Europe on 30,000 Lek a Day

It is a 10 hour bus ride from Korca to Athens, that plus at least an hour at the border crossing. You have to get out of the bus in the cold and wind and stand beside your open luggage while the Greek customs officers inspect. My American passport gets me a warm welcome and my bag a cursory glance. The Albanians get a scowl and a thorough hand inspection. There are many confiscations. The Albanians shrug this off and get back on the bus. They all know this routine, yet no one asked me to help them get anything across.

As soon as you cross the border you notice things are different. While the vegetation is the same, the houses in the towns are in better repair, particularly the roofs which have few broken or missing tiles. There are few buildings standing partially constructed awaiting further funds to restart work. The roads are in good repair and there is much less roadside litter. The most striking thing, however, is the absence of the concrete bunkers which are scattered everywhere throughout Albania, particularly in border regions.

The first rest stop a couple of hours into the country reveals another glaring difference. Prices are in euros and not lek, the Albanian currency, and they are not cheap. Coffee costs 3 euros (about $4.50) not 50 lek (about 55 cents). Dinner at a moderately priced restaurant is 30-40 euros, while the best Albanian restaurant is only a fifth of that. A hotel room costs more for a night than I pay for my apartment for a month.

Yet Albanians wait in long, slow moving lines at the Greek consulate to obtain a visa and willingly endure the scorn of the border guards. This is because there is opportunity in Greece that is non-existent back home. One of my Peace Corps cohorts explained to me that her landlady in Albania could make 40 euros a day cleaning houses or hotel rooms in Athens compared with 5 euros a day in Albania, assuming she could find work. Her Albanian house is large and well furnished, but in Athens she lives in a room of a hotel under construction (presumably she had either contacts with or paid off the construction crew- maybe both) so she could save as much money as possible. My friend made the mistake of visiting her landlady while in Athens. This was a mistake because her landlady insisted on taking her out for dinner, and, being Albanian, also insisted on treating. I am beginning to think that one needs a signed note from a doctor to avoid being fed by Albanians, but I am not sure that would suffice.

A group of volunteers took part in the Athens marathon. This was on the course of the original marathon 2500 years ago when an Athenian soldier ran the 26 miles to announce the Greek victory in the Battle of Marathon. That soldier died from his effort. While none of the volunteers succumbed to that fate, most were hobbling the next day with blisters, bursitis, tendonitis and muscle ache. I provided some therapy and my usual sympathetic ear, and then went touring with some of those who were still able to walk.

It was brilliant sunshine and about 70 degrees. Athens is the San Diego of Europe, except instead of the historical culture being Spanish a few hundred years in the past, it is Greek and a few thousand years old. The photo with this post is of the Acropolis as seen from the Temple of Olympian Zeus. That temple was built by the Romans, who occupied Athens when the ancient city was as remote historically from them as the Crusades are from us. No doubt Roman teenagers complained about having to study Greek because it was so much “before their time”.

The museums in Athens are amazing. The New Acropolis Museum is particularly striking. It is built amid an excavation. Open areas and glass floors incorporate this into the design of the building. The display of art and architecture gives a real sense of the Acropolis and the Parthenon, in particular, and is a strong argument to the British to return the Elgin Marbles.

The walk to the top of the Acropolis was awe inspiring. There were lots of tourists, even in the off season. There were plenty of guards, too, to keep them on the approved paths and mind their behavior. It was such a contrast to Albania, where you wander on your own and knock on a door down the street to get keys to historic structures. I doubt if Athens was that unsupervised even in Roman times.

Athens is beautiful and clean and has all the modern amenities. Most signs are in English as well as Greek and it is easy to find your way around. Public transit is particularly impressive. An all day ticket is only 3 euros and covers buses, trams and a metro (subway) that is one of the best I have ever seen. Its construction required extensive archeological excavation, much of it displayed throughout the system making it seem more of a trip through a museum than a ride to a destination. We watched the changing of the guard, as they high stepped in their skirts and tasseled shoes (the traditional uniform from the Greek War of Independence from the Ottomans almost 200 years ago), at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, adjacent to the Parliament building. We walked through the National Gardens among flower blossoms and orange trees full of ripe fruit, the old open markets, the chic neighborhoods, and, then, in the late afternoon, rode the metro to Piraeus, the seaport of Athens. As the sun set over the Strait of Corinth, we strolled along the circular quay admiring the hundreds of yachts at berth.

The bus back to Korca left at 6 PM. I slept well during the ride through the night in spite of the music blaring on the PA system. I was awakened at one stop by a Greek policeman wanting to see my passport. He smiled when he saw it and told me he had friends in Texas, although he could not remember which city. He asked me why I would want to visit Albania. I explained that I was a volunteer with the Peace Corps assigned to Korca. I didn’t bother to tell him that I was happy to be back among people who spoke Shqip and where clarinets and ballads in a Balkan rhythm lulled you to sleep.

Language Refresher Training

My Peace Corps group had a mandatory meeting in Pogradec last week. Pogradec is a city on the southwest shore of Lake Ohrid, about an hour bus ride northeast of Korca. This is an incredibly beautiful mountain lake between Macedonia and Albania. If Lake Tahoe was surrounded by cities and villages with Mediterranean style tiled roof buildings it might look like Lake Ohrid.

It was sunny, but cold and windy. The space heaters in the rooms didn’t work too well, but that is pretty much the case throughout Albania. I have broken out my long underwear and down sleeping bag and have covered the windows in my apartment with a double layer of plastic sheeting. I plan to put a heavy curtain over my door frame since you can see around the frame and the wind whips right on through the cracks. My landlord gave me another space heater that runs on either electric or gas (God bless him). At the hotel in Pogradec, I sat near the heaters and wore sweaters and my coat at times (something I don’t remember having to do at any hotel around Lake Tahoe).

In the evening, after the day’s session, we walked in a tight group along the stone promenade on the lakeshore to a one of several good restaurants in Pogradec. The owner seemed very happy to see us, maybe because business is slow in the off-season or because he had lived in Michigan for a number of years. He offered us a discount “American steak” dinner. It was about $8, not bad for a t-bone. My group treated an American missionary from Pennsylvania who has worked with the Roma (gypsy) community in Pogradec for decades. She talked to us about the problem of human trafficking, not the most cheerful dinner conversation. Guilt is not my favorite side-dish.

Speaking of “downers”, we have lost about 10% of my original group of volunteers to early termination (Peace Corps speak for going home before completing the two years of service) due to illness or personal reasons. I don’t know if this is high or low or about average for a Peace Corps group, at this point in the 27 month term of service, although I have read that overall about 1 in 3 ET. Some were good friends from pre-service training, and I miss them. One was a pre-med student from Virginia who had put off medical school to serve in Albania. She had hoped to work in a rural area, but had been assigned to one of the bigger cities and wasn’t happy. Another was an engineer and my go-to person for computer and other technical problems. She had taken ill and went home to recuperate. I have heard she wants to return, but may not be allowed. Also, the couple from the group ahead of mine who were serving in Korca, recently left for medical and personal reasons and I am now the only Peace Corps volunteer in my city (when I first got here there were 5). I was looking forward to getting to know them as they seemed interesting, as people, and effective, as volunteers. She is from Chicago and taught English at the university. He is from Florida and did community development with the Korca city hall.

I was very impressed with the language ability of some of my cohort. They already seem to have mastered the Albanian language. One was even able to do Hamlet’s soliloquy in Shqip! I try to study regularly and almost daily read the Top Chanel-Shqip news on-line, referring to my Oxford Albanian-English dictionary. Sometimes, though, the words just don’t stick, and I have to look up the same word more than once for the same article. We were divided into groups based on our level. I am in the middle group, meeting the requisites of the Peace Corps, but not much more.

Some people have a real flare for languages, but not me. I am thinking of asking some of my counterparts who speak English with me to talk more in Shqip and may also post language learning material on the walls of my apartment (at minimum it will provide some insulation). Maybe I should put a language text under my pillow so I can learn by osmosis.

I am not sure how much I got out of the 4 day, intensive training in terms of increased facility with the language. I did enjoy seeing the members of my service group, especially the ones who are assigned in the north who I have not seen since pre-service training in Elbasan. It was exciting to hear about their sites and activities and commiserate about plumbing, heating, scorpions, bedbugs, cracks in the walls, leaks in the ceilings, and adventures in cultural misunderstanding.

They also helped me by trying out my new board game, “Furgon Driver”. You can probably guess where the inspiration came from. I drew the game board with crayons on a piece of cardboard. I cut the playing tokens from a hazel nut branch. Someone gave me the deck of cards which I wrote on to customize it for the game, and I cut the “perk” and “hazard” cards from computer paper. The only thing I paid for was the die, which was about 25 cents. I envision the game coming with a CD of regional Albanian music to be played in the background. Since anyone who has spent much time in an Albanian bus or furgon, already has that running in his or her head, we omitted that detail. The game played reasonably well and I got some good ideas for improvement. If I ever get it made, you know what your “crummy souvenir” from Albania is likely to be.

Korca has had lots of rain this month as well as the cold. Just above freezing and cars can be seen around town sporting a layer of snow, presumably after driving in from the surrounding mountains. My laundry is taking forever to dry. I now string it inside to see if I can get it dry in less than a week.

I am planning my first vacation out of the country for a few days next week. A group of Peace Corps, Albania, volunteers is running in the Athens marathon and I am going along for the trip, but have no intention of running or even walking. I suppose I will be called upon to help with first aid and post race therapy. I am looking forward to touring the sites and, the weather site on the web predicts temperatures between 70 and 80.

There is a very modern coach service on Albatrans direct to Athens from Korca. It only costs 35 euro and leaves several times a day. With my American passport, it is so simple and easy for me to make a reservation and go. Like most Americans, I take it for granted and rarely consider this right of American citizenship that allows me to travel without difficulty to so much of the world. My Albanian friends have to wait in long lines at the Greek consulate to get a visa. There is some irony that Albanians, once a part of the Ottoman Empire which issued some of the world’s first passports to its taxpaying citizens allowing travel throughout the Califate and abroad, now face hurdles to travel almost anywhere out of their country. With high unemployment and some towns with almost none for its young people, some resort to illegally sneaking into Greece or Italy to find work. American visas are granted by random selection of a limited number from the thousands of applications. Albanians call this “winning the lottery”. I have been told there are well trod paths marked by cairns through the mountains on the Greek border. I wonder what the border crossing will be like on the bus.