Winter in Albania and other places

This winter was an odd one, it took until March to say so because until last week I didn't believe that winter was really over.  Last winter was full of rain, floods and a little bit of snow.  This winter was cold and mostly dry with a whole lot of snow.  We made it through December and early January pretty easy, it was cold but not that bitter cold with rain that plagued us last winter, in the middle of January we left for a Balkans tour with our former training site mate Sarah.  The trio of us traveled to Dubrovnik Croatia, Sarajevo Bosnia and Herzegovina, with a day stop in Mostar BiH, Belgrade Serbia, Zagreb Croatia, Ljuljblana Slovenia, Trieste Italy, and finally Venice.  The trip was wonderful.  It was exciting and relaxing and tiring all at the same time.  We had places to stay in every city that we travelled to, mostly hostels with a few AirBnB places, a couchsurf and a hotel in Venice, but no idea about the transportation.  We knew that it was possible to get from one place to another we just had no idea of the schedules and exact costs.  Thanks to a lot of research from Tiff, we had a pretty good idea though and took off from Shkoder bound for Dubrovnik.
They call Dubrovnik the King of the Adriatic, and its pretty easy to see why.  The old city is a fortress that buts up against the sea on two sides, with the third side climbing up a huge hill.  We were told that at times the city rivaled the power of Venice in the Adriatic.  We stayed at a guesthouse up the hill from the old town, it was something like 600 stairs from the entrance of the castle to guesthouse.  Although it was a workout the views were amazing.  We sat one evening admiring the sunset over the Adriatic and drinking a bottle of Croat wine.  The biggest problem with Dubrovnik were the prices.  Croatia isn't on the euro yet but everything seemed just as expensive.  A burger and fries was about 7 euro or roughly 10 bucks, a little steep for my liking.
Next we set out for Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina.  Mostar is a city that should really not be a city except that it has a huge Ottoman Bridge in the middle of its old town.  This bridge draws tourists from all over, and even in January the city seemed to be bustling with tourists.  The bridge was huge but you could tell it wasn't as old as people made it seem, but it wasn't until we saw the photos from 1993 that we understood why.  During the Bosnian conflict with Serbia, (the one that the US brokered peace in Dayton) the Serbs completely demolished the bridge, so although the old bridge was from the Ottomans, it had to be rebuilt after 93.  The best part of Mostar, after the bridge was the old man selling little drinks on the street.  He said he was an engineer and that he made all of the drinks himself, what he was selling was a number of brandys made from different fruits and nuts.  After forcing us to try them all, plus a pomegranate concentrate we decided to buy the walnut brandy.  It actually tasted good, not like the cherry that tasted a bit like cough syrup, and a bottle of the pomegranate juice.  Unfortunately when I opened the pomegranate stuff the other day I didn't take into account the pressure difference and it exploded everywhere, so what started out as a half liter container, which should have made 3 liters of juice, ends up to be about 3 shot glasses worth of juice, enough to fill 2 more nalgenes of pomegranate juice.  The Walnut raki is still pretty good. 
From Mostar we made our way to Sarajevo.  Sarajevo is a beautiful city that was just a bit too Balkan for my taste.  The wonderful thing about Sarajevo though was that everything was very inexpensive.  A great meal, and we are talking serious food costs maybe about 5 euro.  They have this wonderful thing in the former Yugoslav countries called cevapcici, which are little sausages like things they serve with grilled onions and sometimes you can also get kajmak, which tasted like cheese and butter mixed.  you put a little kajmak on your cevap and it tasted like heaven.  Especially for a red meat loving American who doesn't eat all that much red meat in Albania.
We took an early morning bus from Sarajevo to Belgrade, Serbia.  Belgrade is an interesting city, I was a bit nervous being an American living in Albania, 2 of Serbia least liked nations, considering Kosovo is mostly ethnic Albanians and that the US intervened twice during the breakup of Yugoslavia.  Belgrade keeps a few of the buildings in the condition they were in after the US air campaign in Serbia.  It was odd to be so close to buildings that the US had destroyed just a little more than 10 years ago.  But the White City (Bel is white and grad is city) surprised me with it wide pedestrian streets, welcoming people and interesting museums.  We visited the Nikola Tesla museum and after being told to come back twice to wait for an English tour we had an excellent guided experience of the work of Tesla.
ex's furniture everyday they were gone until they came back to collect it.  Unfortunately for the ex they didn't get back in time.
From Zagreb we went on to Ljubljana (loo-bli-ana or loob-yana).  We made it in around lunch time and stopped at one of the best fish restaurants I've even eaten at.  They offered a lunch special of 3 courses for something like 6 euro, which was perfect a salad, soup and tuna fillet and fries.  Ljubljana has a small river flowing through the center of town with the newer side of town on one bank and the older part on the other.  Numerous bridges cross at points along the river.  The Dragon Bridge was my favorite, as it was guarded by four stone dragons, but the triple bridge and butchers bridge were also interesting.
From Ljubljana we travelled to Trieste, Italy.  This was more of an adventure than we originally planned on because while there used to be a train that travelled between the two cities, it had been cancelled due to someones economic issues.  Also complicating matters was that we were travelling on a Sunday, so buses that normally ran didn't.  We ended up on a bus at 5 am coming from Bulgaria and headed for Milan. 
The bus was supposed to take 3 hours, but we arrived at the bus station in Trieste in just over 1.  So we had some extra time to kill, and we didn't want to drag our bags all over creation we found some seats in the train station and memorized the schedule leaving for Venice.  Trieste is a city in Italy that really shouldn't be in Italy, there is only a narrow strip of land that connects it with the rest of the country, and all roads, and tracks lead right past Venice, so no matter where you are going you're going to Venice first.  Trieste was one of my favorite Italian cities, not because it overflowed with art, museums and fountains like Rome and Florence, but because you could tell it was a working city.  People went about doing what they were doing.  Many of these people are more Slovene than they are Italian, but because someone drew a line they were for many years cut off from their families in Yugoslavia, now that both nations are in the EU one can cross international boundaries like one crosses from Pennsylvania into Ohio.  One thing that Trieste does really well is coffee.  Illy espresso makes it home in Trieste, and the natives know how to drink coffee, they just aren't exactly sure what to call it.  To order a macchiato will get you a cappachino, a nero is an espresso, and a capo is a macchiato, add on top of that you can either get your coffee in a little espresso mug or a shot glass like cup that usually has a wire handle to keep you from burning your hand, and you've got a real confusing order, but all the headaches of ordering is worth it.  The coffee was divine.  We have been told that depending on where you are in Italy, people will tell you differently who has the best espresso.  In my opinion, Trieste has got it right, Illy can't be beat.
From Trieste we made our way to Venice.  This was the highlight of the trip for me, as I've always been interested in Venice.  How you built a city on a lagoon, no cars, dominate the Adriatic sea for hundreds of years and have collections of art and science rivaled only by a few others in the world.  Venice lived up to all of the hype.  We stayed in a little hotel just off the rialto bridge.  We got it for a steal, for 2 nights we paid around 100 euro for the three of us.  Now the same hotel is over 200 euro a night.  St. Marks, although smaller than St. Peters in Rome, had more decoration per square foot.  The canals were blue-green in color and didn't smell.  We didn't ride in a gondola, but we did take a ferry across the Grand Canal.  The ferry was a stripped down gondola, so it was kinda like we rode in one, and it only cost us 50 cents.  We also stumbled onto a little wine house, for something like 2.50 for a two liter bottle we could try any number of local wines.  The first night we tried a prosecco, and I'm not sure what we tried the next night, but I'm sure if we would have tried them all we wouldn't have found one we didn't like.  I love the Italians for that reason, they have the best wine in the world and instead of bottling it and selling it to snobs all over the world, they leave it in the barrel and put it into old bottles for anyone who makes the trip.  The sunsets in Venice were amazing, and it's the one place that I really didn't mind being completely lost.  All you had to do was wander until you found one of the signs pointing you towards some landmark, and either you could follow them, or not and continue wandering until the next one.  We finally had to go to the airport our flight was at 10:40 a.m., and after rushing trying to make our way out of the city, onto the bus and making it to the airport exactly 2 hours before our flight, we found out that Belleair had changed the flight time to 8:00p.m.  We decided instead of paying to go back into town we would hang out in the airport, read, walk and play cards.  After another delay of about an hour and a half we arrived back in Albania.  Luckily our friend drove down from Shkoder to pick us up and take us back that night so we didn't have to spend the night in the airport. 

After our Balkan adventure winter showed up in Shkoder.  In late February, Shkoder was buried twice with about 3 feet of snow each time.  This wouldn't be bad in most places in the US but Shkoder has no plow, and isn't used to snowfall.  So the snow sat around for weeks on roads, keeping kids from going to school, and generally being a nuisance.  Marble steps were extremely dangerous when the marble got cold because it would create a black ice like layer overtop of the totally smooth surface.  We slipped multiple times and the steps leading up to the World Vision office felt more like climbing a mountain than 10 stairs.  Now spring has arrived, shorts are again being unpacked and the winter clothes are either going into the suitcases, or in somecases the donation pile.  Many clothes just get plain worn out from the washing machines and extended wear they get here, which is a good thing because we have a lot of souvieners to bring home and we need some room in our suitcases to bring a little bit of Albania back to the US.  Hope that all is well in America, and we will see you in June!!!

Homeward Bound: The Albanian Journey

Well, it is official!  Tiffany and I will be landing after almost 812 days abroad.  Due to finances and stupid airlines we will have to wait to be back in Ohio a bit longer as flying into Pittsburgh International Airport saved us quite a large sum of money.  We have spent the last week looking at flights leaving from everywhere in Europe.  Tirana finally won out as the cheapest and easiest option since we will have all of our luggage.  We will be downsizing quite a bit in terms of clothing, but have also picked up a few things along the way, mostly for family and friends, but also some stuff for us too.  We have asked many people what they wanted from Albania, but if we haven't asked you ,and you would like something please let us know...We'll buy it for you for free it'll only cost you $2000 dollars shipping and handling, we do bulk orders though!  Now we have to figure out how to spend about 20 days that we have free from our close of service to our flight back to the USA.  Also we haven't really thought about where we will go when we get to Pittsburgh, so if any of our family or friends would like to meet us at the airport and give us a ride, you would have two very happy RPCVs. (Returned Peace Corps Volunteers). The R being the key letter!  Now for two months of planning, wrapping up projects and saying goodbye to new friends.  Will try to update this thing again soon with pictures from the winter.  Talk to you all soon, if not online then June 5th!!!!

Great Northen Circle

I started writing this a while ago and never finished it, after this one hopefully I will write another to update everyone with what we have been doing since summer.

In June, the Peace Corps along with the embassy opened the northern sections of Albania to be explored and visited by Peace Corps volunteers, for the past year we had been able to visit that part of the country but only using annual leave, the same type of leave we use to visit places like Italy, Greece, and America.  It attracted a few volunteers, but most of our group explored the Albania that we could access without annual leave days.

We had been in contact with a group that runs a summer camp in Theth for the children that live there all summer while their parents run guesthouses, cafes, or just live in their traditional village (most traditional villagers now live in and around Shkoder all winter and move back to Theth when the pass opens in the spring).  

Tiffany and I started talking about visiting Theth and another small village across the mountain called Valbona in May and hearing different stories about how to best visit the northern expanse of Shkoder.  We had heard about a trail that was hike-able from Valbona to Theth and thought that we could with a group of people see a large chunk of the north in one trip.  We decided our first stop would be the ferry that runs up the artificial Lake Koman, from the village near the hydro power plant of the same name to Fierze, the next hydro dam on the Drin River.  16 people ended up joining us on the adventure, 15 Peace Corps Volunteers and 1 Albanian who wanted to be outdoorsy with us.    

The journey was extremely hot and long but after nearly 3 hours of cruising up Lake Koman we arrived at Fierza, we all loaded into a furgon and were driven to Bajram Curri, the largest city in the north and a place for us to pick up supplies for the trip.  After a great lunch organized for us by two volunteers placed in Bajram Curri, we had some time to relax and gather supplies.  I immediately went for sausage and bread, while Tiffany wandered over to the fruits and vegetables.  Camping isn't as easy in Albania as it is in America, finding foods that are hiking and camping friendly is much more difficult.  We spent the night with the volunteers and much of the next morning hanging around in Bajram Curri, around 1:30 we gathered in the center of town fully stocked up (and weighed down) with supplies.  We made the furgon trip to Valbona in what must have been record time.  I was a little surprised to see a lack of anything in Valbona that you could consider to be a town or village.  Where the furgon let us off was a large hotel/ cafe/ restaurant but nothing else around.  I knew that these places were remote but I expected to see some houses clustered together.  We hiked from Valbona about an hour to another village where we would set up camp for the night.

The next morning we packed up our gear and started the trek towards Thethi.  The lower section of the hike took us slowly around the mountains that surrounded the Valbona River, as we continued to climb the hike got harder and the rewards sweeter.  The views of the mountains and valley below were remarkable and along the trail were patches of wild strawberries.  Sometime you would get into a clearing and the smell of strawberries would flood your nose and everyone immediatly began looking for the little red dots hidden in the green along the trail.  They were so sweet and ripe.  After many hours of climbing, sometimes slowly and sometimes very steep sections, we arrived at the pass between the Valbona and Shala valleys.  We had climbed almost 3000 feet and had almost as much to descend before we could rest and relax in Theth for the next couple of days.  We took the opportunity to snap a few pictures at the top.

The next day we visited with the Balkan Peace Park summer camp project and also had some time to explore Thethi.  Some of us helped make musical instruments with the younger kids while other took a hike with the older ones.  After the camp ended, we took a walk around town to visit the church, and tower as well as a wonderful family who served some of the best food we had ever eaten.  After lunch we went to cool off at the waterfall.

The next day we all got into a furgon and headed back towards Shkoder where we once again drove over the mountains out of the valley only this time to the west of Theth.  It was a remarkable trip and one that we will always remember.  For the rest of the pictures head over to:  Great Northern Circle Pictures

Spring in Albania

Wow! It has been forever since we have posted, partially due to travel outside the country, partially due to work and lack there of with in the country.  I guess there are 4 major events that we will discuss and 1 major event that we will avoid.  The avoided is the disputed election for mayor of Tirana, the capital city.  The original count gave the socialist incumbent a victory by 10 votes but as they have opened the ballot boxes for city council they have discovered that there were votes placed there as well, enough for the Democratic candidate to pull ahead.  The question now is whether to count the "misplaced" votes or to not.  Demonstrations have taken place in Tirana as well as other cities around the country to push for their opinions.  As for the mayoral races in the rest of the country it seems like all the bigger cities in the north (including Shkoder) have gone or stayed Democratic.  The larger cities in the south have remained to changed to Socialist.  The big change in the north was Puka, which was socialist, will have a democratic mayor.

The first thing I will discuss in some detail is the Ultimate Frisbee "league" I'm trying to start.  Working with "The Door" again, we had 10 ultimate discs shipped from Disccraft to Albania and I began "coaching" one group of boys in their gym.  The gym is literally a basketball court sized area with little or no out of bounds, so we have adapted the rules for this size of a field.  We don't have pulls, and any disc that touches the wall or ceiling is a turnover.  The boys seem to like the game because of how closely the game resembles soccer.  I have been working to get the game outside, but when the weather turns nice for a few days and before I can schedule a place outside it turns nasty again.  Also I have been helping World Vision take care of their growth and the practice times from 12:20 - 1 Tuesdays and Thursday was interrupted many times by me having to go out and take pictures with World Vision.  So as of now I have 1 possible group of boys and am no further along with anything than I was in February, and I was hoping to be outside playing with 3 or 4 teams by this time, but avash avash (slowly, slowly).

Secondly, Tiffany successfully held a race here in Shkoder.  She worked with Jessi and The Door to hold a 3 kilometer race from the center of town to the top of the castle.  If you remember the pictures of the castle it is quite a hill.  There were over 100 participants that signed up to run and we had over 80 finish the race and turn in the race bibs.  I participated in the race itself along with a few other Peace Corps Volunteers and our Country Director, and finished first out of that group.  I didn't place in the top 3 but ran a personal best of 12:30ish.  which for 1.8 miles up a pretty steep hill isn't too bad.  There were some issues with the race finishing order, but it was all worked out in the end and it is an event that Tiff hopes to hold again next year.  Kastriot wants to hold a race twice a year!  It even inspired some of the Peace Corps volunteers to attempt a half-marathon in September in Ireland.  We are hoping to make it and I would like to run the 13 miles in under 2 hours, considering the winner of the Boston marathon finished his full in under 2, I hope I can run half that in the same amount of time.  

Thirdly, we had an opportunity to take a vacation with Tiff's parents.  They made it out of the US for the first time ever, voluntarily.  The map gives you an idea of where we travelled.  The black lines are by plane, red by train and the blue lines by boat (Royal Caribbean Cruises).   

We met in Milan, travelled to Florence and Rome by train, caught the ship in Rome and sailed to Athens, Kushadasi Turkey, Rhodes Greece, Istanbul, and Naples.  Everyone loved Florence and we would love to go back to see more, specifically the Uffizi Gallery with some of DaVinci's and Rafael's artwork, but we did get to see The David, and it was remarkable.  I wasn't really impressed with Rome although Vatican City was an exception.  The Colosseum and many other fountains and buildings weren't as spectacular as I had built them up to be.  I also really likes Kushadasi, the city was modern and clean but not ultra touristy like Istanbul.  Tiff's parents also came back for a few days to Shkoder where we got to show them around our city a little as well as take them to Kruja (the most touristy place we have in Albania).

Finally, we had an opportunity to meet the new trainees that will be moving in and around the Shkoder area.  We will have a new TEFL teacher coming to Shkoder, there will be a COD in Vau Dejes and Koplik (both are smaller cities about 1/2 hour from town, and a Health Educator in Koplik as well.  We are excited to get to spend more time with the new volunteers and help them adjust to life in the north of Albania.  While we were down at their training in Elbasan we took time to have a "working vacation."  We have never explored the South west coastline and we decided that pre-tourist season would be a good time to do that.  We picked two cities to visit since we had 3 days to explore, Himare and Vlora.  We went to Himare first, and if it wasn't for the 5 and a half hour furgon ride we would be visiting there a lot more.  It had to be one of the most beautiful places we have ever been.  Crystal blue water, white marble rocks jutting right out into the ocean and in some places forming small tide pools that we could watch small crabs and other creatures scurrying around in.  The volunteer there also had a beautiful apartment.  The downside is she is by herself and about an hour an a half from any other volunteer, but we offered to trade her sites and she said no so she must be happy there.  Vlora was also pretty but it had more of the feel of a big city on the ocean.  Kind of like a Long Beach in LA.  The city was a little more dirty and bigger.  I'm sure I would have liked it more had we not just seen Himare, but I've also been to much worse too.  Here are some pictures of Himare that I took with my little camera.  I packed light for this trip, 6 days with only my book bag and a sleeping bag, plus an extra pair of shoes in a plastic bag tied to the outside of my book bag.  Have I mentioned I love spring in Albania, you can pack like this and be totally fine, 6 pairs of underwear, 3 tshirts, a dress outfit and a pair of jeans and a pair of shorts, plus a light jacket for the cool evenings.   Looking forward to seeing more of the country this summer and fall before winter sets back in.  We've decided to explore more this year, helping other volunteers with projects around the country instead of hunkering down in Shkoder waiting on our own projects.  I think that is all for now.  Hope the spring is good for you all and that it stops raining long enough to enjoy some of it outside! 

Pictures from Thessaloniki

 Statue of Alexander The Great near the waterfront.

Galerius Arch, part of the wall of the city that has been saved.

 The boat down from Aristotelis square really close to the 5 euro per coffee Starbucks.  They used to decorate boats with lights now they just make a boat with lights.

 Tiffany in an arch in the Roman Agora.  I like taking pictures of Tiff in archways.

 Picture of the dome from Church of St. George

 From the White Tower along the waterfront, it used to be a prison in the Ottoman period, next to Alcatraz probably the best prison view ever.

The top of the White Tower.

Per Shume Vjet!

It means "For many years" literally, it is used as a greeting for Christmas and New Years.  These past few weeks have been fun.  After the waters receded from our little flooding experience Tiff and I quickly headed for Thessaloniki, Greece.  It was our first trip outside of Albania since we got here and it was much needed, but Albania wasn't about to let us go that easy.  We took a bus from Shkoder to Thessaloniki, for 30 euro each the ticket agent said the trip would take about 10 to 12 hours.  On the trip about 3 hours south of Shkoder, there was snow falling and on the ground, (this was somewhere between Durres and Elbasan, for anyone with a sense of Albanian geography) when we pulled into the bus station in Elbasan there were a couple of inches on the ground.  Further along the road to Librazhd many cars and other buses stopped to put snow chains on, our bus kept chugging along.  Finally on a steep hill somewhere passed Librazhd we met a roadblock of cars stopped on the hill to put chains on, when they stopped others were forced to stop behind them leaving many cars stuck on the side of the snow covered road.  What made it even more interesting was the rather large canyon that was right out of the window Tiff and I were looking out of.  As the driver and his assistant put the chains on the tires slowly rolling backwards and closer to the edge of this canyon more and more traffic piled up behind us.  Finally the bus got the chains on and we crawled slowly over the hill.  Shortly after one of the chains came loose and we had to stop to put it back on.  Then again, this time the driver decided to take them off completely as the road had been cleared by the plows, and we were off of the large hill.  But something didn't seem to be working correctly, we rode the rest of the way through Pogradec, and past Korca stopping every 10 minutes or so for about 5 or 6 minutes to fiddle with the engine and then drove on for about 10 minutes.  Finally we made it to the border!  Getting through the Albanian checkpoint was easy but then came the Greek checkpoint.  We had heard horror stories about the time it took buses to make it through the border, but we figured with Albanians no longer needing visas to go to Greece or most of the rest of the EU it wouldn't be as bad, plus our bus was only about half full so it couldn't take that long right? Wrong! 2 1/2 hours of people selling bags, phone cards, food and drinks, CDs and just begging for money while we sat patiently we were finally through and on our way to Thessaloniki.  We didn't stop again except to let a couple of people off at a couple exits on the highway.  We finally arrived in Thessaloniki at 8 (7 Albanian time).  A total of a 16 1/2 hour trip.  Once we got there everything was fantastic, even if a little expensive.  I have gotten used to paying Albanian prices for things and was suffering a little from the sticker shock of a 5 euro coffee, or a 2 euro salep from a street vendor.  That's all Tiffany heard about the whole trip :)  We took our wonderful hosts to a dinner at a restaurant they liked near the water front, and had some of the best seafood we've ever had.  The calamari didn't even need marinara sauce to make it delicious.  We spent the rest of our week shopping at Ikea and walking the streets checking out churches and other historic sites.  One church we went inside was built in the fourth century, and we visited the old Roman agora that had buildings that were built in the fourth century BC.  We also took a couple of days to just relax and walk around the little neighborhood where we were staying.
We arrived back to Albania on the 23rd, just in time to sleep through Christmas eve.  When we finally got up Christmas day we were suprised to see it much like any other day even on the Catholic side of town.  We left on the 26th for Tirana to have another Christmas dinner with our American neighbors in exile before they left for France.  They had Christmas dinner catered by "Steven's Center" which gave us a whole turkey, you have no idea how happy were were to see a table with an actual turkey, mashed potatoes and all the fixings even pumkin pie (even though it wasn't as good as Grandma Bloom's pies).  We returned to Shkoder the 27th to head back to work for the first time since we had gone to Greece  only to find out that the week between Christmas and New Years is much like in the US, some people are there, some people aren't and not a whole lot is going on.  Needless to say we have been prepping for New Years and doing some cleaning.  Here's wishing you all a Happy New Year, enjoy the last days of 2010, especially you soon to be volunteers who are getting ready to start their service in a short 2 and a half months.  Per Shume Vjet Gezuar! Lots of love!

wet and wild

This will be a short one but we wanted to update everyone with our status.  There has been some flooding in Shkoder this past week, our part of town has not been affected and we did not really notice a difference in the happenings around town other than some shorter tempers and a lot of people walking around with wet pants.  That and constant buzz of helicopters and military personel carriers moving through town.  The villages have been hit the worst as normal, but the US ambassador along with the staff at the Peace Corps here in Albania have moved us temporarily to Tirana.  They will continue to monitor the situation in the north and will let us return to Shkoder as soon as they feel we are safe.  We will post more later complete with our own pictures and stories from Shkoder.  Until then the best article we have seen was on CNN, so for now hope all is well in the US and we are doing well here.