week conducting a training with WV staff members.

When I got to work Monday morning I went directly to the kitchen to get my mug to take back to my desk. I found my boss, Mary, in the midst of battle with a coffee maker, not a French press, a real Black & Decker coffee maker. The kitchen was a mess of espresso ground coffee and water. The coffee maker was dripping away with the pot sitting in the sink.

“Oh Beni. Can you help me? Can you fix the coffee machine? I don’t know, I think it is broken,” Mary pleaded.

“Is that a coffee maker! Where’d that come from? Did we buy it?

“No it is Zach’s. He is here from Cyprus. But he is Canadian and he brought with him a coffee machine. He drinks SO much coffee, like you Beni.”

Consumed by excitement, I left Mary as she was putting coffee grounds in the water deposit. I went to my office and met the Canuck from Cyprus – who is also probably a boss of mine somehow – and got right down to business:

“So you travel around with a coffee maker?” I asked.

“Well just places where I’m pretty sure I can’t get Canadian-style coffee, eh.” – he didn’t really say ‘eh,’ but I imagined it.

“That’s funny. I always call it ‘American-style’ coffee.”

“Well, you’re American, eh.” – again, so ‘eh’ was said.

“Ummm, I’m pretty sure that in Paris the coffee drink that we both enjoy is called an ‘Americano.’ I don’t know of drink called a “Canadiano.’”

“It’s just called beer.”

Touché Canuck. Zach and I hit it off. I’ve been to Canada plenty of times and I told him about my giving Windsor, Ontario “Tijuana of Canada” status. Which Zach conceded. He related to the importance I place on my morning ritual of making French press coffee.

“I really look forward to the whole process,” I said. And there is a very particular way that I like to make my coffee.”

“I think you have OCD.”

“Probably.”

John, my site spouse, stopped by and we invited Zach over for dinner. “We just bought a grill,” we explained, “and we can make hamburgers.” Zach was in for burgers.

The grill has been a big step in mine and John’s relationship. I think it’s brought us closer. For the last ten days, we’ve pretty much been grilling everything that we think is food. Like a lot of things in Albania that are at first so exciting because you had given up hope of finding them or being able to do it, grilling is pretty close to what I enjoyed back home, but is ultimately a new frustration because it gets you so close but really just not.

The issue here is charcoal and actually lighting the grill. Here’s how I know how to start a grill: There’s usually a button with a picture of flame. I press this button (in an emergency I empty a bottle of lighter fluid on forty pounds of briquettes). The first trial was finding charcoal for our grill. We didn’t know how to say the word “charcoal”, and actually weren’t sure if it could be found at all. I had the following conversation at several stores around Lezha:

“Good evening. How are you? I need something black that is for meat on a grill.”

“Black meat?”

“No, no. It is for me to cook meat…”

“Pepper! You American. You want pepper.”

“No, no. It is black and goes inside a grill. Meat is then laid on top so that the black thing can become hot and cook the meat.”

I don’t have a very big Albanian vocabulary, and it can become rather abstract.

Eventually, someone understood our request and we were able to buy charcoal. That wasn’t really charcoal. What we bought was a bag of really burned pieces of wood. Like just a lot of stuff left from a camp fire. I do know that charcoal really is just compressed wood, but this was just a bag of charred branches and shrubs. So we learned that charcoal can be a lot simpler of thing than compressed briquettes. And, we also learned that the shit that we bought does not catch on fire again.

Determined to grill things, we’ve persisted over the last week. It takes a lot of paper, fanning and other cajoling to get the twigs burning, but we’ve managed. The Canuck joined us for hamburgers the other night. John and I talked mostly about our relief with the approach of summer.

“It’s so great to see people outside again,” I said. “I didn’t appreciate Xhiro season last year, but I’m counting the days now.”

“What’s Xhiro?” Zach asked.

“It’s when everyone just goes out at night and wanders around,” John replied. “It’s amazing. Definitely the best thing in Albania.”

Zach seemed a little underwhelmed by the whole description. We tired to impress upon him how great Xhiro is. Xhiro is not just walking round. There’s also sitting with a coffee or beer, maybe some fried dough or ice cream can be involved. But mostly, I love the people watching that Xhiro offers. As much as Albanians seem to love staring at me, I know I enjoy watching them even more. Part of it is that staring is perfectly acceptable, also, I can openly talk about people in English. But, the biggest reason I love Xhiro is because people are hilarious and I can give them nick names.

“So Xhiro,” I continued. “We usually meet after work for a drink, then we’ll wander to a difference place, and, remember, the streets are packed with people. Everyone is wandering around for a few hours before dinner.”

“And Xhiro doesn’t happen in the winter,” the Canuck asked.

“No way. Strictly a summer activity,” said John.

“So what do you do for entertainment in the Winter?”

“I started smoking,” I said.

We continued with our expectant talk of the summer. An early beach season has been an exciting development. I enjoy the beach, and during the summer Albanians expect you to have gone to the beach at least two times in the last week. So this works out well. The country can have beautiful beaches, however, it requires getting away from any coastal cities, as they’ve all seen dodgy seaside development, leaving the beaches gross. But, there are pristine places.

The Albanian beach experience offers great people watching in its own right. Of course, just about everyone is laying around in bathing suits, swimming, building castles and doing what you do at the beach. But, there will also always be amusing sights that I can only hope never go away.

“A lot of times people are wandering around the beach dressed just in a completely uncomfortable way,” I said to Zach. “Like girls walking down the beach dressed in jeans, a few shirts, big-heeled shoes, crazy makeup and just looking like they took a wrong turn from the Xhiro.”

“And you also get people completely underdressed,” John added. “Always men. They’ll be in their euro-speedos, or, a lot of times, just laying around in their underwear.”

“There are wild donkeys at our beach in Lezha.”

“Sounds like a scene,” the Canuck offered.

“It’s a gong show. Priceless.”

A year ago I didn’t appreciate the Albanian summer. It was like summer in America without air conditioning. But, winter left me wishing I could just go out, wander around, drink and stare at Lezha’s cast of characters. Wasn’t I talking about coffee? I think I have undiagnosed ADD. Hey, look at that bird!