Thanksgiving part two: Peshkopi style

The town I live in is in the northeast of Albania near the Macedonian border. The road to get there takes about 5 hours from the capital and the road (which is not that great, but getting better all the time) winds through the mountains. The trip is beautiful, but long and many Albanians and PCVs have this idea that Peshkopi is really far away, so not many people visit us. It is far away, but it is not really THAT far away, anyway, that is what I keep trying to tell people. . .

So, American Thanksgiving falls at a great time in Albania because usually it coincides with two (and this year three) holidays that are celebrated here. Meaning that we actually get a long weekend- longer than we would have in the US. Most people here had a full five days off- Friday to the following Tuesday and the Americans went ahead and took Wednesday and Thursday off, so basically it was a full week . . .

Taking advantage of this big holiday weekend, I invited some people to come up and extend the eating frenzy. Since they didn't have to be back to work on Monday it worked out. It was also Dylan's birthday this week, so we celebrated that as well and invited some of our Albanian friends to join us. My second Thanksgiving was almost as good as the first, if a bit more Albanian.
We still had all the standards (thanks to a care package or two- thanks Kenji!), but decided to go the slightly lazy rout and get some rotisserie chicken instead of cooking (and killing) our own turkey. We even stuck some sparklers in a pumpkin pie for Dylan . . .

It's funny, I don't think that many people in America have two Thanksgiving dinners, but for some reason I have had successive Thanksgiving dinner repeats for the past two years. Since we are so far away from the normal traditional things and our families, we unapologetically extend Thanksgiving into a full weekend with multiple meetings of different groups in several locations. I know some volunteers that went to as many as three dinners this year. We have a lot to be thankful for and I'm glad that I got to share this with so many good friends.

Diten e Falenderemeve

There are a few words in Albanian that I love to say like lulestrudhe (stawberry), infaktekisht (in fact) and diten e falenderemeve (Thanksgiving Day). I love saying it. Diten e Falenderemeve.

Anyway, Thanksgiving is probably my favorite holiday whether in America or Albania . . . I love that the point of it is taking time to think about the good things in our lives and reflect on the year. Plus there's the food. The people that work at the US Embassy here have made it a gracious tradition to invite Peace Corps Volunteers to their homes for Thanksgiving dinner. This year I was invited by Mark and Mary, a wonderful couple that works for the military at the Embassy. They live in a big house in Tirana with their dog and cat. Three of us came down on Wednesday night and helped with pie and other food- we made a pretty impressive three layer jello, pumpkin bread (with fresh pumpkin) and lots of goodies. The best thing about staying with expats is that they have a whole bunch of American food. When embassy employees come over from America, they get to bring with them an incredible amount of food. Their allowed amount of consumables (things like food, but also cleaning supplies and laundry detergent) for one year is more than the combined total of all the luggage that all 37 people in my group brought initially to Albania (we get 100lbs. of luggage each . . .), so yeah, it's a crap load of food. They also get to shop at the military commissary in Italy for all those "fresh" kinds of food, like cheddar cheese . . . so in addition to the normal Thanksgiving type things we also got to sample things like queso dip, dill pickles, Dr. Pepper, etc. There were six of us for dinner, plus a few other people from the embassy. I literally ate until I couldn't anymore. And then I ate some more. And then I had dessert. The other great thing about Mark and Mary's house is that they have the Armed Forces TV, so we were able to watch the Macy's parade and the football games. We also went to the "Ridge" (the American Ambassador's housing compound that is basically a small American suburban neighborhood in the middle of Tirana made up of modular houses . . . almost feels a bit Stepfordish . . .) to play touch football with the Marines and Embassy staff. In PC vs. Marines, the Marines kind of killed us . . . but I think I would have been a bit worried if they didn't :).














All in all it was a very American Thanksgiving, which is exactly what I wanted.

Mail call

It was looking to be a crappy day. It was one of those cloudy, rainy days where all that you want to do is stay home and snuggle with a good book and a cup of hot cider. It’s so cloudy and foggy that you can barely see the house across the way much less the mountains in the distance. It’s eerie and a bit creepy and when you walk outside it feels like you are walking through water; your clothes never seem to be completely dry. When you get into the office, you find that the internet is out and a trip to the internet café down the street tells you that it is in fact out in the whole town. There go those e-mails that you need to send and the research that you need to do for the training you are doing on Friday. You should have just stayed in bed.

So I walk over to the post office expecting the same- no, the packages I am waiting for are not here. Instead, I find (to the delight of post office ladies and me) that in fact I have TWO packages waiting for me. Bingo! And the day starts to look up. I want to give some credit here to two people that made my day today: My mom and Kenji. First, Kenji- who filled a package with everything needed to make a great thanksgiving (except the turkey, but he’s a vegetarian). When I think back to a year and a half ago and how worried I was that I wouldn’t get along with Kenji, it seems so silly. In the year that we spent here together, he became one of my closest friends and someone that I really came to depend on to listen to me (sometimes to the point of over-sharing, sorry K) and even though he is back in the states, he still is someone I can depend on to cheer me up. Second, my mom- of course, she is basically obligated to send me things, especially because I usually ask for specific things to be sent (in this package- some DVDs I ordered and a new hard drive . . .) but I want to give my mom credit here for having a singular ability for packing a care package. She knows how to use every bit of space- packing small, useful things (granola bars, starbursts, hot cider packets) into the spaces (no need for packing filler here!). She also knows the secret of packing everything into it’s own Ziploc bag. The Ziplocs not only protect everything in the package, but also are extremely useful as for some reason that is beyond me, Ziplocs are not widely used overseas. She also knows how to throw in some unexpected love into the mix- something to make me smile. I think that all moms and dads out there sending out care packages to their kids the world over could take some package-packing lessons from my mom. So to Kenji and my mom, falemenderit shume for the much needed cheer up today. And if you ever need a perfect care package, call my mom, I’m sure she’d send you one . . .

baking experiments

I set out to try to make bagels yesterday. It didn't quiet work out, but I got a loaf of bread out of it. Oh, well. Will try again today . . .

Where's my flying car?

Last night, my friend visiting from Lezhe again convinced me to host a "Kinema Rebecca" party at my house including cooking (lasagna) and a movie projected on my living room wall. As it has been getting cooler all week, it was a perfect time to start up my wood stove and welcome everyone into my nice warm home. We decided to watch Back to the Future Part II, which I love, but haven't watched in a long time. We realized when we were watching that the future that Marty goes forward into is now only 6 years away!

And I want to know: where is my flying car? Or my hoverboard? Or my hanging fruit thingy in the kitchen? Where are the people that are supposed to be inventing these things? Right now we can barely get an electric car on the market, much less a Mr. Fusion. Maybe my hopes are too high and I should worry about the real important things (like heath care and war and things like that) but some part of me just wants the flying car that was promised to me 20 years ago . . .

End of summer

The dip. I was looking back and at about this time last year I had a similar dip feeling. Summer is really over and I can feel winter getting closer. I bought my wood last week- this time all at once so that I don't have to buy more in the middle of the winter. Today it is rainy and not quite cold, but you can tell that the colder weather is coming. A perfect day to snuggle into bed with a good book. I've been searching for the reason for my current dip- I'm not unhappy here by any means. Work things are generally good, I'm getting busy again with the start of school. We had a really successful summer camp at the beginning of Sept. and I had a really successful workshop with my staff about time management and strategic planning. I've started English lessons with a few people in my office. The radio station is very close to being registered and start looking for funding. We had more than 20 kids come to our last Outdoor Ambassadors meeting and are hoping to go camping next week. With one of the girls from my MUN team, I am starting a girls leadership club for the girls that live in the school dormitories. I'm busy. And yet I'm feeling melancholy and homesick. I understand it to be more of an abstract sort of melancholy, rather than missing anything specific. I think part of it is the fact that the end of my service now is closer than the beginning- sort of a theoretical reality that I will be going home sooner rather than later, so I feel homesick because I will be there sometime soon (and by soon I mean within the next year or so) but I'm not there now. Ok, I don't know if that really makes much sense, but anyway . . .

not quite fixed

but getting closer and closer. After a month of panicky kernels, I am getting closer to figuring out what is wrong with my computer. We think that we have maybe narrowed it down to being a problem with my wireless card, which means that I can use my computer again as long as I don't try to get online with wireless. I really don't know what I would have done if I had not been able to use a computer at my office to search message boards and help sites to figure out what is wrong and then how to go about fixing it. A bit ironic, I suppose, that in order to get my computer working again I need another computer . . .

I have never thought of myself as a computer expert in any way, but (especially since I have a mac) I feel like I am probably more qualified to work on my computer (and fix other small problems with other computers) than many other people here, just because I have been around computers for a long time. I also have figured out a secret- in this time of technology, it is not any magical skills that are really needed most of the time, but rather the not so magical skills of asking the right questions and looking things up.





















This is exactly the kind of computer expert I am . . . also maybe why I've thought I might want to be a librarian- I'm good at looking up the answer when I have no idea!