The Hitchhiker's Guide to Albania Part 1

Hitchhiker's Guide to Albania Part 1

A little over a year ago, I wrote about the mental acrobatics and daydreams that led to my accepting a job in Albania: a country I had never been to, in a region I knew little about.  April 1st marked a full year of living and working here, and I feel that it is time to squish, elbow, and stomp my experiences into a series of five wholly insufficient and mostly ridiculous entries.

So grab your towels, and until I get my cease and desist letter, I give you, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to Albania"!  It is only a prototype, but when mass produced will be slightly cheaper than Lonely Planet guides, and will have the words, "Avash, Avash" (Slowly, Slowly) inscribed in large, friendly letters on its cover.

Author's note: All stories and other nonsense herein are meant as homage to both Albania and to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.  I adore them both.  However, I offer my apologies in advance to the former for being a smartass, and to the latter for being a shamelessly inferior exploitation of a classic.  The sections in italics are asides representing (mostly fictional) reference articles from "The Hitchhker's Guide to Albania".  British accents are encouraged.  

The Hitchhiker's Guide to Albania
Albania is the third country I've settled into outside of my native United States for my teaching career.  It's the first, though, in which  I was vomiting so uncontrollably after arriving that one hour into my first day of work, I had to go home to hug my toilet for the rest of the day.  In a sweaty slouch of deliberate breathing, I had wobbled through introductions to my new colleagues, trying to pretend that everything was okay.  Later, near-naked and fetal on my cold bathroom floor, I began to worry that I had succeeded.  Instead of believing me ill, what if they thought their new social studies teacher was some kind of floundering idiot with a glandular condition?  I'd been hoping to delay that conclusion for at least another month.

As it turns out, my illness was not the least bit unexpected.  By the time I got there in the spring, the other staff had long-since given it a name: Balkan Belly.  One by one, my fellow teachers regaled me with the times that they, too, had been steamrolled by the merciless and indiscriminate stomach bug.  With my rite of passage safely behind me, it was time to get to work.

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Science has recently discovered that the bacteria and amoebas living permanently inside of our bodies remain at peace with one another (and us) only through a web of carefully crafted treaties and ongoing diplomatic missions.  Our white blood cells were once thought to attack and destroy these foreign entities, but recent observations under up-quark microscopes at CERN indicate that the elimination of bacteria and amoebas are merely a side effect of the fact that white blood cells are, objectively speaking, the dullest conversationalists in the known universe.  This, combined with their complete lack of social cues, paints quite a complicated picture for immunologists.

As specified in the Lymph Node Treaty of 2005, when the population of either bacteria or amoebas grows too high, their own leaders will cull their numbers by texting a lone white blood cell to come and hang out.  Upon arriving at the nearest colony of bacteria, for example, it will immediately launch into an aimless narrative about something it saw on its Facebook feed.  When the bacterium shies away, the white blood cell will shift jovially into a painful discourse on the results of their latest fantasy football match up.  When the bacterium begins to panic, the white blood cell will put a filament around the capsule of its captive and tell it that, actually, it has LOTS of red-blood-cell friends and that it doesn't even SEE color.  At this point, the bacterium will strangle itself with its own flagella, and the white blood cell will cluelessly drift on to the next one.  In this way, each white blood cell will haplessly eliminate up to 10,000 bacteria or amoebas before it stumbles onto a meaningful topic.  Thus, our immune system will remain in relative equilibrium.  Or, that is, until it encounters a Balkan Bug...

Magnified Balkan Bug
(image sources here and here)

A Balkan Bug is neither a bacterium nor an amoeba, but rather a unique blend of RNA, tobacco, and racial memory.  Typically, they will react to a white blood cell in one of two ways:

1) The Balkan Bug will kindly invite the cell into its home, feed it, and listen patiently to all of its foolishness.  When the cell has exhausted all of its talking points, the Balkan Bug will kiss it congenially on both nuclear pores, and send it on its way with leftovers.  Standing in the doorway and tightly clasping a delicious Elbasan Tava, the white blood cell will decide that it never wants to leave.  

2) The Balkan Bug will loudly cite the atrocities committed by white blood cells against its people, claim that its own people were there before the white blood cells, and then perpetuate the cycle of violence by killing it.  A child white blood cell observing from afar will see this, and never forget.

Either of these responses will immediately neutralize the white blood cells, allowing for unchecked growth of the Balkan Bug population.  So while a certain amount of stomach illness is no stranger to travelers, don't be surprised if you spend a sizable portion of your trip to Southeastern Europe scrutinizing each and every intestinal gurgle.  

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By the beginning of June, I'd moved into my current apartment, from which my commute to work is a whopping eight-minute walk (my first apartment was so close, I could log onto the school's wifi from my living room).  This eight-minute stretch is usually fairly routine, but being an infrastructurally-challenged coastal city, Durres keeps its residents on their toes.

The building I live in is not finished, and there are no perceivable plans to finish it.  I live on the 11th floor, and floors 12-18 above me are open to the elements.  One stormy morning this year, I emerged from my apartment to find the elevator out-of-order, and on the other side of me, water cascading heavily through the open center of the spiral staircase.  Apparently, the rainwater being held in the floors above had reached some sort of critical mass, and the levee broke.  I didn't dare investigate further.  I opened my umbrella and navigated down 11 flights of slick marble, only to emerge into a foot of standing water in the streets and sidewalks around my building.  This had happened once before, and I had to pull a Huck Finn, wading across the street with my pants rolled up to my knees, my shoes in my hand, and a mantra of, "no glass, no holes, no glass, no holes..." in my head as I blindly crossed a road I knew to be prone to both glass and holes.  Having decided myself lucky to escape previously, I went in search of a drier path.  I found it, but was soaked by the blowing rain and my own sweat after 15 minutes of poking around and then another 15 minutes of power-walking to get to work on time.  Luckily (sort of), a lot of people had adventurous mornings, and school got off to a staggered start as students and teachers caught on the wrong side of the flooding trickled in.

When the weather is good though, and it often is, there is a slightly longer, but far more scenic route that I like to take home after work.  You start out of the school, cross the street, and turn left.  Walk a short ways until you see two men playing backgammon at a table in the shade.  Pass them, and bear right in order to find your way through the archway of the 20-foot medieval wall that winds its way through the middle of town.  The adjacent modern buildings have used it for their outer wall, making it feel integrated into the present.  Keep walking straight, and on your left you will see the ruins a nearly 2,000-year-old Roman amphitheater.  One of the big ones, too, that they would fill with water for gladiatorial reenactments of naval battles.  Equally impressive, on your right, you can see "Flok Stil", the barber shop where I grudgingly go once every few months to look like I've joined the army.  While it's the only haircut they do for men, you can still expect to spend up to an hour for them to do it perfectly.  This street will take you out to the main boulevard, where if you turn left, you'll find the main plaza of Durres.

They must occasionally step away to order
coffee and bet on sports.

Here, listen for the call to prayer coming from the mosque as you walk to Mama Luli's for some lasagna, ravioli, and unit planning, as my friend Phil and I did one evening last year.  As we were finishing our food, though, we heard live music starting and abandoned the unit planning in order to investigate.  What we found was a beer festival, during Ramadan, outside of a mosque, in a Muslim-majority country, in the shadows of Roman and medieval ruins.  With Italian food in our stomachs, we struck up a conversation with a pair of Albanian women who didn't drink but felt like stopping by to check out the festival on their way home from university, where they were studying to be English teachers.  In this place, and at this moment, I felt that the world could learn a thing or two from Albania.

Then I got home, and the power was out.

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In addition to unreliable power and undrinkable water, one of the most common complaints among *expats living in Durres is the paucity of dining options.  For example, there is pizza, seafood, and Italian food.  And then, if one keeps looking, they can find pizza.  And seafood.  And Italian food.  Upon first arriving, travelers often rejoice at how the Italian food is just as good as in Italy, the seafood is wonderfully fresh, and the pizza is...well, decent pizza.  And all of this can be had at seafront restaurants for under $10 per meal, which includes a few drinks.  

(*expats: group of immigrants, typically affluent and overwhelmingly white, who do not identify as immigrants)

For months, new arrivals will listen in wonder as their more entrenched friends and colleagues despair about the food situation.  Until the fateful day when they, too, find themselves ordering fresh gnocchi with a tone of despondency.  The following visual aid has been created to illustrate this phenomenon, known as "Quantum Dining":  

While initially spiking to roughly 90% satisfaction, this level drops just below 40% by the 1-year mark.  At this point, the event horizon is crossed, and the laws of quantum mechanics take over.  Expats living in Durres beyond this length of time cannot travel back through memory to recall their initial excitement.  The level of satisfaction from here on exists SIMULTANEOUSLY on two different planes: that of contentment over the availability of cheap, fresh vegetables and some comforts from home, and that of placid acceptance that one must keep eating to survive. 

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I have immensely enjoyed my first year in Albania.  For all of my joking around about the frustrations, I already feel protective of my adopted home.  When drinking a few beers among friends, we may vent and take some shots at the country's perceived shortcomings.  But if we overhear others doing it?  Fuck those guys, they don't know what they're talking about.  No one hits my brother but me...

Ultimately we chose to come here, and we knew it wouldn't be perfect.  In fact, we didn't want it to be.  I didn't, at least.  I wanted a place that was charmingly and maddeningly itself, and that is what I feel like I've found.

Anyway...all this has made me hungry.  I guess I have to eat something now in order to continue existing.

Stay tuned for the next entries:
- So Long, and Thanks for All the Furgons!
- The Beach at the End of the Universe
- Mostly Farmless
- Life, the Universe, and Everything