Travel Stories >> Albania >> August 1- 2: Gertie-less, At last!!

ALBANIA – Summer 1996
August 1- 2: Gertie-less, At last!!

Thursday, August 1, 1996

It is a happy bunch at the RBA this morning - a little apprehensive, but basically excited. They make their copies, arrange their materials, and patiently watch and take notes on their peers. The business people are mostly women, and they seem like a good group. No one really translates for me which is fine - I like to listen to the Albanian - it doesn’t flow quite the same as French or Spanish, but it has a cadence which is not unlikeable.

After the training - and I tell them I am very impressed with them - we eat lunch (filo dough filled with meat or cheese (that I’m embarrassed that I cannot recall the name of). And after lunch, I promise them that I will not hold them too long, and we have a 30 minute discussion of what they did right, and asked them what they might change or improve for the next time. We are a happy bunch and as we finish, we move into the inner room where Mark and Aurel have champagne for everyone - much to the delight of all.

We drink champagne and laugh and tease each other. At one point either Aurel or Angelo grabs a half empty bottle and shakes it a little. There is a little shrieking and a rush to find cover, and luckily the only thing he manages to besmirch is the wall above the filing cabinet. Well, the Korça RBA has a little souvenir of our training!

During a quiet moment, Elda pulls me aside and gives me little gift, a necklace of bone, carved into a little figure - She begs me to contact her again if I come to Korça. She tells me that she and her husband are renovating the house, but it is almost finished so I’ll have a new place to stay! She is so kind. They all are. The excitement over, we linger to say goodbye. I have really liked this bunch - I mean I have liked all of the groups, but this one ranks close to the Shkodra crowd. And how so very different the two groups are.

Mark and I get back to the house, and I finish packing. Mark is coming back to Elbasan with me because he has work to do there, so it is just goodbye to Susan when the taxi (the same driver!!!) shows at 3pm. I will genuinely miss Susan. There are little pieces of her that remind me so much of my Stroudsburg cousins - all the fond things! I find it easy to talk to both of them, they are good-natured and level-headed and the chemistry lends itself to good talking. SO we are off at 3pm, the driver seems fine - especially after the HORRENDOUS drive yesterday. Although we all admit, he had it the best since he didn’t understand any of what Gertie was saying.

It is a very pretty but uneventful ride back to Elbasan - I love the countryside. It would be such an excellent place to do some serious hiking and camping. Mark sleeps some in the car, as do I (he has graciously given me the backseat), and at one point I have this surreal little moment when in a sleepy daze I am listening to the taxi’s cassette player. Here I am in Albania, half asleep in a Mercedes, listening to Bonnie Tyler singing "A Whiter Shade of Pale". One of those funky moments in time.

We get to Elbasan in regular time and stop by John’s apartment since I have the Elbasan rugs stashed there. We arrive back to Mark and Susan’s house and hook up with Dimitri who is a rock, the poor thing. When we express our great sympathies for his recent ordeal, he does the Dimitri thing and sort of shrugs and rolls his eyes!

Mark and Dimitri go off to do some business, and to arrange for a taxi for me for tomorrow (to Tirana and then the airport). I begin to try and figure out the final pack out. I have left my big suitcase here in Elbasan, I have rugs from Korça, I have the rugs from here, I have my clothes… I must be nuts. Mark is back in no time, and I decide to worry the packing later. We spend some time trying to ‘catch’ a signal on the satellite dish - to no avail. We finally figure that perhaps it is set too high, and that since neither Mars nor the moon is sending, it’ll have to be reset. We speak to John by phone and then walk out to his place then on to the ‘express-your-love hotel’ where we shared a nice meal. John is feeling a bit weary on all fronts. He has had visitors from home off and on for a number of weeks, Paula has just left, he is missing friends’ weddings back home, etc... and the icing on the emotional cake was getting Gertie at 11:30pm last night wound up like a top - and talking at him for a couple of hours before she finally hit the sack. Poor guy!

We head home, and I spend about 30 minutes getting everything packed - quite successfully (amazingly). I will be stealing one of Mark’s bags - and will fill with things and send it back with Mishel when he comes home at the end of August. After the bags are packed, Mark and I sit and talk for a long time - mostly about project stuff. They have been a bit forsaken out here - between a project administrator in the home office who can’t see his way clear to send a lousy fax or make a phone call for them, to a chief of party in the field who is little more than useless.

ELBASAN -- TIRANA -- ATHENS -- CORFU - Friday, August 2, 1996

My taxi arrives on time at 8am. It is Lahti - the man who drove us to Korça the first time and ate Qoran with us on Lake Ohrid. I managed in my nonexistent Albanian and clever charades to promise him I would send him pictures of Corfu - since he expressed that he had always wanted to go. And considering this is a country where they will keep postcards from going out if they want them for their walls – I’m happy to oblige him!

I arrive in Tirana at 9:45, and head straight to the project office. Mishel accompanies me out on the town to buy the last few trinkets and bunkers I wish to buy for folks at home. We stop in the TIH to pick up the last bag I have stored there, and for a cup of coffee and a good talk. I can’t wait to see him at home in DC where he’ll be later in the summer. He is so bright, and his English is so good, I know he will greatly enjoy the US.

Back to the office with five minutes to spare so I can re-pack (again!) for the imminent air travel. It is hot today! After the goodbyes, Lahdi takes me off to the Tirana Airport. I am there with plenty of time to spare. The Tirana Airport ‘departure lounge’ is an amazing place. It is a large, very dirty room. The pink walls have long ago begun to peel. The five ceiling fans do very little to keep cool any of the 200 people standing in this room. There are large, overstuffed couches and chairs around the outside of the room which are filled to capacity, although I imagine they are even hotter than standing because they are made of material. I stand by the open door to the runway area. My flight is scheduled to take off at 1:55. The wait is long, and the passengers on the Alitalia flight and the flight to Istanbul push and shove out through the door when their flights are called at 12:00 and 1:00. The flights, are called by a woman with a very loud voice standing by the door. No announcements, no signs indicating anything, the whole process and feel is kind of like a Brownie troop getting from the Troop Leader’s living room to her minivan - only on a larger, dustier scale.

We finally get onto our little Olympic Air flight, and the cool air doesn’t work right in the plane so we sweat fiercely all the way to Thessaloniki, Greece, where we sit for 45 minutes waiting for a crew change, and for one of the stewardesses to clean up a seat in front of us where a child has yarped up his meal just half a hour earlier. It’s kind of funny because the seat is so badly puked on that they actually remove it. The flight is rather uneventful, except for a rather pregnant Albanian woman (who would NEVER have been allowed on a plane in the US) who smiles a little and grabs my wrist to read my watch every twenty minutes for the entire course of the three hour flight.

It muse about my journey. Albania has been a special place. I want to go back, I want to rekindle the friendships, I want to see how dramatically this little country will change even month to month. I joked that I was so, so proud to have beaten McDonalds to Albania - and I know in my heart that the next time I’m there, they will have Big Macs - probably smack in the middle of Skanderbeg Square. Hoxha knew the imperialists would invade, he just never calculated when and how they’d invade. Well, here we are.

Copyright © 1996 by Rachel Peterson

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