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).