Tag Archives: Albania

The opposite of writer’s block

5 Sep

As usual I have to apologise for not writing  a new blog post for ages, but unusually the excuse is not just that I’ve been insanely busy (which I have) but also that I don’t know what to write about – or more accurately, I don’t know which thing to write about.

I have jotted down a few ideas for posts (I do this – I have an extremely rubbish working memory, so scraps of paper and memos on my phone serve as an alternative) but don’t want to write about all of them (if I wrote three posts in a week you might worry that I’d been replaced by the body snatchers!) and if I try to space them out over the next several weeks I’ll forget, or they will be out of date, or something else will come up.

So it’s over to you, patient readers who have just slogged your way through two one-sentence paragraphs. Do you want to read about my summer in Greece and Albania, with reflections on different culture, the changing face of Albania, and possibly language learning? Or would you prefer to hear about my beautiful new budgie, Gatsby? (I may become a bit of budgie bore, I’m afraid. He’s so cute!) Or would you like to hear about lactase? No, I’ll not tell you any more; if you’re intrigued, vote for it.

The survey should be showing below. (If it’s not, click here.) I look forward to getting my writing orders!

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Albania 2015 – just the best bits

8 Aug

I have recently returned from my other reality, aka Albania, where I have a different name, a different language, different clothes (well it is 20 degrees hotter) and to some extent a different personality. I was going to blog about how strange it is to suddenly be bad at things that you are usually good at – things like baking, dancing and writing, in my case – because you’re in a different culture where all the rules are changed.

However, I feel like I have encountered quite enough negativity recently, with people talking down Albania, or Scotland, or just generally moaning about how hard life is, so I don’t want to add to it. However hard life is, and whatever problems there are in both my countries, I had a fantastic month, so I will choose the share the best parts. If that makes you nauseous, look away now.

1. I went to a museum in Lushnjë where I was the only person there, so I got a personal guided tour, and unlike most museums where you are told very firmly not to touch, this museum positively encourages you to! I was handed a two-and-a-half-thousand-year-old perfume pot (which I took extreme care not to drop) as if it were just a mug of coffee, and the tour guide passed me an 18th century sword to hold while he took a phone call. For a history nut like me, it was amazing!

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Look at the colour of that sea!

2. The sea was beautiful, and so different from the North Sea and the Atlantic that I grew up with. It’s so clear you can see the tiny fish, and it’s warm (or no colder than cool, at worst) so you can get right in there without fear of losing a toe to frostbite. My eyes are the colour of the sea and, bizarrely, while they are North Sea blue-grey here in Scotland, they were Mediterranean blue-green the entire time I was in Albania.

3. Being outdoors so much was great. I like being outdoors in Scotland, too, but there are not that many days you can do it without suffering from mild exposure, if not from the temperature then from the wind. In Albania (and Greece) we ate outside (breakfast, lunch and supper), socialised outside, went to outdoor bars, and I even slept outside, on the balcony outside my room, when the temperature got a bit too ridiculous. Waking up to blue sky and swallows overhead sets you up for a great day.

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My bed on the balcony

4. My husband gets irritated by this one, but I love being mistaken for an Albanian! I talk with an accent of course, but millions of Albanians live abroad, so they pick up accents too. Sometimes people have a little debate in front of me about whether I’m foreign or not! It’s very funny, and quite reassuring when I have an Albanian exam coming up later this year.

5. I enjoyed bonding with my mother-in-law over telenovele, the überdramatic soap operas they show in Albania. They used to be mainly from South America, but now there’s a glut of Turkish ones, which are a bit more serious, and very good. The latest was Diamantë dhe Dashuri (Diamonds and Love). There’s lots of mortal peril and complicated love triangles / hexagons, and I am happy to throw myself right in there for as long as I’m staying. They also don’t go on forever, like British soap operas, so you’re not in danger of losing your whole life to them.

6. I also enjoyed dressing up. This can be a hassle if you’re not in the right mood, but I was on holiday so I was very happy to only take my prettiest clothes, and then to wear all the new pretty clothes that my mother-in-law had collected for me too. Most of the time in Britain I slob around in jeans and a t-shirt, so it’s fun to take a break from that and wear heels and dresses. I didn’t wear trousers for the entire holiday, and it was with great reluctance that I put them back on for the flight home.

7. The ice cream was so cheap! Lots of things are cheaper in Albania, but ice cream is so expensive here in Britain that it’s really noticeable. In Albania it ranged from about 30p for a cheap one to £1.30 for an individual tub of Skandal, the equivalent of Häagen Dazs. My young nieces, who accompanied me for the first part of the holiday, weren’t used to the heat so I insisted that we stabilised their temperature with regular applications of ice cream. They didn’t seem to mind.

8. Catching up with friends was a highlight – and not just friends in Albania, but those in Greece and Italy too! Because almost everyone in Albania has relatives abroad, standard mobile phone packages include overseas minutes. For about £8 for the whole month I got hundreds of minutes to Europe, as well as huge amounts of data and messages. Not bad.

9. This one is from Greece rather than Albania. I stayed in a hotel with a pool on my way back, since I had to spend a night in Corfu. (It was the Anita, in case you’re interested, and it’s very good and extremely friendly, though not as handy for the airport as the Arion.) One of my favourite memories is standing up to my neck in the pool, alone, watching brightly coloured dragonflies playing over the water. Idyllic.

Sunny enough for bananas!

Sunny enough for bananas!

10. Sunshine. Sorry, but it has to be said. In Scotland we throw ourselves onto the nearest patch of grass whenever the sun comes out, because who knows how long it will last? In Albania you can predict that it will last roughly from the start of May to the end of September. It was sunny every day, it was hot every day, it was cloudless all but two days. It was paradise.

My mother-in-law will hopefully be visiting in October, her first time in Scotland, so it will be interesting to get her perspective. Maybe she will see wonderful things that I don’t notice because I’m so used to them. I have a nasty feeling that she won’t like it at all, actually, but until she casts her verdict – let’s stay positive. 🙂

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Why the chicken really crossed the road

15 Apr

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I am just back from a lovely holiday in Albania complete with sun, sand, sightseeing and strange cocktails. However I have already written at length about how wonderful Albania is, so this time I think I will tell you what Albania has taught me … about chickens.

Before I continue, I should explain to any chicken fanciers reading this that there’s nothing unique about Albanian chickens, so far as I know, it’s just that I never had much exposure to chickens, or indeed any farmyard animals. My primary school teacher once let us hold some newly hatched chicks, and my family had the occasional visit to a farm during the school holidays, if we were passing one, but I’m a city girl born and raised, and I’ve mostly seen chickens in small, pale, plastic-wrapped pieces on supermarket shelves.

That changed when I lived in Albania, and especially when I married into an Albanian family. My mother-in-law keeps chickens, as do a lot of people in Albania, as long as they have a bit of garden for them to scratch around in. So let me share with you the wisdom I have gleaned about chickens so far:

1) Cocks crow all the time . I knew that cocks (or roosters, if you prefer) crowed at dawn, just like they do on cornflakes adverts. What I didn’t realise is that after they start, they don’t stop. They just keep going all day long. It’s pretty annoying if you’re trying to sleep late, or have a siesta – and I often try to do both.

2) People can recognise their own chickens. To me, one black chicken looks pretty much like another, and I assumed there was some sort of leg ringing system, or a more informal way of marking which one is yours, but apparently not. People can just look at a black chicken (or any other colour – I only give black by way of example) and tell whether it is their chicken, their neighbour’s, or a completely alien chicken. I think it must be an acquired skill. Despite a lot of peering at chickens over the last week, I still have no idea which is which.

3) Chicks are only cute for about two weeks. After that they stop being adorable little balls of fluff and turn into straggly, leggy things with half-grown feathers and a bad attitude. The males start to bully the females, which is not an attractive trait. However, chickens do produce new fluffy chicks pretty regularly, so it’s not too bad.

4) Chickens are chicken. This insult is well-founded because chickens really are scared of everything. They scuttle out of your way as if you were trying to kill them (even when you’re not), and when there was a loud bang at my husband’s cousin’s house, the chickens practically jumped into our laps. I can understand where the story of Chicken Little came from, because if anything dropped on their heads, chickens would undoubtedly be terrified enough to think that the sky was falling. This is also because…

5) Chickens are incredibly stupid. I mean so, so stupid. Especially the young ones. When they run from danger, as they so often do, they’ll as likely as not run in the wrong direction. They followed my husband’s uncle around when he was hoeing, even though one of them had already lost a toe that way. It’s no wonder they’re said to be able to live for a while without their heads – there’s nothing of worth in there anyway. And this also answers the age-old question, why did the chicken cross the road? Because it was too stupid even to realise there was a road, let alone that it would be in danger from traffic.

No doubt there is a lot more I could learn about chickens, and do feel free to inform me through the comments, if you are a chicken expert. For me though, it’s back to chickens being kept in the fridge, in pieces, until the next time I go back to Albania.

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Toilets I Have Known (on a scale of one to ten)

9 Mar
The Trainspotting Toilet - about a three.

The Trainspotting toilet – about a three.

I have a rather idiosyncratic approach to toilets – so much so that a friend suggested I share it on my blog. I’m not referring to the way I use toilets, which is entirely normal. (Athough really, in the privacy of the cubicle, who knows what is normal?) No, I’m referring to the fact that I award them a score on a ten point scale.

This is just public toilets, I should probably say. I’m not going into people’s houses, wrinkling my nose and saying, “No better than a six,” like some contestant on a lavatorial version of Come Dine with Me. However, when using a toilet in a public place for the first time you might well find me doing that.

This started as a coping mechanism in Albania. In the less developed parts of the world you are far more likely to find toilets that I would consider to be on the lower end of the scale, and using them can be quite a trying experience. To help, I would assign them scores, which is not only a distraction in itself, but also reminds you that it could be worse.

So what are the criteria for scoring well on the WC scale? It’s partly subjective, but here are some of the basic elements that score a toilet points: a door that shuts; a lock on the door; a light source; the ability to flush; toilet paper, and somewhere to dispose of it; water to wash your hands, preferably running; soap; a method of drying your hands; a hook (see my post on disabled toilets); a mirror; an inoffensive smell. Extra marks can be gained for having such luxuries as hand cream, aesthetically pleasing decor and floor-to-ceiling cubicle doors.

Some of these seem pretty essential, do I hear you say? You’d never find a toilet without them? Oh yes you would, and I have seen facilities missing all of these things, though usually not all in the same toilet.

So let’s examine both ends of the scale. Although in Britain you wouldn’t expect to find less than a 6 at worst, it takes something special to reach the perfect 10. Toilets in art galleries and beauty salons often score 9s or 10s, as do posh restaurants and hotels, but possibly the nicest I have ever seen is in The Blythswood Hotel in Glasgow. I may not like their attitude to ordinary working folk, but I can’t fault their toilets: a haven of peaceful salubriousness, with restful lighting, lovely fittings, and tiny single use hand towels that you throw in a basket afterwards. Bliss – definitely a ten.

What about the other end of the scale? What kind of a toilet scores just one? Are you thinking of the filthy loo in Trainspotting? No, that’s about a 3. Disgusting as it was, it had a door (that locked, I think) and sinks to wash your hands. The toilet in Slumdog Millionaire, then? Again, no. It had a door and someone to guard it. I think there may even have been paper. It would score at least 2. So is it possible to score only 1? Yes. I have seen the worst toilet in the world (I believe). It was in Albania, I think in Erseke though it may have been Leskovik. It was a hole in a concrete floor above a river. The room had three concrete walls; the fourth side was entirely open to the road, from where I observed it. I did not use it. That’s how you get a 1. So the next time the loo roll has run out or the hook is broken, think of Erseke, and be grateful.

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Who Cares?

3 Nov

There are places in the world that matter, and places that don’t. There are people who matter, and people who don’t. That, at least, is the attitude of our media. I was reminded of this by Hurricane Sandy, which devastated large parts of the Caribbean, then hit New York and other parts of the USA. While the hurricane was sweeping through the (poor, black) islands, the BBC and most other news outlets just talked at great length about what was likely to happen when it hit the States, and then about what did happen, and then about the clear-up. This is because Americans (rich, culturally similar to us) matter, whereas Caribbeans do not. The 69 dead in the Caribbean managed a princely one sentence out of a thousand-word BBC web article on the effects of Hurricane Sandy.

Of course, there was some coverage. There is a blog post on the Guardian site all about this skewing of the media, and another BBC web article about the effect on Haiti, where 54 people were killed out a population of 10 million (compared to 90 out of the USA population of 300 million).

This isn’t an isolated incident. In one of those strange co-incidences that life seems made up of, there were a number of bus crashes over the space of a few months, most of them involving students or young people. The one in Surrey in September, returning from Bestival, you’ve probably heard of. Three people were killed, others received horrific injuries. The ones in Iran (26 dead) and India (11 dead, not students) in October, you may or may not have done, but I can pretty much guarantee that you heard not a peep about the terrible crash in Albania in May. Thirteen students were killed and another twenty badly injured when a bus plunged over a cliff. One girl was left in a coma and had to be told, upon recovery, that her fiancé had died in the crash.

I know about it because I get an Albanian newsfeed through Facebook, and have a lot of Albanian friends and family, too. Over the years I have been annoyed, although I’m no longer surprised, whenever there have been wildfires or floods or droughts or violence around the elections in Albania, and there has been not even a one-sentence mention of it on the TV news. Albania is a place that does not matter, as far as our media (and, I suppose, most people) are concerned. The country would have to sink into the sea like Atlantis or (more realistically) help or threaten one of our allies or enemies before it would warrant a mention. (Although I should say that, once again, there is a BBC web article. Some Albanian news is there if you go looking for it, but if you’re looking for it then you probably know about it already.)

Now I understand why the Bestival crash received more attention. It’s natural to be interested in things that happen in your own country to your own people, and there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s also understandable that we get more news about our allies or, in the case of Iran, or enemies, since these things have a more direct effect on us. Human nature means that we’re probably more interested in the two Brits who died in an (hypothetical) air crash than the 70 non-Brits.

The amount that news is skewed towards us and our allies is out of proportion, though. OK, Albania is a special interest of mine, but how can it possibly be right that the 6 o’ clock news can fail to mention the trail of death and devastation Sandy left in Haiti, Cuba, Jamaica, the Bahamas etc., but can give 5-10 minutes (of a half-hour programme) to speculation about how the hurricane will affect the election of the leader of a foreign country? Of course, the main TV news is not the only information out there. I should probably listen more to the world news programmes, and it’s a failing on my part if I’m not interested enough to do so. But I just wanted to express my conviction that the dichotomy in the mainstream media between the “matters” and the “don’t matters” is unfair, morally pernicious, and makes things worse for the suffering areas of the world that we should care about more.

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Balkansickness

28 May

The combination of the unusually hot weather and the Eurovision Song Contest are having an unlooked-for effect on me. I had hoped that the sun would cure me of my longing to go somewhere hot this year, but in fact I’m having the opposite reaction. All these experiences and sensations that I associate with Albania and Greece, rather than rainy Britain, are giving me a gut-deep yearning to be in the Balkans.

Walking down a street with the sun scorching my bare shoulders and the hot pavement cooking my feet takes me back to Lushnje. Iced coffee will always mean Greece to me. I can even order it in Greek, just the way I like it. The opening strains of the Greek Eurovision entry made me long for outdoor cafes with jangly music playing in the background. It wasn’t even a good song! Today I’m going to the beach (wearing shorts!), something I usually only do in Albania or Greece, either romantically with my husband, or chaotically with some of his millions of nieces and nephews.

It doesn’t help that hubbie is currently abroad due to a death in the family. This means a) that we won’t be able to go on holiday to Albania this year and b) that part of this yen for the Balkans is really a longing for him.

The Balkans aren’t heaven on earth, and there’s plenty I don’t like about Albania, Greece, Macedonia etc. When we move back there (as I hope we will) there will be plenty I’ll miss about the UK, too. So what I ought to do is appreciate Britain while I’ve got it – beach, shorts and all. Albania will still be there, and still be hot, next year.

Fancy a virtual trip to Albania? Try Leda, my novel set there.

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