Albania 15: Jimmy

[NOTE: This blog/diary of Mykel's Italian-Albanian trip starts several entries before this one. Due to the oddities of Blogging, the entries appear in reverse order. Because much of the reportage is based on the previous days, I recommend reading from the start, at the entry ALBANIA 1. Also, because this computer lacks search capabilities, and my brain needs a RAM boost, I fear I may repeat some tales already told... repeat some tales told better the first time.]

Change the setting, and the commonplace becomes wondrous. --Mykel Board

Jimmy's Tale

I write sitting in the Cuçi Bar Restorant in Berati. My plan was to sit all day in an outdoor café, drinking a cup of coffee, very Parisian, and just write. But, such are plans.

The outdoor café is louder than a sports bar during the world series. It's right across from a mosque. Pretty setting. But over the general din, the guy at the next table kept shouting. Like he was in an argument about a sports team. But I kept hearing the words iszhrael or something like that. People who know me know I'm not the biggest fan of the country of Israel, though I have Israeli friends. (Hell, I'm not the biggest fan of the country of America, though I also have a couple of American friends.) But I also know Izraelit in Albanian means Jew. And hey, you talkin' about me?

I could be completely wrong. The guy cudda been screaming about something else. The local soccer team for all I know. In one of his movies, Woody Allen talks about how Jews are so sensitive, that they hear Jew in everything. People talking on the street:

“I didn't go. Did you?”

Jew? Jew? Did he say Jew?

So maybe I mis-heard. In any case, the guy is so loud and annoying that I can't stay. So I go for a walk, go down a side street. Find this restaurant and figure, if so many flies like this place, the food must be good. And they have Fanta. I don't know what it is. Maybe it's the sugar and not high fructose corn poison. But the Fanta in Albania is really great... And the restaurant doesn't care if I use their electricity to write this entry.

This is my third day in Berati. It's a nice town, somewhat vertical, but not as dramatic as Gjirokastra. It's not about Berati I want to write, though. It's not really about a town at all, but about a person.

In my last entry, I wrote about my climb to the castle. On the return trip, after meeting some Peace Corpsers, I found myself a long way from town, and very high up in the mountain. I knew the way from the Post Office, so I asked a local directions there, figuring the rest would be easy.

I asked an ancient Albanian guy. One tooth in his mouth... and it was gold. Thinning gray hair, and that large Albanian forehead that is so distinctive of the people here.

(Actually, the entire Albanian headshape is distinctive. There's no back to the head. Just a straight line up from the back of the neck to the crown. The face is rectangle, like a brick on end. And that forehead. That high forehead, like a caricature of an intellectual. I don't know much about brain geography. I think intelligence is what's behind the forehead, so maybe Albanians are really smart. I don't know what's at the back, though. That, they're missing.)

The guy told me his name was Jimmy. I told him mine was Mykel.

“I speak Italian, Russian, and French,” he said. “I'm sorry. I don't English. My son, he speak very well English.”

I asked him where the post office was. He told me it was closed. Communication from this point was difficult, but he showed me, I thanked him, and found my way home from there.

I return to the castle the next day. First, I want to go to the information center again... find out about the bus schedule to Tirana. Second, I want to see the Zekate house, a Byzantine house, reconstructed in the original style. Third, I wanted to go to the Ethnographic museum. I had such a good experience at the one in Saranda, I figured I'd see another one, just for the photos and the guides.

As I climb the cobblestone path toward the castle, I hear a voice.

“Mykel! Mykel!”

It's Jimmy.

“Mykel,” he says. “You go to the post office? You mail things?”

I tell him yes and thank him. There's not point in trying to explain again.

He moves to my side.

“I speak Italian, Russian, and French,” he said. “I'm sorry. I don't English. My son, he speak very well English.”

“Une koptoj.” (I understand) I tell him.

“You have a cup of coffee with me?” he asks.

“Sure,” I say.

That's why I travel. I don't travel for buildings, though some, like the Gjirokastra castle, are pretty amazing. I don't travel for scenery, though the Albanian mountains are amazing. I travel for people-- and adventure. If I don't say yes to every invitation, I may be missing something. I'll never know.

So we go to a café on the side of the mountain. I don't know how it stays there. Certainly one wall must be longer than the other. I wonder if they have special chairs, two legs longer on one side, so you can sit outside without falling over.

Jimmy and I both order coffee. He talks to me.

“I taught Russian, but I love democratzia. I love American song: Elvis Presley. Michael Jackson. Gloria Gaynor (?????)...”

I nod. Then remember that I might be saying NO with that nod. Jimmy doesn't seem to notice.

“I speak Italian, Russian, and French,” he says. “I'm sorry. I don't English. My son, he speak very well English.”

“Une koptoj,” I tell him.

“Now I have no work.” He says. “Four years no work. I have son. He in Tirana. He study medicine. I have daughter. She in Italy. She also student.”

Just then the waiter comes out. I ask him to take our pictures. The sun is, for once, so bright, that the shadow from the restaurant awning, divides our faces.

“I'm a teacher too,” I tell him. “I teach English in New York. All my students are Japanese.”

One of the many nice linguistic coincidences is that teacher in Albanian is mësues (pronounced masseuse). It's much sexier sounding to say I'm a masseuse, than a teacher. Though Jimmy is not a guy I particularly want to be sexy with.

We finish our coffee. Jimmy says to me, “I'm sorry Mykel. But I have no change for coffee. You have change? You can pay?”

The total is around 150 lek. I think I can spring for that. But it's a weird culture where people invite you out, then expect you to pay for them. It's like my guide in Durres. Don't worry about the money... you're paying.

“We go to the Zekate House,” says Jimmy. “I show you.”

So up we walk. Up is the only way to walk to see anything in Gjirokastra. Down is the way back.

During our walk, Jimmy talks some more.

“You teach English,” he says. “Everybody use English. I teach Russian. I teached Russian. Little children. I not teach dictatorship. (He pronounces it dictatorship). I teached Democratzia and music: Elvis Presley, Michael Jackson, Gloria Gaynor. But I teached Russian. Now in Albania, no more dictator. No more Russian. I no work four years.”

“That's too bad,” I say, turning to look into his impossibly weary eyes and unavoidably staring at his single gold tooth. Is he eighty? Ninety? I don't know. He's strong enough to take this hike. Straight uphill, it's leaving me breathless. I wish I smoked. Then I'd have an excuse.

He continues talking, but hides his mouth with his hand as he speaks.

“You have lots or little a teacher?” he asks, rubbing his thumb against the other four fingers in a near-universal sign for money.

“Not a lot,” I say, “but I live.”

“I don't live,” he says. “Mykel, I don't live.”

Luckily, about this time we come to the Zekate house. A dog barks at our approach. It's looks like a poodle, or something poodlish. White, fluffy, with a harness instead of a leash. It's pulling against that harness, yapping away. I guess it's a kind of automatic doorbell, informing the occupants of an approaching visitor.

The house itself is an interesting old building: two towers and a stone foundation. The house is so wide and the street so narrow, it's impossible to fit more than one tower at time in the camera lens.

The top, white part, has rectangular windows, very close together. There are long wooden support beams holding up the black roof. In the lower, stone, part, the windows are arched at the top, and rather small compared to the whole wall space.

It's an incredibly impressive building, looking not quite like anything I've seen before.

It is also closed.

“I'm sorry Mykel,” says Jimmy. “It is closed.

I shrug. At least the return is downhill.

“No problem,” I say. “Let me take your picture here, and we'll go to the ethnographic museum.”

He nods.

When we get to the museum, Jimmy says goodbye.

“Here is the museum,” he says. “I will not go in. You go in.”

“Thank you, Jimmy,” I say, shaking his hand. “Faleminderit shum.”

He turns to leave. There is a deep sadness in his walk.

Oh yeah, I forgot to tell you. During our conversation, Jimmy tells me how old he is. He's younger than I am.

***

I enter the museum and am immediately greeted by a photograph of an old Praktica (East German) camera, with a big red X over it.

Okay, that spoils have the fun, since the stuff in the music is stuff you want to remember, and, if you have a brain like a... like a... I can't remember what... like I do, then you need pictures. Just to spite, I take a picture of the no picture-taking sign.

Looks like I'm going to have to take this tour on my own. No host and hostess like last time. That's a shame, but then again, I can take pictures. Who's gonna know?

I walk upstairs. A middle-aged woman is sitting on a couch talking to a much older woman. The younger of the two wears a long dark dress and has dark stockings rolled to mid calf. She wears sunglasses... on top of her head.

(I already wrote that few Albanians wear glasses. Many Albanians, however, wear sunglasses... always. When it's sunny, they wear them over their eyes, looking like mobsters or Secret Service. When it's cloudy or rainy, they wear them on top of their heads. Looking, like tourists in their own country.)

The woman sees me and pulls up her stockings.

“Ju flicni Anglisht?” I ask.

She shakes her head yes.

“You want to see the museum,” she says.

“Po,” I say.

“200 lek,” she says.

I pay her the money. And she takes me to a large room with a window in the ceiling.

“This was the kitchen,” she says.

Then she takes me to another little room. It's all white with a little carved-- or more accurately broken-- space in the floor and wall.

“And this was the bathroom... the toilet,” she says.

Then a room with what looks like red shag carpeting on all the furniture. Everything is on the ground. Just pillows around a round central table. On the table are half a dozen place settings with metal plates, forks, knives and spoons-- all on the same side of the plate.

“And this was the dining room,” she says.

And so it continues, room to room, until we're back where we started.

“And now you have seen the museum,” she says. “Good bye.”

Hmm, a bit different from the last ethnographic museum.

I walk downhill to go back to the hotel, wondering if I should have given Jimmy a thousand lek or something.

Albania 14: The Vertical City

[NOTE: This blog/diary of Mykel's Italian-Albanian trip starts several entries before this one. Due to the oddities of Blogging, the entries appear in reverse order. Because much of the reportage is based on previous days, I recommend reading from the start, at the entry ALBANIA 1. Also, because this computer lacks search capabilities, and my brain needs a RAM boost, I fear I may repeat some tales already told... repeat some tales already told.]

All generalizations are wrong... including this one. --Mykel Board

1. Albanians don't eat. They drink, especially coffee. Cafés by the dozens are filled with locals, sitting, staring at the passing parade of people. Or in heated conversation, with one person yelling something as if in rage, and the others shaking their heads in agreement. There are restaurants, fast food joints, and pizza parlors galore. It's just that there's no one in these places. Albanians get everything they need to live in liquid-- and inhalant-- form.

2. Albanians smoke. (Tobacco... though once I did smell the good stuff. By the seaside, in Vlora.) They smoke everywhere. On the street. In cafés. In bars. When you sit down at a table to eat or drink, the first thing a waiter does is bring you an ashtray. It's like America in the 50s and 60s. The aroma of tobacco is in everything. It's great.

I realize how much I miss the smells suddenly disappeared from American life. A smokey bar is a real bar. Not the fake TV-watching, music-blaring, meat markets that pass as bars in America in 2009. In this small corner of the world, people appreciate the smell, the sensuality, the toughness of cigarettes. By the way, Albania was one of the first countries in the world to legalize gay marriage. Smoking and gay marriage. I think the two are related. That brings me to...

3. Albanians show affection without it being a sign of conquest-- or even sexuality. Teenage boys walk with their arms around each other. Middle aged men walk arm-in-arm. There's nothing sexual about it, but there is real friendship. Friends, not afraid of showing their friendship-- by touching one another. It's a joy to see, though it makes me sadder to think about what Christianity's hate-the-body/hate-the-touch has taken from us in America.

Now on to Gjirokastra:

Gjirokastra was a steep city, perhaps the steepest in the world, which had broken all the laws of town planning. Certainly this was the only place in the world where, if a passer-by fell, instead of sliding into a roadside ditch, he might end up on the roof of a tall house. This is something which drunkards knew better than anyone. --Ismail Kadare, Chronicle in Stone

Gjirokastra-- coldsore day 13. (Yeah it's still faintly there.)

I sit in my hotel room in Gjirokastra. It was probably the right move to leave this morning, instead of yesterday. It did rain today, but not the torrential Noah's ark rain of yesterday. And, it stopped before the bus left from Saranda.

It's been raining in this town too. It just stopped, but the sky is dark and threatening. It's 1PM, I'll give it half an hour. If it's still not raining, I'll go to the old (vertical) town. Right now, I'm in the new town, not far from the bus stop.

The ride here from Saranda was uneventful. Saranda, by the way, was my favorite town so far. Several people talked to me, asked me where I was from. I didn't make any friends, but this was the closest to friend-making I've had in Albania.

Goni, the hotel owner, managed to joke with me, and tell about his surgery in Michigan... all without English.

(I find that the only way I can remember Albanian names is to relate them to other languages. Goni is FIVE-TWO in Japanese. Just like the evil Co-ocho was TOGETHER (co)-EIGHT in Spanish.)

I even had a glimmer of hope with my cellphone this morning. Playing with the settings got me a few seconds of connectivity. But then it failed, and I haven't been able to get it back since. Ah well, another thing on my todo list when I get back: Complain to t-mobile and see if I can score another phone.

I wish I had a thermometer with me. Not the health kind. It would be too easy to find out I'm sick and then act accordingly. I mean the room kind. It must be 40^o F in this room now. I've got on my 200 lek sweatshirt and still I'm cold. My feet too, through my army boots.

Ho ho! Look what I found! A remote control for the heater. I set it to 30^oC. (It doesn't go any higher).That's about 90^o Fahrenheit. There's no way it'll actually reach that temperature in here, but it may just get warm enough to let me take my shoes off.

Ah, that's better, now onwards and upwards...

*****

It's been a tiring, yet peaceful day. I walked uphill through the old town to the castle. It's a hell of a walk. First through the entire new town. Then practically straight up on a cobblestone street,through the old town.

Then to the top of the mountain.

The city is so steep-- not hilly, just steep-- it makes San Francisco look flat. The castle is at the top, and it's pretty spectacular.

Of course, I'm the only one in the place-- and it's huge. Bigger than Grand Central. It was first a castle in the 1200s. Then a prison from the middle ages through the 1970s.

I take a piss in one of the cells, makes me feel like I'm getting revenge for one of those nameless prisoners who probably died here. Most of the cells are just block rooms, cement cubes almost as small as my New York apartment.

Some have a little raised area in back.

A few are below ground level. These were the punishment cells. When water reaches these cells it stays, ankle deep, puddling the floor, attracting mosquitoes. The punishment was hot water in summer, cold water in winter. You can only imagine.

The castle has it's own café, a stone and wood room, in what looks like a bunker of some kind. The weirdest part of the castle walk, though, is the plane.

The Albanians say it was a U.S. spy plane shot down in the 1950s. At least that's what they used to say. The current sign, near the entrance lists it like this:

U.S. Spyplane???

 The question marks, I guess are post-Communist.

 Why it's in the castle, and what the story is, I don't know. Just coming across it, sitting on the castle grounds, lends the adventure an even greater air of surreality than it already had from the tanks, and the anti-aircraft guns.

The museum of armaments, contained inside the castle is not open. My guidebook says there's not much there anyway. Most of the good stuff was looted during the riots of the late 90s. Those were caused by the collapse of a national pyramid scheme. Like Bernie Madoff.

People in Albania got angrier than Americans did. There were riots all over the country. In this city, they broke into the weapons museum, stole the displays, and used them.

The castle was also used as a storehouse for heavy weapons,

and when you enter you go down a poorly lit, very spooky hall with heavy artillery pointing from both sides. At the end of the hall is an entire tank, along with a giant statue of someone with a gun.

Then comes the prison, then an open field, then the small café, where I have a Turkish coffee, as the only customer, of course. There is a very loud cat, though it doesn't seem to be having coffee.

On the way back down from the castle, I find a tourist information center. I go in.

There are three guys in there, all in their late 20s. Two of them wear glasses.

[Note: very few Albanians wear glasses. It's strange. I haven't figured out if it's because they have good eyesight, or no opticians.]

“Ju flicni anglisht?” I ask the young man behind the counter.

“Pak” he says. He nods toward one of the other guys. “He speaks English,” he says.

“Sure,” says the guy. “You want a map of the town? One Euro. You want one only of the old town. It's free.”

The guy has a perfect American accent.

“How come your English is so good?” I ask him.

“I'm from Cincinnati,” he says. “My friend and I are with the Peace Corps. We're working here in Albania.”

“Ju flisni squip?” I ask them.

The guy behind the counter answers. “With a very bad accent,” he says. “You're Albanian is much better. Maybe you have an Albanian in your blood.”

I figure out what he means and thank him.

The Peace Corps guys walk me to a local restaurant. On the way they tell me today is a national holiday: Mother Theresa Day. Schools and some businesses are closed. The restaurant is not.

I should order the qifqi (pronounced Chief-chi), they advise me. It's a specialty of the area.

I do and it's not bad. It's a fried riceball with various herbs and spices. I also get fried green peppers... and a beer. Cost me 500 lek. Not bad, huh?

I don't really have a good sense of how to get back, except that I need to walk downhill. Way downhill. As long as I get back before nightfall, I can make it to the hotel with no problem. It gets dark around 6, so if I leave by 3, I'll be fine.

Then I check my useless phone. It's 4:30. I'm outta here!

The locals don't seem to be able to read maps. I show them mine and ask where different places are, but they can't relate the places outside to the marking on the map. I've seen it several times in Albania. People can give directions, but they can't read a map.

I know that the post office is a good reference point. I think I can find my way down from there.

I ask a vegetable seller where the post office is. His only customer, a nearly toothless guy with a scruffy bit of white beard and one of those high Frankenstein foreheads, asks me if I'm Italian.

I say no, American.

“I speak Italian, Russian, Greek, Albanian,” he says. “I don't English. I go with. My name is Jimmy.”

“Uh oh,” I think. “Here we go again.” At least this time, I already have a hotel.

“Post office closed,” (he pronounces closed like closet) he says.

“That's okay,” I say. “I only need to find it.”

“You come tomorrow. Open. Open.”

I try unsuccessfully to explain that I don't really need the post office, but am only using it as a landmark to guide me back to my hotel.

“Tomorrow, open. Open,” he says again.

He takes me there anyway... or at least within pointing distance. And... it's all downhill from there.