Travel Stories >> Albania >> July 12 - 14: Settling into Enver Hodxa's land of bunkers

ALBANIA – Summer 1996
July 12 – 14: Settling into Enver Hodxa’s land of bunkers

DC/ZURICH - Friday, July 12, 1996

As we approach Zurich, it suddenly occurs to me that I am going to spend the next three weeks 24 hours a day with a woman I can barely tolerate for an hour at a time. Gertrude (ok, names have been changed to protect the tedious) is bright and driven and one of the most awkward and rude people I’ve ever met. She has a hard time listening to what people say to her because her mind is already on the thing she herself will be saying next. Ah well... I want to go to Albania, I want to see the three terrific guys on this project, and I want to get OUT of the office. If spending three weeks with Gertrude is my payment/punishment then so be it. It could be a lot worse.

This United flight is full of Europeans who don’t use deodorant as regularly as I do, as well as the requisite number of unhappy babies. I suppose that at this point in my life I have been on so many planes that each plane and its passenger selection is really identical no matter where you are flying or with whom. So we’ll get into Zurich in about an hour, we’ll then wait 3 hours for our little puddle jumper to Tirana. I have been reading about Albania... what a fascinating place. It is apparently quite mountainous. The language is considered the last vestiges of the Illyrian culture, in fact, Albanians are considered that oldest culture in Southeastern Europe.

ZURICH - July 13, 1996

Well, the flight gets in on time which means we have a nice long wait in the Zurich airport, the only place on earth where even a chocolate bar is well over ten dollars. It’s a wait of almost 5 hours. I finish a Spanish novel that Nati (a spanish friend) gave me for my birthday, Gertrude is reading through a draft copy of a book that a friend of hers is writing about Albanian women. The Zurich airport is very clean, fairly small, and full of smokers. How can ANYONE smoke at 7am... I don’t care what time zone your body is in. A cigarette is to be savored after a good meal with a nice cup of coffee, not choked down at 7am. I do sit there and think about how many times my sister has sat in these very seats, and passed through these very halls. We sat and people-watched and yawned a lot and waited. At about 11:45 they finally set the gate for Tirana and our 12:50 flight left on time.

Swissair’s local regional airline is called ‘Crossair’. Our plane is a small 5-seat wide plane (they announce that we are 98 passengers today). Up in the front of the plane there is a group of small boys (9 years old?) who appear to be part of a scout group or something like that. I have a window seat so I will have a view as we land - which should be neat. It is a fairly interesting flight. The skies are almost completely clear so the view out of my little porthole is magnificent - I can follow our path through the Swiss then Italian Alps, and down over the Adriatic Sea - the landscape is almost surreal - like I am hovering over some huge relief model of the region. The skies are so clear and we are so small that we are flying low enough to see the road system. This is the wildest - following this network of hairpins, switchbacks is just magnificent.

Although Gertrude and I are in different seats, the amount of interaction one has with strangers when travelling accompanied is suddenly very limited. The people-watching is still fascinating to me, even though with a traveling companion there is just a lesser level of contact. This Crossair flight is almost full, and the crew members make all of their announcements in German, French, Italian and lastly, English. Just imagine having to know four languages to get a flight crew’s job, sheesh! And I keep thinking, so what if the plane is going down? Since they get to English last, I’d be dead before I ever knew what had happened. Sort of a moot point, I guess!

We finally arrive (quite wearily) at the Tirana International Airport - which is one cement block runway. Customs is a ten minute wait (the entire plane is being served by two small windows - and of course we get in line in the wrong one (I thought Gertrude had done this back in March, but apparently she didn’t remember this part). The entire airport is a building the size of my living room. We make it through, our bags pass muster but the six boxes of binders and training equipment is questioned. It is obvious that Gertrude has encountered this before because she just whips out the loose copy of the course binder for the customs people to look at, hollers at them in English, repeating words like, BIZ-NESS, (like enunciated and loud they are suddenly going to understand English), but they seem quickly satisfied and let us go. Lesson one: Rude seems to fly in Albania, Go Gertie!

Our chief of party (Rich) is outside waiting with his office retinue and two cars and drivers. We meet the famous and wonderful Mishel and are whisked off to Tirana in an air-conditioned Mercedes. It’s like Morocco, the country is lousy with Mercedes.

The countryside is classic Mediterranean; dry, green, and hilly. I imagine that this is what impoverished Spain looked like just after Franco’s men won the civil war. The hills are sometimes a terraced agriculture, and there are old war bunkers everywhere! They are funny domed shaped concrete things. Gertrude says they ought to grow mushrooms in them. Rich says they’d make great outhouses. Some of the expats in Albania have thought half-seriously about an "adopt-a-bunker" program. At the tourist kiosks in town they sell little alabaster copies of these things.

Once into the city (I use the term loosely – it’s a tiny place), the drivers leave us with our bags at the Tirana International Hotel (TIH). It is a very nice place, overlooking Skanderbeg Square and the very heart of Tirana. In the brochure they mention that it is the best hotel in town, of course, they fail to mention that there are only two hotels in the city, so being the best one is sort of a relative thing!

It really is a little place. No street signs, barely a stop light in the entire place, very dusty. Although places are being renovated - everyone logically starts in the inside, so the outside of most places still look pretty shabby. Rich says that this place has REALLY grown quite a bit since he got there in 1992. There were hardly three cars to be found in the city and now they were clogging the roads, and noisy. He describes Tirana in 1992 as a wild and isolated place.

After washing off United/Zurich/Tirana with a magnificent hot shower, we reconvene down in the hotel lounge/bar with Rich, Mishel, and Tim and Amber. Tim and Amber are two public policy specialists from Iowa farm country who have been to Albania twice, and have just finished a series of training seminars and meetings with business associations. They love it here, and it was sort of fun to cross paths and hear their stories (and boy, do they have stories).

After our friendly meeting, Rich and Mishel take us to change money in the streets. Apparently not only is the rate better in the streets then in the exchange houses, but the banks will not exchange money. They’ll give you dollars for your travelers cheques, but they will not sell you lek for your dollars. This sort of blows me away, logically, but one of the things I am quickly learning about Albania is that the rules of logic do not apply here. They tell us that the streets are pretty safe. Apparently the impoverished have not yet begun to hunt down the wealthy... although a day or two ago some guy went into the Savings Bank in Tirana and took a couple of people hostage, shot another. Seems he had been turned down for a loan earlier in the month. I suggest to Gertrude that this might be an interesting point in the training module on customer service - she doesn’t get the joke.

Rich and Mishel fill us with all sorts of trivial and fascinating information... for example, 95% of all the vehicles in the country were stolen. Four years ago, it was illegal to own a private car. And it’s not like some things private you could hide. You either have a car or you don’t. Of course the military and the government had vehicles, and so there are some people in the country who actually know how to drive. In general, however, the roads are suddenly a fury of cars driven by people who’ve been denied access to them forever. The vehicles area all from Bulgaria, Italy, France, Switzerland, wherever... insurance scams... the owners agree not to report the vehicle stolen until they are sure that the robbers are safely in Albania. Of course, the problem is then that the Albanians can’t leave Albania or Interpol will confiscate the vehicle. What a joke! Imagine running the center in Tirana or Durres or Gjirokaster that is in charge of registering cars. They must spend their entire days printing up false titles on cars whose VIN is really registered in some other country. Wild.

And of course, if one is going to go to the trouble of stealing a vehicle and driving it straight through hundreds of miles to bring it back here, one is certainly not going to steal some old Citröen, oh, no. If one is going to go through all that, one is going to snatch a top of the line Mercedes, Audi, even Jeeps (loaded for yuppies)... so the country is just lousy with stolen luxury cars. Mercedes has even set up a parts and service franchise of sorts to deal with all the repairs and parts because the demand has gotten so great! Can you imagine? They don’t have a formal dealership here because no Albanian could likely afford a Mercedes for real, but there are so many hot ones floating around the country that they figured the least they could do was make money servicing them!

The feel of the city is of a small, friendly, poor barrio in Peru’s Lima. Dusty, dirty, absolutely filthy kids all over the streets - but comfortable and apparently safe. The people really are attractive. They look to me very much like the gypsies of southern Spain, tan leathery skin, green or sky-blue eyes, occasionally deep brown doe-eyes. In the last two hours I have seen some drop-dead gorgeous men... I can’t speak for the women, but the American men here say the same for the women (my old friend Gary says with disgust, "yeah, you want to talk about a real hell?.. all over the place are these beautiful, bright women, and the country’s motto should be: "you try, you buy.").

After leaving the money changers (112 leks to the dollar, it is 95 to $1 in the hotel), we wander the streets. We briefly visit some friends of Gertrude’s and their two adopted children. The 4 year boy is American born, the 3 year old girl is Albanian....children born out of wedlock here are generally relegated to orphanages because, "no Albanian man will raise another man’s child." Lovely. The Albanians may have been isolated, but some of those charming Mediterranean values seeped in somewhere. How sad.

We finish the evening by stopping by Pizza Calypso for dinner. It’s a really nice meal, individual pizzas done in a brick oven. As 10:30 approaches, Gertrude and I both sort of hit that jet-lag wall, and so it’s back to the hotel to crash. Hey, here I am. In Albania.

TIRANA/SHKODRA - Sunday, July 14, 1996

I am sitting in the TIH dining room... getting up wasn’t so painful this morning (you KNOW how I love to sleep), but after spending most of the last 48 hours being fed every three hours, I was hungry. The hotel is full of Italians and Americans - mostly do-gooders - NGOs, non-profits, evangelists (oh no!), and grassroots types. Drag. What Albania needs are good, honest, bright businesspeople (did I just write that?)... What they CERTAINLY do NOT need is to become Born-Again Christians so as to solve all their problems. If they don’t get a handle on jumpstarting and then managing the economy, someone, and probably someone who does NOT have their best interests at heart, will do it for them. That would be disaster.

Gertrude called, she’s showering, not going to Mass this morning after all, would I like to do a little shopping before we get to the office. Yes, I would. Perhaps I will end up changing my opinion of Gertrude, but for the time being, I am dreading this month. I think it’s really hard for people who have been raised to believe they are highly cultivated intellectuals to flow easily in social situations. She interrupts people, she doesn’t catch the glazed over eyes of her listeners, she laughs at things most don’t find funny, and misses most of the subtle humor that goes on around her. I am torn between feeling sorry for her, and being irritated by the fact that this is the sort of person that Americans send overseas... Well, this American is tied to my waist for the next three weeks so I had better get used to that. Bottom line is, if she does a good job, I don’t care how ignorant, loud, rude, or socially awkward she is.

Well, we run a little late, but we see a lot and buy some postcards. They have a lot of filigree silver that I thought about buying as gifts, but it really is that kind of stuff you either like or don’t and I don’t want to figure that out for anyone. They have some alabaster carvings of things like Skanderbeg (the national hero), and Roman gods, and those damn bunkers, and they have wooden boxes (the quality is not great) and funky cigarette holders and pipes, and other little knick-knacks...but what they really have are beautiful hand-woven and knotted rugs. Kilims, Qilims, Chilims by whatever name is used, they are really pretty.

So we arrive at the project office, go through our boxes, figure out what we’ll need for the first week in Shkodra, in the north, and we’re off. It is to be a three hour ride, and Mishel is coming with us. Gertrude, who has made it clear that she tends toward carsickness (are we surprised?), will likely spend the next three weeks riding shotgun. And having seen them drive here this is perfectly fine with me!

The countryside is very green and healthy. Lots of good looking crops, lots of healthy-looking pigs, sheep, goats, and cows along the roadsides. The houses are mostly of stone and are quite modest, although on occasion we pass new construction. We see a lot of corn (mostly for feed), a lot of watermelons, sunflowers, tomatoes, tobacco (drying on ropes against the outside of the houses), peanuts, onions, etc... Seems to be a working rural sector.

Cars are just outrageous (poor and careless drivers) and people on bikes and on foot get hit. Lots of horse- and burro-drawn carts. And today being Sunday, every fifth car that passed us was covered with wedding decorations and honking up a storm.

Shkodra is north of Tirana and although most of the road traverses a wide flat valley - there are enormous, impressive mountain ranges along both sides (sort of a strange, poor Switzerland), and boy was it toasty out there today, whew!

We are dropped at what is the only hotel in Shkodra, the Rozafa hotel, a former Albturist hotel (or a state-run hotel). We are on the third floor, 85 steps (the elevator hasn’t worked in years apparently) - which felt more like 4 or 5 thousand with all our suitcases and equipment. We are informed that for most of the day there is no water (they tell us that there is almost always water after 11pm at night - I guess we’ll be taking late showers!) - forget asking if it’s hot or cold, it’s NO water. We sat around waiting for Gary to show up and even called a couple of times to have his landlord tell us that he went to the beach.

Finally Mishel, who was starting to think about heading back to Tirana ("Oh No! Don’t abandon me, Mishel!") suggests we walk to Gary’s house - which turned out to be a five minute walk (everything is close here because everything is small here!). We are greeting by Gary who says he’s been waiting for our call (!) We sat and chatted a while, drank a nice bottle of wine, and then went out for the "giro". It is identical to the Spanish "vuelta". Everyone leaves their house at about 7:30 and walks around a main series of streets, meeting and greeting their neighbors, checking out the opposite gender, catching up with old friends, stopping for a coffee or coke at the cafes which line the strip. Shkodra is supposed to have a very good Giro (as Albanian giros go), although we are told that the best giro is in Korça. The giro is fun, and it is sweet to kind of move with the flow and get a visual inundation of Albanian looks and fashion (such that it is). People walk along, or cycle along (sometimes 2-3 to a bike - remember that these people are major bikers, that being the only means of transportation for basically the last forty years), and it is really nice to sort of saturate my mind with what Albania "looks" like.

We had a little surreal moment when, before the giro, we went by the hotel with Gary to check on things for tomorrow. As we were leaving through the dining room exit, we encounter a couple of guys setting up for a Sunday night wedding (apparently the bride’s part of the Albanian wedding?), and one of these young men asks Gary if he speaks English, Gary responds affirmatively, and the guys breaks into his own English - which is a result of his being born and raised in HOBOKEN, New Jersey. Here I am feeling like I am as far away from my other life as one could be, and here in front of me in this filthy old communist hotel is a young Albanian from Hoboken, here to attend his cousin’s wedding. Weird!

So we complete our giro. Gary has introduced us to a couple of his friends, and you know Gary, the guy’s been here for a year and the whole town calls out to him as he passes, ‘Ga-ry’. We stop at a place for dinner, a pizza, which was very tasty... offsetting the worst service I’ve ever received at any eating establishment.

As it gets later, Gertrude was feeling a little like she wanted to go over some of the materials (yeah, considering we give our first course TOMORROW!). I agree completely since I am feeling some stress about this whole thing, as well. So off we go, and as soon as we get into the rooms, Gertrude promptly turns to me and says, "look, I’m really tired, I’ll get up tomorrow really early and go over what I need to do, you know, go over my notes." I’m thinking, "notes?" "what notes?" And I think to myself - we haven’t worked on ANY of this yet. So, ever agreeable, I nod and return to my room, to panic alone, and read through every module I think I might have to give. I sort of expect to be the idiot, the junior, the person who makes the sacrifices, since Gertrude is the senior. It is all rather tiring, but all rather expected. If this is what going out in the field is all about - fine, I can ride in the back seat until the day I die.

So off she goes to bed. And I sit there reading through everything for the fourth time.... and the wedding downstairs is just heating up... and on a Sunday night!

This hotel is one of the worst places I’ve ever stayed... and it can afford to be since it is the only hotel in town. These former state-run places are just a disaster. The problems this country encounters in the transition from socialism to private property seem insurmountable at times. Imagine that this hotel has numerous owners, no one is quite sure who is/are the legal owner(s), so no one is going to put any capital into the place because the minute they fix the place up – "owners" will appear out of nowhere to stake their claim. So this, and other Albturist hotels (I’m told) are all on the verge of being unlivable places. Forget conference planning and catering, this place needs a working elevator, furniture, an accounting system, a system for meals, I mean the basics!

So I have to keep the windows open because it is hotter than hell out tonight, but of course this means that 1) the mosquitoes feast, and 2) the wedding sounds like it is taking place on my windowsill, all 200 drunks and the band.

I think I may have gotten about 2 hours of total sleep. Lord save me.

Copyright © 1996 by Rachel Peterson

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