The mustache? For two weeks.

This has been a big weekend. Last Thursday, we marked the end of our Pre-Service Training with a swearing-in ceremony in Elbasan that officially made us Peace Corps volunteers. Afterward, many of us went out to our favorite bar in the city and spent most of the afternoon doing the usual activities: sitting in the shady courtyard drinking cheap beer, playing cards, and talking. It was a bittersweet day- we were all happy to be done with training and excited to go to our sites and begin our work, but it was also the last time that we were all going to be together as a group for many months. Saying goodbye to the other volunteers from Bishqem was especially difficult. For the past two months, I saw them practically every single day. I wasn't sure how that was going to play out in the beginning, but we ended up getting along remarkably well. They became such an integral part of my peace corps experience that it is hard for me to imagine going through the rest of the two years without them. I'll adjust, I'm sure, but the first few weeks will be very odd.



The next morning, I packed all of my bags and said farewell to my host family. That was another very difficult goodbye. When I first moved into their home in March, I thought it would be odd to live in the home of a family with whom I didn't share a common language. As the weeks progressed and my language improved, I could gradually talk to them about more and more things, but I never reached the point at which I could talk to them about my true feelings on an issue or expand upon an opinion far beyond whether or not I liked something. In many ways, I consider the ability to do those things to be vitally important to forming a strong relationship with someone. What I discovered with my host family, though, is that you can communicate some of those things simply by sharing a space with them, greeting them every day, and sharing times of celebration and disappointment with them. I truly do consider them to be my family in Albania and will dearly miss seeing them each day.



Ok. Enough of the sappy stuff. When I was living in Bishqem, my internet access was fairly limited and didn't get to share many of the pictures or stories from day to day life. Now that I do have internet access, I want to start recapping some of those experiences from PST.

A short time before I left for Albania, I read "The World According to Garp" by John Irving. Great book, if you wondering. Anyway, the book tells the story about the life of an author. At certain points in the book, you get to read short stories written by the fictional author as a way of following his progression as a writer. His first short story was set in Vienna and is about a young boy who is traveling with his family when they have an encounter with a group of gypsies and their pet bear. It is a cute story, but when I read it I distinctly remember thinking, "Oh John Irving, couldn't you come up with a slightly more realistic plot? I mean, a pet bear? Nobody actually has...



"...a pet bear." You win, John Irving. You always do. This friendly creature and his less than friendly owner were touring Elbasan for a few days this spring. He makes his living by allowing people to pay to get a picture taken with the bear. The death stare that he is giving me has something to do with the fact that I was not paying him for my personal memories of his bear. In this world of digital cameras, I would have to say his business plan seems flawed, but at the end of the day, I'm not the one with the bear. So yeah. Come to Albania! We have pet bears!

Disco Club Mateo

From the time that I submitted my application last march until now, the Peace Corps experience has been defined by the temporary and the unknown. You submit your application and you wait. You get nominated for a position, fill out lots of paper work, and you wait some more. I felt like I was in limbo for most of last year-- I didn't want to put my life completely on hold, but at the same time I knew that I couldn't start any big new pursuits when I was going to be running half way around the world the next year. Or not-- nothing was guaranteed, even after you are nominated for a position. Even when everything came together and I got on the plane for Albania in March, there was nothing solid for me to grab onto. I was meeting lots of great people and getting to know some fantastic new places, but always in the back of my mind was the knowledge that I'd be leaving them at the end of our ten week training.

As such, I hardly knew what to do with myself last week when were given the opportunity to spend a week in our assigned cities. On Tuesday, I arrived in Pogradec and spent the next four days touring the city, meeting my coworkers and spending quality time with my peace corps site mates/new family. I had to continually remind myself that this was not just another stop on the Albania tour bus. This was a preview of my life for the next TWO YEARS. When people ask me about the Peace Corps ten years down the road, this will be the place where all my stories begin.

I am happy to report that the next two years promise to be very, very good. The city itself is beautiful. It is defined by Lake Ohrid-- it is located directly on its southern shore and life in the city revolves around its crystal clear waters. The economy is driven by the tourism that it attracts. The xhiro (pronounced jeer-oh, the main street and social center of Albanian cities. Summer evenings in Albania are spent on the xhiro, walking and talking with friends and family) parallels the lake shore and the beautiful park that the city built there.



During the evenings, the sidewalks in that picture are packed with people. It is fantastic. Many street vendors appear during the evening to cater to the xhiro crowd-- including a doughnut vendor who will give you a bag of 4 or 5 freshly made doughnuts with the toppings of your choice for 50 cents. Can you say dangerous? I got to spend several of my evenings in the town doing the xhiro with my new site mates, Connie and Stacy. You should become familiar with those names, because I expect they will be making many appearances in this blog. Stacy (who is also a new volunteer) and I stayed with Connie (who is one year into her peace corps service) for the week we were in Pogradec. I couldn't have asked for better site mates. They will be great friends and great people to work with on our various projects around the town.



Connie is on the left, Stacy is in the middle. I still don't know much about my work itself. I got to meet my counterpart (my assigned liaison between the peace corps and the municipal government) and the mayor, but the exact work that I'll be doing has yet to be defined. The city is doing lots of work related to tourism and planning, though, so I expect that I will eventually be doing work in both fields.



You can see the draw for tourism. On Friday afternoon, Stacy and I hiked up a hill on the west side of the town and enjoyed a great view of the city and Lake Ohrid. It was hard to leave at the end of the week. I will miss many of the people and places that I have come to know while in training, but I am ready for Pogradec and the life that it promises. I am ready to start putting down roots again. It has been far too long. Only two more weeks...

Now I just need to work on my mustache

Half way through college, one of my great friends introduced me to Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway seems to be a polarizing author- I've met some people who can't stand his books and others who think he is a fantastic writer. Generally, I fall into the second camp. One of the things that distinguishes his writing in my mind is his ability to not only describe a scene, but to convey the ways that the scene affects his characters. By turns, he made me long for cosmopolitan energy surrounding a table in a cafe on a Parisian boulevard in the 1920's, for the excitement and anticipation found in the heat and press of the crowds during the fiestas in Pamplona, and the soothing comfort of the white sands, clear waters, and warm breezes of a Cuban beach.

Some of the strongest impressions that he left on me, though, came through his descriptions of the fly fishing trips that he (and/or his characters. They are usually interchangeable) took across Europe and early 20th century America. He would start these trips early in the morning and set off-- by foot or by hitching a ride-- towards a stream or river that he knew of or had heard to have good fishing. He would spend the next day or two slowly traveling down the stream, eating sandwiches and fruit and drinking wine along the way. If he grew tired of one stream, he would set off across the land to find the next.

This may strike some people as a wholly unremarkable experience, but it becomes much less so if you have ever had the desire to try the same thing in modern america. Even if you are lucky enough to live close to land that could potentially offer such adventures, you will most likely find your trip cut short by two small words: NO TRESPASSING. We americans, more than most people in the world, it seems, make sure to emphasize the "private" in private property. Even if there is no development on our land and it is buried deep in the mountains of, say, Virginia, we do not want anyone else walking on our property and will gladly remind anyone of that fact if they dare try.

In our relentless pursuit to protect our little piece of the world, we carve the land up into discontinuous pieces that are unable to allow us to truly experience its complete offerings. In so doing, I think that we do ourselves a great disservice. We separate ourselves from each other, from the land, and from the remarkably satisfying feeling that accompanies the simple freedom of movement through the world that we live in.

The past two weekend, I have been able to get some of my first tastes of this freedom while hiking in the mountains of Albania. Most of the hiking in this country is not done on designated hiking trails. Instead, you simply pick a spot that you want to reach (I bet that the view up there would be great!) and start walking towards it. Usually, there is a small road or path that you can follow. You walk through fields, in and out of small villages, around flocks of sheep being tended by their shepherds, and past people's homes. On one of these trips, I was walking by myself (sorry mom!) along a dirt road when it abruptly ended in front of someone's home. A grandmother immediately came out to find out what I was doing there. When I explained that I was trying to reach the top of the mountain but wasn't sure which road to take, she simply pointed me in the right direction-- which happened to be right through their yard. I walked along the side of their house, through their gardens under the watchful eyes of their cows, and up a small path that put me out on a new road a short distance later.

The next day, I was hiking with Laura (one of the other volunteers living in my village) and we were having a difficult time finding our way through a village and up to one of the paths that could take us up the mountain that sits behind it. We decided to ask a woman who was working in her garden for directions. She stopped what she was doing and personally walked us through their land and up to one of those paths, but only after inviting us into her home for coffee. So at 10:30 last Sunday morning, we found ourselves drinking coffee and peach juice with three complete strangers (we were joined by the woman's mother in law and sister in law) and talking in somewhat broken shqip about who we were and why we were in Albania. Only a polite refusal prevented us from leaving their home with sack lunches and bottles of water.

I have always loved hiking, but this adds an entirely new element to the equation. It becomes an exploration of both the land and the people. In some ways, I feel as connected to these communities after a few weeks as I did after years in some towns and cities that I lived in previously. And the views at the end of the hikes? Those are pretty great too.