Another Time, Another Place...

 We are seven hours ahead of our friends from our home area. We are in the same time zone as our Prague friends and one hour ahead of the English – and their really good football matches. We are two hours behind people in East and Southern Africa and five hours behind our friends in Taiwan and South Korea. We are several thousand miles geographically from most of you.

But time and distance tell only minor parts of the differences stories! Geographically we live in a land the beauty of which continually grows in my heart. We see mountains from our flat and from everywhere in Korca.

The hills are alive with the tinkling sound of bells on the sheep and goats that roam the foothills with their shepherds. The city is alive with the sound of traffic, the chatter of people walking along the streets, the conversations we here (often louder than in the USA) from the people socializing in the parks, and the calls from the minarets. On Sunday mornings, the songs burst forth from the Orthodox Churches around. Weekdays we hear the whirring of table saws cutting up firewood and the thud of axes splitting the logs. Firewood is a big thing here – more on that later.

The sound we perhaps miss the most is hearing the English language spoken. We of course speak English while we teach and while we are with the Lorings. We also speak English when we go out to eat with Dutch or Americans who live here. We have had good conversations in English with only one Albanian so far – the lovely young lady who translates for us in church.

The best way to know what a marvelous invention central heating is to move to a cold place where there is no such thing. We have a nice, large flat with plenty of room, two bathrooms, reasonably nice kitchen, etc. But, there is no central heat! Now, those of you who do not live in North America and by now realizing one more of my wimpish qualities – aversion to cold rooms inside – but please indulge me. When the temperature goes near freezing with no central heat, life becomes more interesting. We have a wood burning stove in the living room/kitchen area. In other places we have lived, the odor of people who cook and live with wood was somewhat of a novelty to us. Now we have become that novelty. It seems that most of my clothes now have the distinctly fire wood odor. We do have electric heaters and do not look forward to our electricity bill because I am going to run them reagardless of cost. But our situation does remind us of how blessed we are in the US and how nice we had it in Prague, Mazatlan and East Africa regarding heating of houses.

It also seems that each weekend I am subject to “Tringing”. This is a word I am using to describe the disappointment one experiences when he is eager to watch a sporting event on television only to find that the satellite carrier (Tring, that is) has advertised that they will carry a certain match, but when you naively sit down to watch it, only the words, “signal scrambled” appear on the set. We think Tring is guilty of not paying the Premiership for the game, and therefore losing its signal at the last moment. In our flat, we get CNN International and a few Dutch channels and along with some channels we don't care to watch – about ten in all. We go over to the Lorings to watch (or not watch if we are Tringed) sporting events.

Did someone mention coffee? We naturally make coffee every morning and it is quite acceptable the way we make it. However, should I want a really good cappuccino or latte, I may need to leave this country. Of course the coffee here is perfect for Albanians, but to us it is strange to me and we have not become accustomed to it. I have had two cappuccinos and they were both tolerable. Phyllis has not yet ordered one here. They are very strong and taste distinctly different from those in the US or other parts of Europe where we have lived. I may get the nerve up to order a latte here, but am very pessimistic about what the results will be. We were told by one friend that she describes how it should be made to the waiter. Since I know about two words of Albanian, that will be difficult for me!

Speaking of food, we are getting quite good at shopping here. Yesterday we bought cashews, walnut and dried cranberries. This would indicate that we are now able to find many items that we did not hope to find after our first week here. We have a nice (small) supermarket very close to us and lots of little shops and vegetable/fruit stands. We buy bread that is baked fresh daily – no preservatives. My staples are eggs, bread, chicken (frozen), peanut butter, cookies and nutella, jam, bananas, pears, sausages, coffee and coke zero. Liz is buys peppers (which cost a dime), tomatoes, cucumbers, and all sorts of other stuff. We are really lucky to have a good variety of food stuffs available. Did I mention ice cream and pop corn? Now you know we live in a land of plenty.

Living in a land of plenty is not a big deal to most of you. But, in Albania, it is a relatively new occurrence. Go back twenty years and there was one kind of bread, one kind of cheese, one kind of most things and ration cards limiting how much you could buy. Most of the old Soviet countries lived with these restrictions.

I think next blog will continue with the changes to Albania in the last twenty years. For now, thanks for reading this blog and see you next time.

John