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!