Meti në Shqipëri

Just as the Christmas holiday appropriated many pagan symbols, Albanian New Years has appropriated Christmas symbols. Case in point, the picture below. Joe is standing in front of a beautiful seasonal display, complete with Santa Claus and a tree. But the mostly Muslim Albanians consider these all to be New Year’s symbols. I heard a kid say recently that Santa Claus is the “symbol man of New Years.” As we were walking through this display, the song “Let it Snow” was blasting from nearby speakers, when it was suddenly preempted for the call to prayer from the mosque in the background. “Oh the weather outside is frightful, and the snow is so deliALLAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHU AKBAAAAAAAAR!” It was bizarre and refreshingly ecumenical. Gezuar Viten i Ri! (Happy New Year!)

Tonight I finally saw the atmospheric phenomena known as the “The Green Flash .” When you have the right conditions, you can see a little burst of green light from above the sun just as it sets. The trick to seeing one is to live by the sea (or a clear horizon) and to use binoculars. Yes, I know that it’s not “cool” to look at the sun through binoculars. But the internet told me I could do it once the sun starts moving across the horizon, and as usual, I believed what the internet told me to do. I would describe the Green Flash as a little green bubble squeezed from the sun just as it sets. It certainly wasn’t a flash. It was cool, but it didn’t really warrant all the hubub it elicited in Pirates of the Caribbean.

  (I’ve been waiting a month to write that headline…)

So I stumbled on this video on YouTube. I don’t know who these kids are, but to have my song randomly covered is a blast!

Spent the last few days in Macedonia. I was there to present at a teacher training in Skopje, but had lots of free time to explore. Denise and I did a village bus route up to the Kokino Megalithic Observatory which is a 3800 year old astronomical viewing site. We went to Ohrid, a very cool and historic city on a lake on the Macedonian border with Albania. Mexican food, Indian food and McDonalds was eaten with much enthusiasm during our trip. Macedonian is a cyrillic-Slavic language, so I could actually understand some things. It was easier to read than to speak, but there were enough English-speakers to help us out. FYI, alcohol can’t be bought at stores in Skopje after 7pm.

Old city in Skopje

Hey look, a new blog entry! When was the last time I updated this thing, and what has happened since then?…
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No seriously, I really don’t remember, someone tell me.
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I think we had a Mid-Service Conference in Korce. Later, Denise and I figured out how to make burritos with all local ingredients, and that was a delicious miracle. Then I guess some other stuff happened, then my computer broke, and I ordered a new one which was a serious pain in the xhopa to get out of customs. Then I got a new sitemate, Joe from Chicago. He’s a nice guy, he was one of the volunteers who were evacuated from Georgia. Which brings me to today, when I had an Albanian language moment. At the bus stop there was an advertisement which I was actually able to read. It’s nice to feel literate once in awhile. It even used second conditional tense! It read something like “If all of our clients stood in a line, it would reach to China.” On the other side, it read “If all our (bank) branches were on this street, the street would be 840km long.” Such quantities seem to be selling points for Albanian banks. These days, I’m working on updating my resume, translating some archaeological summaries and other various and random things.

When Russia invaded Georgia last month, Peace Corps volunteers there were evacuated to Armenia. It’s a heck of a thing to be evacuated like that and then just have to sit and wait (in another foreign country) for a month. Of their 80 volunteers, most ended their service and went back to America, but 20 or so continued on. Eight came to Albania.