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.

Sometimes this country is just strange...

Since I haven't sat down to write in so long this will be a mix of stories from the past month or so.  Don't take strange in a bad way.  Strange can be good.  I used to call Tiff strange or weird and she would be offended, its not a bad thing, you are different, and different can be good.  Albania is strange, Albanians are strange.  This whole experience can be really strange.  Let me start with my best example, I was heading to work one morning and got in the elevator to head up to the office on the 7th floor.  I got in and pressed the 6 on the elevator like I always do, because in the elevator the ground floor is 0, but if you took the stairs up one flight you would see a sign announcing that you are on the second floor, strange.  Back to the elevator, and elderly gentleman gets in with me after parking his bicycle in the hallway, the doors close and we begin making our way up, he asks me if I live in the building, I answer "no, I work here."  He hears my obvious accent and then asks me something I don't quite understand, I ask him to repeat it and he second time I pick up what he asked me.  He wanted to know if I was Turkish.  Really? Me? Have you seen me?  Do I look Turkish at all?  I'll give you almost any Western European country you want because you probably don't see that many but Turkish, not so much.  I told him that no I am from America just as the elevator reached his floor.  Strange.
I went to the Vodaphone store to put money on my phone so I could make phone calls and send texts.  I got to the store and told the guy behind the desk that I wanted to add one thousand leke (about 10 dollars) to my phone.  He looked at me like I was crazy and said I could add that amount.  I put my phone down and pulled a one thousand leke note out of my wallet and handed it to him.  He took it, put my phone number into the computer and I got a text message saying I had ONE THOUSAND LEKE added to my account.  As I turned around to leave he told me that I really wanted ten thousand leke on my phone not one thousand.  Strange. The Albanians like to use a system of called old leke.  I guess a while ago the government wanted to use smaller amounts of money to fit more equally with the standard dollar, pound and euro, so they dropped a zero from the currency.  The problem was they didn't force anyone to use it.  I'm almost sure if I went and asked the Prime Minister, Sali Berisha, how much his car cost he would reply to me in old leke.  I realize by now that this blog is probably being read not only by family and friends, but maybe some new group 14 volunteers, so here is my tidbit of advice for you.  Love the old leke system.  It is actually easier for me to understand a price in old leke than new, for example dy mije pese cind pese dhejte (2,550) versus dy cind pesedhejte e pese. (255) have someone read those to you as fast as they can, which one do you understand more easily? The first one right, that extra 0 keeps really long weird number sequences from happening at the end.  Granted we generally get both prices because we look, act, sound, and smell like foreigners, but I like the old leke best, and I'm guessing if you are coming here you will someday too.  You'll complain about it, we all do, but then you'll come to embrace it and if your confused just ask, but generally you'll know that you pay 500 leke for a dinner out and 50 leke for a candy bar, not 5000 for dinner and 500 for a candy bar. 
Staying on the money theme, in the US I always (tried) to carry around a 20 dollar bill, I figured I could use it in case of emergency, car needed gas, needed to grab a bite, whatever came up.  Whatever it was from a pack of gum or candy bar no one wouldn't take a 20.  Here having a 2000 leke (roughly 20 bucks) note is like being cursed.  You go to the ATM and people are standing in line at one while another is completely free, I walk up to the free one knowing exactly what will happen, I will get my weekly budget out ( I try to go to the ATM once a week, this prevents me from spending too much money on coke early in the month only to run out of toilet paper at the end, a little extreme of an example but it is my way of budgeting) and from the machine will slide a 2000 leke bill.  I hit myself for coming after the bank has closed for the day (3:00 pm) put the bill in my wallet and begin planning how to spend it.  I try to spend about 500 leke a day so 2000 would be 4 days of my week.  And to hand a cashier, waiter, anyone short of the beggar on the street 2000 leke you will get a death stare worthy only of having cursed someones dying grandmother.  Many of the businesses that we frequent often would tell us to pay next time, but we are on the other side of town we either have to wait for the manager to find change or walk away without or groceries.  This will happen less often with 1000 leke usually at a coffee bar when you are paying 120 leke for a couple of coffees.  But change is a foreign concept to many people here.  And we won't even mention being given change in bubble gum.  I heard once a volunteer saved his and bought something entirely with gum given as change.  Me, I eat my change the lemon and cola is pretty good even though it is out of flavor by the time I get home.  Strange.  Hope things are well in the USA, enjoy your holiday this week.  If there is anything in the Black Friday ads I could use in Albania feel free to go to the stores Thursday night wait outside all night buy it Friday morning (now that is STRANGE) and spend the 60 some dollars it costs to ship it here to me.  I love not working retail right now!!

gjakmarrje comes (again) to Shkoder

What a weekend!  Things kicked off Friday, I came home early to start a relaxing weekend, and it really has been, but in a very weird way. 
    Gjakmarrje (jock marr yea, or just jock marr) is the Albanian found in  the Kanun of Lekë Dukagjin.  The Kanun has been present in Albanian society for a long time but was made into a formal code somewhere around the 15th century.  The kanun or code has many rules and I'm sure most Albanians don't know them all but one that many people know is gjakmarrje.  It literally means blood taking (gjak is blood and marr is the verb to take).  The code goes something like this... If a person, lets just say person A, kills another person, person B, then the male family members of person B are responsible to murder a male family member from the family of person A.  It could be person A or his brothers, father, sons, or cousins for that matter.  Normally all of the stipulations are decided upon by a meeting of the families and the chief of the tribe, when there was a tribal chief to mediate meetings.  Things that could be decided in this meeting were the members of the family that were eligible or ineligible for the blood feud, or if a family was wealthy enough they could buy their families out of the blood feud.  Family members are always safe in their own house, but not outside of it.  This practice is also what keeps foreigners and guests safe here.  If person C were to come to your house for a few days from out of town and while they were in town they were killed, you would be responsible for avenging person C's death.  As residents of Shkoder blood feud is a little more visible to us than to many other volunteers in Albania.  The Kanun has always been more predominant in the north than in the south and during communism it was the main form of justice since Hoxha's army did not venture into the mountain highlands.  Thethi ( a city in the north of Albania) is cut off from any contact for around 6 months a year depending on the snows, and that is presently imagine when Albania had all of 20 cars, that is really cut off from the rest of the world.  After the fall of communism in Albania people felt once again that they had to manage for themselves, and the Kanun reemerged as the primary means of creating "justice" that the state was not able to guarantee.  One particular example is a great one to show the lack of power that government had.  During the years immediately following the fall of communism everyone built whatever they could where ever they could trying to gain a claim to land.  Many former parks and green spaces were overrun with illegal buildings even in the capital city of Tirana.  One place that many people chose to build was a long the river that ran through the heart of the city.  The government came along and started destroying the houses along the river and forcing people out of their homes they had built but one family was engaged in a blood feud...so what choice did the government have?  Of course they let the home stay illegally on the river.  Eventually the family members passed away of natural cause and the house still sits on the river in the heart of Tirana.
    In Shkoder we have at least one house where we know that a current family is trapped as self made prisoners, and we have heard rumors about a second house that is close to one of our favorite restaurants, what we had not heard about was an actual killing because of a blood feud.  I figured that these men just holed themselves up inside their houses until they eventually passed away from old age.  That is until this weekend.  I was on facebook catching up on the latest farmville news when my friend and local pastor posted that all the events for this coming weekend were cancelled.  He has a friend in from the Netherlands or some other country and so I gave him a text message to see if everything was ok.  He replied back that a pastor had been killed here in Shkoder.  I got a call from a co-worker at the Aarhus center that I have been working with to meet him to give him the pictures that I had from a meeting we had on Tuesday.  He was one the phone when I arrived and when he finished his conversation he looked extremely distressed.  I know how small the 4th largest city in Albania is and knew that he had just heard the same news I had heard a few minutes earlier.  From the news reports I have read and people I have talked to the cousin of this pastor murdered someone between 5 to 8 years ago.  The brother of the victim took his revenge on Friday.  People are in shock over the murder especially since it took place in a very public area of town near the pedestrian walkway.  The key issue, in my opinion, is what changes will come about because of this event.  Obviously changing the public opinion on blood feud is many years off but I believe it is the responsibility of the governments of Shkoder city, district and region as well as the national government to begin putting an end to blood feuds in whatever way possible.  It appears that Albania and Bosnia will gain visa free travel to EU nations this November.  They also hope to someday gain admittance into the European Union.  I find it very hard to believe that the European nations will admit Albania with a system that at the very least permits and in many ways encourages an eye for an eye, especially when it spreads to entire family of the perpetrator. 
    In other news, we had our first major power outage of out time here just over 32 hours.  The power went out sometime before 1:30 Tuesday afternoon, and returned 9:31 Wednesday night.  Luckily we had not been shopping recently and lost very little food, just a few apples that were sitting in the puddle of defrosted freezer ice.  I managed to make it through the whole Buckeyes game last night but fell asleep during the michigan-michigan State game.  (the power outage really adjusted my sleeping schedule to sleep by 10 or 10:30)  I woke up to a pleasant surprise of MSU beating u of m.  What I discovered later because it didn't even make the first headline of ESPN.com was that Alabama also lost to South Carolina.  So now Ohio  State should be #1 in the BCS poll that is due to be released some time this evening.  Makes a good end to a rather shocking weekend.  Go Bucks!!

working too much?

It has been a rather busy couple of weeks.  Two Wednesdays ago a Peace Corps representative met with Tiff and I and a coworker in our office talking about how our first three months were going in the office.  After talking with her for for about an hour, she implied that I worked too much.  I think that I was taking tsaying that we were working 24/7 too literally and I am trying to relax the amount of time I spend at the office.  But things are picking up quickly.  Last Saturday, the 25th of September a village outside of Shkoder held the first (hopefully annual) "Play for Peace" soccer tournament.  The day was centered around the International Day of Peace (September 21) and organized by The Door, an NGO funded by Norwegian Aid.  Tiffany and I had proposed the idea to Kastriot a while back, and he ran with the idea.  The Peace Corps country director came and spoke on a very wet and rather chilly day, but we still had a full complement of teams.  4 boys teams and 4 girls teams competed.  In the end the boys from Berdice and the girls from Juban won.  Everyone involved was very excited on the success for both the soccer games and the crowd turnout (which was estimated between 200-250) in spite of the terrible weather.  That afternoon we welcomed other volunteers from "the north" for our first northern dinner.  We had a potluck at our place with veggie lasagna, spicy chicken bruschetta, babaganoush, samosas, chili, rice with veggies, potato and corn salad, fruit pizza, brownies, oatmeal raisin cookies, fruit salad,  and honey cake, along with a few drinks.  The party was a success but we were exhausted from the soccer tournament and I fell asleep in the 2nd quarter of the Buckeyes game (which was already a blowout by that point).  The week was filled with coffee meetings and planning for an environmental group that Tiff and I are wanting to start here in Shkoder.  US Aid had a meeting on Friday to help plan the next phase of their local governance program which Tiff helped organize bringing a few NGOs that weren't invited by city hall and met with the representative before the meeting.  Tiff also has helped the Aarhus Center complete a few post season beach surveys, and we were very surprised with some of the responses.  We have also been busy watching all of the new fall TV shows, and catching up on the ones we have been missing.  I thought we watched a lot of TV in the US but it is true when they say you never watch as much TV than when you are in Albania.  On Tueday I will travel back to Puka to attend a deforestation round table that hopefully will end with a convention being signed by all the leaders of the Puka region to stop illegal logging.  We will also have information sessions in the schools for the Outdoor Ambassadors group that we want to have the first meeting on the 13th of October.  I have some other plans for groups I want to organize but I'll wait to get more information before I share that with the world (or all 8 people that read the blog).  In other news it looks like Tiff's family will be visiting us in the spring, which is very exciting for us and I think they are excited as well. We are always excited to have more visitors.  Hope all is well in the US and to talk to everyone soon.

It's that time of year again

First off we'd like to thank everyone who has sent care packages recently.  The Youngstown gang, including mom, grandparents, and UC & AG, Newark mom and dad, and Aunt Marcy.  I think the post office is getting tired of us as they are now setting time constraints for us coming in to pick up the latest two packages between 8 and 12 noon, so I got myself out of bed one chilly fall morning and rode my bike down to the post office.  After fighting my way up to the front of the "line" they brought out two packages full of goodies.  Spices, candy, rain boots for Tiff and lots of other stuff. 

We have decided that if we never reuse any of the reusable shopping bags we will still have extras to give away as wrapping paper for gifts!  Thank you all very much for all of them but we have got more than what we know what to do with now. 

What these weeks have been filled with are football of the American variety.  We were out of town for the Marshall game (we left town on Friday morning at 7:00 a.m.  the game was actually Friday morning at 1:30 a.m.) but we downloaded the game online to see it later in the week.  The game we wanted to make sure we saw was the OSU- Miami game.  We had a friend (Buckeye) come in from a town nearby and we made hot dogs, mac and cheese, chips and guacamole, pasta salad and had plenty of American candy to go around.  This was the first attempt of watching a Buckeye game in real time over the internet.  Here is the result:  

We moved the couch in the bedroom, set a projector on a table sitting on the bed and turned on the game.  We watched the first drive of Ohio State and the internet went out all over Shkoder.  (Aunt Marcy: I know what you were going through for the Marshall game.)  The girls gave up on the game about 10:30 when the internet still hadn't come back, I went outside to let the girls sleep and the internet came back with a few minutes to go in the 2nd half.  I watched the rest of the game outside, trying not to yell too much.  When the game ended and OSU had won I was still wide awake and watched some of the Penn State- Alabama game, until I finally passed out from exhaustion.  We got up in the morning to watch the whole game, and I tried to be quiet about who won.  Of course everyone was happy once Pryor downed the ball the final time and all of us could say (a few hours late) that we had beat Miami (again)!  Yesterday we could not find the game online to watch but we were able to listen to a radio broadcast of the game.  It makes us feel more at home to know every Saturday and Sunday we can settle in behind the computer and watch (or listen) to the Buckeyes winning, and the Browns losing, although hopefully that will change soon.  We hope to have at least one more Buckeye Big Screen showing here this season, and maybe more depending on when the games are.  We do pretty well with the noon or 1 p.m. starts but the 3:30's require a mid day nap, and the 7s require going through jet lag again.  We hope to watch the game against that team up north at the end of November, and maybe the Penn State game depending on the time.  There is an actual tOSU grad here in Albania and she has promised Buckeye candy if we host another party.  We might even invite the traitor from Berat who was born in Ohio but likes corn and blue better than scarlet and grey, just to give us someone to pick on.  Hope all is well in the USA, hope your teams are winning, unless their name starts with and M and ends with an ichigan.  Go Bucks!  O - H...!

Greastest Care Package to date

The greatest care Package yet to date, 26 pounds of spices, and candy, Lots and Lots of Candy!

Finally the traveling part

So we realized that this blog was called the travels of TnT not the travel, so in the interest of informing people about more of the country than the Shkoder region, we made a few trips.  Well, we made the trips to see more of the country, but also to let everyone back home know about these places too.  When we returned home people in my office as well as other peace corps volunteers asked what our favorites were, so I thought it would be a good idea to give my best and worst of Albania list, and at the end I will share some pictures of the places we have been and let you choose your favorites.  The two "peoples choice" categories are best castle, and best view from a castle.  Sorry cities without castles, you didn't make the cut.  Sorry Elbasan, your castle is nice but I don't have a good picture and the field castle idea just doesn't provide inspiring views.  Tiffany has declined to compare anything since she feels that Albanians compare too much and doesn't like my awards idea, but I digress. On to the awards...

Best City... the nominees are Shkoder, Lezhe, Tirana, Gjirokaster and Berat.
Shkoder is a nice city, the hub of the north, it has 3 rivers, a lake and the ocean just to the southwest.  It is also the "cultural capital" of Albania, boasting many famous poets and singers.  Lezhe is nice, having the big city feel and the beach so close. Tirana is the capital crowded and metropolitan but it is a good place to stop when you need a bit of the Western World feel.  Gjirokaster is also a nice city but the hike up the hill is a killer and not one that I would enjoy having to do every time I needed to pick up some imported item.  The fact that many of the imports come in the country through Gjirokaster and are sold there does give it some bonus points.  Finally Berat, the city of 1000 windows ( I only counted 997, just kidding)  Berat is beautiful with the castle and river running through the city, but the water schedule bumps it down because sometimes you just need to shower, do dishes and laundry in the middle of the day.  For those of you not familiar with a water schedule it is how many cities distribute water for a few hours during the day generally once in the morning and again in the evening, many residents have storage tanks to provide 24 hour water, but they notice a lack of pressure when not on city water.

And the winner is....  SHKODER!!  They say there is no place like home, and I may be a bit biased but I like it the best.

Worst Climb to a Castle (or best place to train to climb Mt. Everest if there were a castle at the top of Mt. Everest)...The nominees are Shkoder, Lezhe, Berat and Gjirokaster...
Shkoder's Rozafa castle sits on a hill on the south end of the city, Shkoder itself is as flat as a day old can of Coke so the castle rises up out of seemingly nowhere.  Lezhe's castle also sits above the relatively flat city, the castle is less visited by tourists so the path is more of a goat trail than a road of many others on the list.  Berat's castle sits perched between to large mountains the road leading to the castle wraps around the hill providing an easy drive for a car but at points a steep climb.  As mentioned before Gjirokaster's castle sits above both the old and new cities providing views of the river valley below.  The recent settlers of Gjirokaster built the city at the base of the hill but the old town was built on the side of the mountain with nothing but straight cobblestone roads to get to the castle.

And the winner (or loser) is...Gjirokaster.  I know it had to be painful for armies trying to take the castle but someone had to think about tourists centuries later!  (To be fair the true loser of this category is Elbasan their castle sits in the middle of the city with nothing even close to a hill anywhere close)

Best Beach...

No idea still have only been to 2 in the north, and I have heard the southern beaches are pretty nice

Best Souvenir Shopping (or best place to spend all of your money on things no one will know what to do with)...The nominees are Shkoder, Tirana, and Kruja.
Shkoder has a number of souvenir shops around town including the tourist information center.  Tirana has many souvenir shops selling everything from Albania t-shirts to pens with the Albanian flag, they even have mobile shops around the necks of teenagers that hang out in the center of town where the tourists all pass through.  Kruja's "souvenir central" is set up in their old bazaar.  The narrow cobblestone street is lined with merchants speaking in English asking you to come in to look at their merchandise.

And the winner is....Kruja.  The merchants can be a bit annoying after awhile but there is no beating the setting.  If I was looking to buy my set of Albanian leader coffee mugs in the 1700's I'd look in the same place as I do today and it would probably look pretty similar too.

Alright we will take a pause for now from the awards but I want to know your opinion so post your favorite castle pics and view from a castle on the message board or E-mail me. 

The nominees  for best castle are...

A

B

C

D

                                                                

And the nominees for best view...

A

B

C

summer camp

It has been 2 exhausting weeks.  World Vision organized 4 summer camps in 2 weeks.  That means we had 2 camps going on at the same time Monday-Friday.  The camps started at some point around 9 a.m. and finished at some point around 1 p.m.  One camp a week was held here in Shkoder at a Kolping center.  Kolping is a organization affiliated with the Catholic Church and has guest houses around the world.  The other was held in the villages.  The first week in Drobrac, the second in Stoj.  I helped to organize the camps here, but volunteered in the villages two days a week.  Tiffany and our site mate Jessi also volunteered a day or two each week as well, mostly at Kolping but each made it out to Dobrac as well.  I have never felt as terrible about my level of Albanian as I have with the kids.  They spoke so fast and I realized even having simple conversations with people in the office they are slowing their speech down so that I am able to understand.  The kids don't do that for me, they speak their fast high pitched kids speak and leave me looking around for someone to translate.  Fortunately I had Adi, the games coordinator at the camp who also served as my translator, and after he learned how the game or activity worked, he pretty much took over to let me take notes or time the kids, whichever was needed.  Without Adi the kids would still be staring blankly at me waiting for directions in a language they understood.  Instead of explaining he rest of the camp I thought I would share a few of the pictures.

A Tale of Two Roads

This past weekend Tiff and I decided to travel to Kukes for our first non-capital excursion as volunteers. We chose Kukes for a few reasons; first the volunteers there were hosting a training event for Outdoor Ambassadors ( a group that promotes enviromental awareness through activities like hiking and camping), secondly we wanted to go to Puke (pronounced with the e like an A), thirdly we just needed to get out of Shkoder. Our list of sites to visit also included Fushe Arrez (fush arrez) but due to bus schedules and furgon routes we couldn't make it there, but we have a bus that makes a trip to the Fushe everyday so we will make it there soon. As you know Shkoder is in the north-west part of Albania. We are surronded on three sides by water (1 lake, 2 rivers) and prone to flooding, we are also about a 45 minute drive to Ulcin, Montenegro, so we have heard, we are still not allowed to leave the country. Kukes on the other hand is almost directly across the country traveling due east. They are surronded on 3 sides by water (1 lake that used to be a river) and was completely rebuilt after the old Kukes was submerged under the lake when the government dammed the river in the 1970's. They are also about a 45 minute drive from Prizen, Kosovo.

We left Shkoder on Friday and traveled to Puke on a bus. About 2 hours later we arrived on the outskirts of the city, our bus was bound for a different location and they took the road that runs along the outskirts of Puke instead of the one that runs through the city. We spent the day with the volunteers relaxing and joking, we were also joined by 4 other volunteers that were working with GPS software mapping trails around the country. The next morning we caught a furgon at 7:25 a.m. bound for Kukes. We went up and down mountains through valleys and over rivers, luckily this driver goes very slowly but the ride still felt like a roller coaster. He even bought us a coffee at our rest stop because we were Americans and we knew James (one of the Kukes volunteers), who I think he might have a little of a man crush on. We finally arrived at about 11 a.m.

Traveling time from Shkoder to Kukes- 2 hours to Puke + 3.5 hours from Puke = 5.5 hours

We enjoyed a great weekend with the volunteers in Kukes and a volunteer that joined us from our group. We learned about the Outdoor Ambassadors, had good food, and went on an incredible hike up a canyon called "the bad staicase." (Hopefully I will get pictures up soon). This afternoon after our hike we decided to take the "new" road home. The new road is the Albanian superhighway that includes numerous bridges, and a tunnel that I estimated to be over 3 miles long. Most of it is 4 lanes and it is designed to allow freight to be brought from Eastern Europe to the port in Durres more efficiently than was possible before. If anything went out from Durres it either went around Albania and then south from Montenegro through Shkoder, or through the old road that we took on our way here. The road is not totally finished yet and they still have to let one direction of cars travel through the tunnel at a time, 3 mile tunnel, but traveling on this road we left at 2 p.m. from Kukes and arrived in Shkoder in time to here the bells chime at 5! This included a transfer of furgons in Milot but I didn't check to see exactly what time this transfer happened.  The road was very nice and reminded me of freeways in the US other than the random people on the side of the road trying to catch a bus or furgon.  I made a quick map of our trip just to help anyone not associated with Albanian geography what the trip looked like.  You can't even see the new road on maps yet, but it cuts in that general direction and meets up with the Shkoder- Tirana road near Milot and that meets with the Tirana- Durres Road near Tirana. 

So we are back in Shkoder safe and sound albeit tired, and ready to start a new week.  I have seen other volunteers do this and thought it would be a good idea to have people who read the blog, or get it forwarded to them by people who read it to ask questions about what life is like in Albania, and we will try to answer them as best as we can.  So shoot us an E-mail, or comment in the blog and we will answer all your questions and everything you ever needed to know about Shqiperia!  Hope all is well in the US!

Hot, hot and hot!!

This week has been interesting, it started off with threats of 40 C days (104 F) later in the week and it didn't fail to disappoint. We had no choice but to turn on our air conditioning the past 3 nights just trying to get to sleep. We also got to head out to a couple of summer camps this week. Tiff went to a summer camp on Tuesday and Friday at two organizations close to Shkoder and I got to head up to Hot i ri (Hot pronounced with a long o like oh)and the Catholic Church's summer camp put on by the Hot sisters, not to be confused with the hot sisters, which as one of my coworkers described must be a strip-club somewhere in Albania. Then on Saturday night we got to go to the Miss Earth Albania beauty pageant where about 27 girls competed for a chance to represent Albania in the Miss Earth competition. We not only got to go but had seats in the official Bashkia box seated right next to the mayor and vice-mayor, and Tiffany's counterparts daughter. Here is one of the many pictures I took, they are all a bit dark but I think you can get the idea.

Other than that not much has been going on just trying to beat the heat as best as we can. Hopefully heading east this weekend will provide some relief.

Happy 9th err 4th of Korriku umm I mean July

This is my best attempt to keep the blog updated, the posts might be shorter but I will keep everyone hopefully a little more updated on our lives.
On Friday we got to go to the 4th of July party sponsored by some Americans, to be honest I don't know who they were but it sounds something like AMCHAM. We were just excited to be able to go, as we originally did not get peace corps tickets. 30 tix for 90 volunteers, and the math didn't add up, but thanks to US Aid (actually David Smith a contractor for the organization) coming to the rescue, who knew they were into this type of aid, we got tickets. The party was a lot of fun even though no one can figure out why it was on the 9th, a full 5 days after the 4th, which was a Sunday and either the Friday or Saturday would have seemed to be better dates to have the festival. The location was at the Wilson School, an international school named after Woodrow Wilson, and managed to have pretty good hot dogs, although the hamburgers left a lot to be desired. A few of the Albanian beers companies also showed up as well as a winery/brandy(ery) to keep the party lively. They even had a very decent fireworks display at dusk. After we went to the Block (short-north of Columbus, or warehouse district in Cleveland). Well I don't know how much partying is going on in Cleveland right now, but when there was partying in Cleveland I guess the Warehouse district was where it was done at. So we found a bar and hung out with a few Navy sailors. All in all a blast, and we even felt our first Albanian earthquake. We hear they are quite common here but not as much in Tirana and not this big, although it was a modest 4.8. The deck we were sitting on just wobbled a bit, many people around didn't even seem to notice. Yesterday we made it back from Tirana, and met up with some friends to (not) watch the soccer match. All in all a very exciting weekend and we are taking today off to catch up on the latest news of LeBron and the rest of the more exciting news of the world. Still hoping the all but sports is good in the US and everyone is doing well.

1st month

I know it has been a long time since we have updated, but now is as good of a time as any so this is our first month as residents of Shkoder. I have been working with World Vision every day generally going in at 9 and getting out every day around 2 or 3 but some days I get out as late as 5:30 or as early as around 1:30 depending on what is going on at the office. My days have been filled with creating a filing cabinet, going out to visit some of the villages and most recently filling out annual progress reports. These are required for every sponsored child in the area which for Shkoder is 298 children. I can't believe other cities that have twice or three times as many children as we do and have to do an APR for all of them. It seems like "grunt" work and I have been frustrated at times when I get "sent" home (Alketa, my counterpart tells me I can go home if I want, which means either go home or sit around doing nothing) but overall I think I have had a better experience in terms of amount of work than other volunteers and less work than others. I also got to spend a couple of days in Tirana at an emergency action plan training with 15 other volunteers mostly from our group. I really enjoyed the opportunity to spend some time hanging out with friends from training and learn some important stuff in the process. July should be an interesting month as there is a party in Lezhe for the 4th of July on the 3rd-4th and we will camp out on the beach. Then on the 9th there will be another party in Tirana hosted by some embassy people. I think we also want to plan another trip somewhere for a few days but we aren't sure if it will be south to Gjirokaster and Berat, or stay north and visit Puke, Fushe Arrez, and maybe even make it over to Kukes and that area. I guess time will tell. Again for those who want an address to send packages E-mail me and I will send you the address, just let us know when you send something so we can watch for it. We have gotten 1 package already, and look forward to more. Things that we can always use: contact solution (just don't list it on the contents of the box), peanut butter, candy (starburst, peanut butter M&M's, reese cups, rolo's etc.), Terry needs a new pair of tennis shoes if he ever hopes to play soccer again, tampons, note cards (preferably 3x5 blank), reusable grocery bags (you can usually buy them for $1 and use them as padding for other things). We also have more that we would like but ask us in an E-mail if you want more detail. We hope all is going well in the States and hope to see some of you in Albania soon!

TnT

tourist day

so we have been living here for a little over a week and the 3 newest Shkodrans decided to take a photo tour of the city here are some of the results, more to come later...

if it doesn't work here it should also be playing in the slide show to the left on the newer layout.

Breaking Stuff

So it is official...we are Volunteers. I know you all thought we were for about 3 months now but in reality we were only trainees until we swear in which we did last Thursday morning. Now we are volunteers and residents of Shkoder. After we swore in on Thurs. I went to the capital and had my finger looked at again and it turns out it was broken but healed correctly. The doctor said that because it is my ring finger it isn't really important, it is only a helper. He gave me some excercises to do and sent me on my way. I met up with Tiffany and our site mate, Jessie, on Friday morning for the rest of the trip to Shkoder. We made it here and have been exploring and getting our apartment settled. We have an address now which we will gladly share with all of you if you ask us for it because giving it out on a public website would not be a smart idea, and if we wrote it many of you wouldn't even recognize it as an address. Other than the broken finger we are both healthy and happy, excited to be living in Shkoder, and missing our friends and families back home. Other than the 3 weddings we are already missing this summer it sounds like we now have another wedding next summer too. You all need to stop having important life events while we are in Albania, it is really inconvienant for us to have to miss this stuff.
On the work side of things it is still slow but that is to be expected for the first week of work. World Vision celebrated June 1 (Children's Day) by bringing children in from many villages to watch a movie in the theater in town. They got to see Ice Age 2, and I got to see most of it twice. It was translated into Shqip so my understanding of the words wasn't good all the time but I managed to follow the story line. Tiff has been at the city hall for two days and is doing some minor translating of Shqip-English into better English. I think we are still both a little lost on what we are supposed to be doing exactly but more of that will come with time. Finally it sounds like we will have a constant source of internet, so we can set up Skype dates and facebook chats soon. I am excited because I will still be able to enter the football pool and know all of the final scores because Albania is 6 hours ahead of the east coast USA, right UC?

apologies and Shkoder

First off let us apologize for the lack of updates in the past month. I realized with the last post we have not written for over a month, and with the surprising amount of E-mail I have received from family/ friends I guess it is time to update.

Secondly if you have not already heard Tiffany and I are moving to Shkoder in about 2 1/2 weeks. If you look at a map of Albania look north for a big lake (Shakar or Shkrodra depending on your map) on the southeastern part of the lake you will find Shkoder, a larger city for Albanian standards. Tiffany will be working with the municipality and I will be working with World Vision, a international NGO that focuses on children. We are in Shkoder for the rest of the week, learning about our city and getting to know our organizations. Shokder is beautiful and will have pictures of the city up soon (hopefully).

Thirdly, pictures are finally up on the blog the pictures there currently are from Lezhe, the site we visited around Easter. I also posted others to Facebook so if you have facebook look them up there. Again we hope all is well in the states and we look forward to chatting with you all in the near future.

spring sprung in Elbasan

On our weekly stop in an Elbasan internet cafe, we got out of our session early so I am writing freehand instead of having a prepared blog update. Spring is beautiful here in Albania. It hides so much of the garbage discarded around. The random flowers that have sprung up along the road side, flowers that people plant in gardens around the US are growing wild and free here along with many smaller "wildflowers." We will find our our site placement exactly one week from today, and we think we know where we will be placed but will not jinx it by posting it here until we are for sure. More pressing is the language test that we have tomorrow back here in Elbasan. I think we are both nervous about it since my vocab is still weak and Tiff feels that her sentence formation needs improvement. I think that after having a week off traveling a Saturday would be better served sitting in class with our teachers having a review session. Speaking of having a week off, Lezhe was beautiful. We traveled by furgon to Tirana and then ate a light breakfast at Stephan's Center, an American style restaurant started by missionaries to Albania. They even had real drip coffee! After meeting our host for the weekend we boarded a bus for the last hour and a half trip up to Lezhe. The city was wonderful, not too big and much bigger than Paper, full of markets, cafes, and restaurants. We hiked up to the castle, went to a beach on the Adriatic and even saw three random pigs that inhabit the city. (the north of Albania is more Catholic and therefore eating, and keeping pigs is OK) With our host we met the mayor of Lezhe who was very impressive with his forward looking approach and attitude. We also went to a school for the mentally handicapped and drank a lot of coffee. The experience was great and we look forward to seeing more of this beautiful country. Now it is off to catch a furgon back to Paper and try to study for our language thing tomorrow! Wish us luck and we wish you all a Happy Easter and hope spring is treating everyone well in The US of A.

Albania, Elbasan, Paper etc.

So we have officially been in Paper, a small village about a 15 minute drive from Elbasan, for two weeks now. It finally feels like we are making some progress with the language and our host family. Agron, our host father, has consistently been our best resource for Shqip (Albanian) at home but recently Arisa, our 13 year old host sister has opened up and we have been trying to teach her some English. We have mainly focused on greetings and colors for now but she is a very good student and will give us small English phrases when we least expect them. Mariglen, our 10 year old host brother, is still shy and just stares blankly at us when we mis-conjugate a verb but we have been playing with him and have found that a soccer ball has been a successful way to bring him out of his shell. Violsa, our host mom, has also been talking more now that we have a little more language under our belts, she is extremely nice and an excellent cook, and Terry has the chickens working over time to make enough eggs for breakfast and dinner, her cooking skills also mean that there has been no weight loss in Albania, so far. Tomorrow we head north-west for a volunteer visit to Lezhe. We are excited to see a different part of Albania and are hoping for a little more connection to the outside world. There is no Internet cafe in Paper and our days in Elbasan are full with other activities. Please feel free to comment on our blog or shoot us an E-mail and we will try to respond as quickly as possible depending on when we get back to an Internet cafe. We also hope to get pictures up of this beautiful country as soon as we have Internet access on a personal computer, as many of the PCs in the cafes have viruses that we do not want to transfer. We hope that all is well in the ShBA (Shqip for USA).

Traveling Ohio

We officially left Kentucky on Sunday and we are now making the grand tour of Ohio. We saw the Cavs play the Spurs on Monday in Cleveland and even though LeBron and Shaq didn't play we enjoyed the game and the Cavs won! For now we are spending time with mom Schulz in Y-town and will make the trip back to Newark on Thursday. We are enjoying the last days in the States eating all of our favorite foods and spending time with family and friends (it is always enjoyable to try and organize a group of 8 to leave and arrive in time for dinner reservations). It is hard to believe that we are leaving the states in 5 days! We are looking forward to getting Cheesesteaks in Philly and the bus trip to JFK because Terry has never been that close to NYC. The biggest problem is trying to pack for two years into two 50 pound suitcases. Tiffany needs to shave 10 pounds off of her bag weight, and Terry is just thinking about wearing eight layers on the plane. That is all for now, anyone in the greater Ohio area is welcome to come to Tiff's parents house for a going away gathering from 2 p.m. to whenever on Saturday the 13th. If you need an address E-mail us. We hope to see some of your beautiful faces!

March 2010

Yes, we are leaving for Albania on March 15th we will make our way to Philadelphia then to JFK airport for the flight. We hope to be able to update this blog on a regular basis while in Albania, but as we still don't know how much internet access we will have we are not sure. What we hope is for all of our friends and family here in the United States to be able to follow this blog while we are gone for 27 months.

Terry and Tiffany