Albania and Albanians

I feel as though I am in no way equipped to give any sort of synopsis of my stay in Albania --- after all does a three-day, under the weather sojourn in the Albanian Republic give me any right to pontificate about it? Well, I suppose the democracy, or perhaps anarchy, of a web-based medium entitles everyone to scream their opinions as loudly as they wish, regardless of their connection to truth.

For starters, I shall mention that the Albanian language (locally known as Shqip, while the country is known as Shqiperi --- I have neglected the omnipresent umlauts found everywhere in Albanian, whose unfortunate non-inclusion detracts from the officiality of any sort of pronouncement here -- but since my present keyboard is regrettably challenged in the field of Albanian linguistic competence, you get the non-umlaut version) is phenomenally difficult. Written though it is in the Latin alphabet, it contains a staggering 34 or so letters, the inclusion of which cause no end of headaches for the uninitiated. Worse still are the sound combinations, silent letters, and general foreigness of most of the vocabulary.

Start with the name of the language: Shqiperi: After a week in Albanian cultural areas, I am no closer to pronouncing the name of the language than the day I was born. At best, one must produce an sh, follow it by some sort of ch sound (there are two ch sounds, to l's, to r's which to me sound pretty much the same --- although upon proffering this theory to Albanian acquaintances, I was quickly rebuked, informed that the sounds couldn't in the least little bit be related), swallow the 'i', do some sort of acrobatic thing with the 'e', before perhaps pronouncing the last 'i'. A ka problem? Yo, ska problem.... One could become fluent in Georgian before managing to say good day or 'pardon' in Shqip.

Stumbling through prices notwithstanding, (oh, my groceries come to dyqindtridhjetegjashte leke (236 Lk= 2 Euros) do they?) Albania tends to reward the people that bother to brave the white-knuckle roadways, separated on both sides by precipitous drops above the cloud line, that constitute the "highways" of the Respublika Shqiperare (something like that). The distance from Prizren, Kosovo, to Tirana, Albania's capital is about 200 km. In normal types of countries, where asphalt is regarded as a fundamental human right, such a traversing of the countryside should be accomplishable in about 3 hours. In Albania, it means 9 --- with a "shortcut" --- when I enquired to my fellow passenger, a former emigre worker in Britain, as to why exactly we would be spending the better part of 9 hours moving a paltry 200 km, his response, in his very best acquired-English, was that the roads in Albania tended to be a bit "f*cked up". He wasn't kidding.

Still, despite the fact that an Albanian highway can't really fit two cars side by side most of the time (it seems a good portion of travelling in Albania is reversing for a few kilometres to let someone pass), and the potholes would give a Virginia mine shaft a fairly decent run for its money, the countryside perhaps provides some of the most breathtaking scenery to be beholden anywhere... But just to keep it a bit mysterious and unreachable, every single one of my batteries, spares and otherwise, decided to forget how to polarize, leaving me unable to document the switchbacks that led from olive groves to pine trees, across ridges seemingly riding the top of the world, past villages little unchanged from Ottoman times (complete with Gypsies parading dancing bears --- really, I didn't think that still happened), past impressive vistas of snowcapped peaks rising above the sea of clouds on the horizon, past the chrystal waters of Lake Ohrid (somewhat reminiscent of Lake Van, Sevan Lake, or Lake Okanagan, which is going to helpful to round about none of you in way of comparison), etc., etc. Truly impressive, truly bloody annoying that my camera didn't work.

Before moving on to matters of importance, one must mention the general incongruity of a bus' musical selection in this part of the world when compared with its passengers and general surrounding scenery. Until recently, Albania was essentiall rural --- Tirana is a city (a small one at that, however, yet it somehow contrives to have snarled traffic that would give Istanbul a run for its money), and this is reflected in a bus' ridership. Younger women might wear more Western style clothes, but the older generation of men tends to prefer a peasant cap, and farmer's pants..... As a result of this style of dress, one is constantly amused by the fact that busses spend hours traversing tricky switchbacks high in the pines and olive trees of central Albania, transporter its hearty backwoodsmen passengers ----- all while Aqua's "Barbie Girl" screams from the bus' broken speakers (on another bus that looks like it was stolen from the Mercedes dealership in Baden-Baden circa 1971, just to add).... I'm in the mood to sing along to Denmark's No. 1 hit of 1998, although, regrettably, the peasant passengers are not.....

(It recalls memories of sliding down the Georgian Military "Highway's" icy roads, precipitous drops and rocky, painful deaths in the glacial streams running 300 metres below awaiting a wrong turn made by the marshrutka's (shared minibus) driver, a man again decked out in a black peasant cap, simple clothes, dignified, deep-blue, wolf-like eyes ---- and a taste for Gwen Stefani in the musical department.... It is another experience altogether to be squashed in a Georgian marshrutka with matronly, pious Georgian peasant women crossing themselves all the way to ward off the one steering mistake that will send us plummetting to our deaths (10 minutes later, no doubt, given how high the drop was) ---- whilst being serenaded by "Oh, I'm Just a Girl......" along with Gwen Stefani's other hits which help the sojourner soak up the full magnitude and magnificence of the Georgian Caucasus mountains.)

As a people, Albanians are fairly hospitable, and tolerant. In a world where Serb Orthodox and Croat Catholic (both speakers of the same language, with the same kind of last names), Iraqi Sunnis and Shiites, and Northern Irish Catholics and Protestants do their best to immolate each other, it is refreshing to come to Albania, where Muslims (both Sunni and Shiite), and Christians (both Catholic and Orthodox) happily and convivially get along. No wars have been fought on sectarian lines, and Albanians learn at a young age that the religion of Albanians is "Albania". Happy as this is, most urbane Tiranans seemed to have little time for their more country-like fellow-countrymen (regardless of confession), generally degraded as being not much better than animals in the civilizational order: According to one acquaintance, girlfriends and wives were basically there to be hit by their husbands (one 20 year old university student, a girl, celebrated the fact that she had only been hit once by her boyfriend --- quite an accomplishment in a macho society such as Albania).

Meanwhile, Albanian parents evidently digested the very best of Dr. Spock's methods for child-rearing --- transgressions such as speaking in public, not sleeping on the bus, standing up to many times on the torturously slow bus ride --- could and should best be corrected with a series of sharp smacks upside the head (in this instance, while the sweet, dulcet tones of Manu Chao echoed in the background).... Hmmmm..... who am I to disagree?

But lastly, in this somewhat rambling pseudo-anthropoligal study of Albania, one must mention Enver Hoxha, Albania's Communist (from the rather psychotic, Pol Pot side of the movement) leader for 40 bitterly long years. Hoxha was Communist, in his mind, and no one else came close. He broke off with Tito's Yugoslavia, then with Khrushchev's Russian, and then with Deng's China, and refused to having anything to do with the "bourgeois" Communists of Western Europe. Instead, in the interests of advancing Albania into the 21st century, he closed the borders, forbade foreigners from entering, banned foreign TV (every Albanian still found a way to watch Italian soap operas, though), and, in a country that boasts magnificent castles, fortresses, towns, mosques, churches, and the like, he added his own architectural masterpiece: The bunker. Ever paranoid that the Capitalists or perhaps his shadow might invade (who'd want to? It was as poor as Syria then...) Hoxha covered the countryside with indestructable bunkers, designed to defend Albania in a war that never came (whether the populace would have bothered to defend him at all is another matter). 21 years after his death, the bunkers remain, unremovable. They are everywhere: In fields, in graveyards, hidden by trees, hidden by thatch, on front lawns, on roads, in ditches, on mountains, in streams --- generally in the most inconveniently placed position for the general population, who have spent the past 30 years having to plough their fields around the small concrete mushrooms that blot the countryside.... They are likely to remain a wonderful and enduring legacy of the sheer paranoia of Albania's first comrade, Enver Hoxha...

However, spring, summer, fall, winter and spring again have transpired since I began writing this account --- perhaps a sign to stop....