Home Sweet Home

One of the most difficult things about keeping in touch with friends and family while living in a foreign country is the need to continual remind yourself that you live in a world that most of the people back home simply cannot imagine. I know that I certainly couldn't imagine it before I came here. I spent my first couple weeks in Albania in state of wide-eyed wonder, unable to believe that I would ever come to think of my surroundings as normal. Those were the times during which my calls home (or blog posts) were probably at their peak in terms of their information offerings. I still had clear memories of life in America and was able to compare and contrast my life here with the life that I had left behind quite easily.

Somewhere along the line, though, life in Albania became somewhat unremarkable. Not in the sense of being boring, but simply in the way that you grow used to anything that you see every day. Shopping in open markets no longer feels exotic. A furgon seems like a normal means of travel. I forget that there was a time during which I wasn't familiar with Euro-pop music. Tirana, Korce, and Skopsko mean the same thing to me as Bud, Coors, and Shiner. Byrek is standard lunch. And so on and so forth.

I have found myself casually referening all these things and more during conversations with people back home and am almost surprised when they remind me that they don't have the slightest clue of what I'm talking about. If I do this, I promise that it is not in an attempt to make you feel uncultured or untraveled. I simply tend to forget what the world that I knew looked like while I was sitting in the airport in New York City on March 16^th.

Some of this is unavoidable. Some of these topics, however, are begging to become blog material. Therefore, I am going to make an effort to spend the next few weeks trying to fill in and explain some of these little details of my life. We'll begin today with the most basic of the basics: my apartment.

Most apartments in Albania come in one of two styles: communist block apartments or high rise towers. Many, if not most, volunteers live in communist block apartments. These are usually 5 stories (give or take) tall. They aren't much to look at from the outside (unfinished brick or some dully colored plaster), but inside, many of them are surprising comfortable. Most are relatively spacious with a front entry hall, full kitchen, living room, bedroom, bathroom, and balcony. The size and quality of everything will vary from apartment to apartment and city to city, of course, but they usually make for decent living quarters.

Others of us live in the newer apartments that were built in post-communist times. Almost all of these take the form of high rise tower apartments. Most are ten stories (give or take) tall and can vary in quality from comfortable to borderline luxurious. I would classify mine as being closer to the comfortable side of the scale. A picture of my building from the outside:

I have a bit of the hike to the city center/my office (ten minutes through a lakeside park. Some guys really have it rough), but what it lacks in convenience, it makes up for with the quality of its venue: I am sandwiched directly between the football stadium and the lake. I haven't had a chance to take in a game yet, but the lake is a daily pleasure.

Once you enter my apartment building, you get into the elevator (if you didn't just say, "Whoa. Elevator." you obviously haven't been living in Albania) and dial up the 4^th floor. The discerning rider will notice, however, that you got in the elevator on the 2^nd floor... which is marked as floor 0... so I'm actually on the 6^th floor. Go figure that one.

When you get off the elevator, you will probably be greeted by complete darkness. There are no windows in the stairwell and all of the lights are on temporary timers to save electricity. Not a problem, though. You simply walk straight forward until you hit a concrete wall and then feel around with your left hand until you find the light switch on the wall. Easy peasy! Once you flip it on, you have a couple minutes of light to take care of the business of finding your door and your keys.

Actual photograph of my hallway, before finding the light switch..

I wasn't sure about things at first, but I have come to be quite fond of my apartment. I too have an entry hall, living room, dining room, bedroom, and full kitchen. They just happen to all share the same room. Such is the way of the studio apartment. With a little imagination and some rearranging of the furniture, though, it has worked out quite well. It is also very easy to photograph. From the four corners!

View one: Kitchen (left), entry hall (middle), bedroom (right)

View two: Bedroom (left), living room (middle), wardrobe (right)

View three: dining room (left), bathroom (middle), kitchen (right)

View four: You've seen those part before. What you didn't know was that the pearly gates are located directly outside my balcony. And/or I need to turn on the flash.

Other notable things:

The balcony. Complete with washer (blue and propped up in the corner) and drier (front and center). That's probably the closest that I come to a standard Peace Corps experience.

The view from the balcony. I would be willing to bet that every building you see here has been built in the last fifteen years. If you zoom in, you'll find that half of them aren't even complete yet. The closest ridge line more or less marks the border with Macedonia. Please also note the herd of sheep in the empty lot. Their shepherd apparently decided to make a trip to town that day.

My sweet light fixture...

...and my sweet rug. Aside from the down comforter that I plan to buy for the winter, that will probably go down as my most costly purchase in Albania. But it was worth it. It really ties the room together, man.

The bathroom. It's nice. It's blue. It has a new water heater and great water pressure in the shower. I remember during one of my first posts that I was showing some pictures of our hotel and talking about how our bathroom was missing something (began with shower and ended with curtain). Well, this bathroom is also missing something. Begins with "shower" and ends with... wait, that's the shower?!

That's no trick of perspective, friends. There are about three feet-- if that-- that separate my toilet and the shower. Not the tub, not the shower stall, but the shower head itself. Takes some getting used to, but it is great for multi-tasking. (I kid! For now...) The water, in case you are wondering, simply collects in a drain in the middle of the bathroom. I was slighly annoyed in the beginning, but it does have the advantage of making it very easy to keep your bathroom floor clean.

So there you have it. The humble abode. This coming weekend, I will be doing a little bit of traveling, so the next post will probably be about transportation in Albania. To wet your appetite, I give you... the hokie furgon!