Mars to Shkurt part 2

Bob doing his part to keep the beaches in Albania clean!

Lunch at Kaon with Rachel, Alex, James, Jen, and me giving Bob the traditional head rub to chest!

Mom and I in front of Kishe e Shelbuemit, the catholic church of Ascension in Rubik, 1166.

Dinner at Sander’s and the remainder of Mom/Bob’s trip:
I am still trying to play catch up for the months I have neglected to write so I am going to try and keep this short and brief. Today is Tuesday July 13, 2010 and it is hot, hot, hot. I last left off having returned from Fushe Kruja during my Mom’s trip. After we arrived back to my apartment after a three hour ride from F.K. we took a short hour or so nap and then headed to my counterpart’s house, Sander Ndoj. This was the third dinner my Mom and Uncle had been to over the course of four nights and the final. Sander is married to the English teacher at the 9-year school in Rubik. His wife, Bardhe, is also the counterpart of the TEFL volunteer in Rubik (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) and an excellent English speaker and woman. The Ndoj family are great hosts and treated my Mom and Uncle as if they were part of the family. Sander has two young boys, one is ten and the other is twelve, who both stick up for the bumbling idiot who fumbles through their language while speaking to their father. Sander likes to give me a hard time for not being the best speaker of Albanian and is always kept in check by his two sons. Bardhe and my mom talked like old friends and I translated Sander’s perception on the history of his country to my Uncle. Bardhe also spoke about her education and love for education that was acquired during communism. Bardhe’s mother spent years 3-10 of her childhood in a communist “re-education” prison. Her grandparents were not in the communist party and were seen as agitators. After their release from prison they moved from the village of Rubik (Rubik didn’t become a city until the communist industry was brought to the area in the ‘60s) to the top of a small mountain to the east of Rubik. Her family remained in the house at the top of the mountain to avoid further persecution from the communist party which they were still blacklisted from. Just to explain basically, during communist Albania under Enver Hoxha, ever person had what is called a Biografi (biography). This was a document that stated every basic thing about the person and their family. Bardhe’s family had negative biografis. In the document it even listed that her mother lived in the prison and that her grandmother was anti-government. During her childhood this was not a secret among the people of Rubik and her family was in turn extremely poor. Bardhe showed my mom the house that she grew up in. You can see the house where her parents still live from most places in Rubik, sitting at the top of the small mountain looking over the town. Bardhe told my Mom and Uncle stories I had heard a few times before but are still surprising. Bardhe has an older sister and during communism her sister would go to school in the morning and Bardhe would go in the second session during the afternoon in order to balance chores and farming. The family was so poor that Bardhe and her sister shared one pair of shoes which her sister would hand off to Bardhe half way to school each day. The walk from Rubik to the house takes about one hour and remains a small trail unsuitable for motorized transportation. I think it is a remarkable thing that Bardhe has become the woman she is. Her family was ostracized for a large portion of her life and still she remains a smart independent mother. Her kids are some of the best behaved boys I have ever met and smart as hell. Fabien is 13 years old and knows English, German, and of course Albanian fluently. She also remains a critic of the government who is not afraid to speak her mind. She is however careful who she speaks her mind to, her and Sander are public employees and if they lost their jobs it would be difficult to find other work in Rubik, which has an unofficial unemployment rate of 57%. Think about that for a minute. Although it is difficult to officially gage unemployment rates in Albania due to the amount of informal work, migrant workers, and people who actually seek out work the unemployment rate in the country sits at about 30%. Now try to complain about not being able to find a job. Things could be worse!
Back to dinner. It is custom in Albania to badger your guests to eat lots of food and drink lots of liquor. Sander is really good at this. He instructed me to make sure that my Mom and Uncle had enough to eat and drink at all times. I actually did a good job at this but Sander thought otherwise. He believed that if the guests did not consistently have something in their mouths they were not being treated like proper guests. My family was severely “plot” (gorged) but Sander continued to tell me how bad a waiter I am and that I needed to fill my Mom’s glass or give my Uncle another piece of chicken. They both adamantly refused but Sander continued to tease me. He has a, um, we will say entertaining sense of humor. After a four-five hour dinner/lunch, we left Sander’s house and headed to a locali (bar/café) in order to have a coffee with another close friend of mine named Nik Nikolli.
Nik runs the NGO in Rubik and I have written about him a few times in previous entries. Bob and I of course drank a raki with Nik and my mom had water. After about an hour we retired to my apartment and got some rest. We left Rubik the next day and I will not write too much about the next week of the trip. From Rubik we travelled to Tirana in order to rent a car. After we rented the car we drove and spent the night in Fier. In Fier we, or more correctly my family, treated my friend Chris who is the volunteer in Fier to dinner. The next morning we headed to Appalonia which is a Greek/Roman ruin (Greek first and then Roman, I think, look it up if you really want to). We spent all day at the Archeological site and ate at a really good restaurant that overlooks the park. A protected site in Albania is far from what you would expect from a national treasure. There is still trash, little signage, and of course a café sits in the center of the historic area. After our late lunch we headed to Vlore and my friend Amy set us up with a beautiful hotel on the water. Amy is an awesome girl and a good friend who has a really great outlook on life. I have never had such a view from the balcony of a hotel, I will post a picture. I guess I will mention that for one room with three beds was only $35! The next morning we had coffee at the restaurant in the hotel, enjoyed the great view of the Adriatic Sea, and then left for a scenic drive down the Albanian “Riviera.” This is a gorgeous drive on a fairly new road. I will also post a picture. Our next stop was Sirande that afternoon. There are two volunteers in Sirande who are married. Before we had dinner with Ben and Lauren, they also fixed us up with a similarly priced hotel with a seaside view. The next morning we headed to Corfu, a Greek island about 30min ferry ride from Sirande. This being my first and only trip so far to Greece I can say naively that Greek culture is all too similar to Albanian. As soon as we got off the ferry at the port of Corfu the similarities were evident. Bob, eager to eat and see the island, was first in line for customs. My mom and I however were trailing behind and were placed last in the queue. It took maybe 3 minutes of aggressive maneuvering by our fellow arrivals for Bob to join us in the rear of the line. I thought this was hilarious, but I am not sure Bob shared my point of view. I think he was a little taken aback due to the utter lack of “line etiquette” and how it was possible that a 95 pound elderly woman with more bags than I could possibly navigate snuck her way past my towering Uncle. This was not it. Similar to a situation I would expect in Albania, after we made it through customs we waited in a room for about twenty minutes unaware of the reasoning. My Uncle made friends with one of the customs officers and it turned out that they didn’t know who had the key to the door that led out of the building. They eventually tracked down the culprit with the key to our freedom and we were officially in Greece.
Corfu was a great time. As soon as we arrived we searched out a hotel. This was my first trip to Greece and it was really nice to get out of Albania, even if only for one night. As we were looking for a reasonably priced hotel we were coerced into a restaurant in the old town by a very convincing Greek man. Without even really knowing what was going on this sly restaurateur had delivered a three course meal and a bottle of wine. We had such a good time and it was such a funny experience with this guy that I don’t think my Uncle even minded the outrageous bill, the price of which I will leave to your imagination. We soon found a relatively cheap hotel after the dinner and then spent the night perusing the old town and enjoying its many cafes. The next morning we returned to Sirande and then headed straight away to Butrint. I won’t get into the details of Butrint other than it was mentioned in Homer’s The Odyssey. After a day at the historical park we headed straight away to Gjirokaster, an interesting city with many Ottoman era homes.
On the way to Gjiro we ran into our first and only vehicle issue. On a winding road we turned a corner and were introduced to one of Albania’s many potholes. Slam…flat tire. Not a huge problem but it was a cultural experience; of course I think everything is a cultural experience. We drove on a doughnut about 30KM to a Gomesteri (tire shop) that looked reasonable. A side note: in my experience if you get a flat tire in the states it takes anywhere from 1-3 hours for it to be changed, patched, or whatever. Usually you sit in a room drinking from a paper water cooler cup waiting anxiously for your car to even make it into the garage. This was a completely different experience. We pulled up to a beat down concrete building overflowing with used, new, and broken tires. The tire guy was working on another car with a group of about 5 people just watching him. He asked me what I needed so I told him we had a flat tire and needed a new one. Then, of course, he asked me where I was from, why I live in Albania, how I speak shqip, and why I don’t come live in Gjirokaster. The usual small talk with Albanians. He then stopped his work on the other car a retrieved a brand new tire for us. I told him that we had a rental car and he said, “Oup, then I will give you a bad tire.” He went a grabbed a less expensive tire and within 15 minutes we were back on the road. That night we slept in a cheap hostel that my friend Seth had recommended to us. The place really wasn’t that bad for my standards but Mom and Bob did not enjoy themselves. I think my Mom said, “It was a…good experience, but I would never do it again.” The building had no heat and little in the way of blankets. I think my guests put on all the clean clothing they had before they went to sleep. I slept like a rock! The next morning we headed for Tirana where we slept at my friend Charlie’s house because he was out. The next day we saw a few sights in Tirana and had lunch with a group of my Peace Corps friends. My family left at 3am. I was fairly bummed out to see them go but to be honest I needed a vacation after they left. I am sure they would say the same thing. We traveled over good part of the country and I was translating and guiding for 10 days. It was exhausting.