Hallowhat?

Sooooo - last week was Halloween, right? This was the first time I've spent said holiday in a country that doesn't buy into the concept of Halloween and it makes for an interesting time of getting around. There were parties, of course, but put on by expats primarily for the benefit of expats. Social parties on Halloween night, a party for children at the Embassy on Friday, and even a dog costume party at the housing compound. What made for the greatest 'stranger in a strange land" moment was getting to the party Saturday night. Margo and I were fairly uncertain of where to go, as were two other friends of ours, so we were invited to caravan with the one couple that knew what they were doing. We met at their house and took off in our three cars (originating from the housing compound, so we don't really stand out yet). But once we park in the heart of downtown (Skenderbeg Square, for anyone with a map), we suddenly look like this bunch of lunatics. Of the six of us, there were two pirates, a geisha (Margo), a viking, a Mexican (as offensive as it sounds), and a Pacman. Yours truly was said Pacman and said costume was A) huge, B) made to fit over my body, C) hastily made from a dozen cardboard boxes hours earlier, and D) restricted both leg and arm movement, so walking was a sort of walk/hop hybrid. Halloween night in the US? This is perfectly normal on the street. Halloween night in Albania? As far as 95% of Albanians are concerned, it's not Halloween night; it's just Saturday night. So to walk outside like this, people think you're absolutely crazy. The police, parking guards, doormen, cars driving by - all of them just stare or laugh or both.

And I have to say that while it's probably a more fun atmosphere back in the US when everyone thinks that it's a giant party night, it's a lot of fun to go out like this when people have no idea what you're doing.

Pumpkin's party was just what you might expect - maybe a dozen dogs wearing costumes that they hate for 5 minutes before finding ways to wriggle out of them. They recently built a dog-run on the Ridge (housing compound) so it was nice for him to have to place to run off-leash and play with other dogs. We recycled his dragon costume from last year and sadly he did not win the costume competition, but he still looked pretty awesome.

My Dog and His Tick

That's right, I said tick.

We took Pump to the park the other day to hang out with his dog friends and he came back dirty and with a couple of scratches from jumping through the trees and leaves and general undergrowth. The park, while it has a nicely paved walkway, is not what you would exactly call 'tamed.' So we didn't take note of the little brown mark on his belly right away, figuring he would get a bath in a day or two. But then I saw it again yesterday and it was markedly larger, so I took a closer look, and it was a tick! Nasty!

Have you ever removed a tick from anything? It's gross and vaguely disturbing. According to the instructions I read, and now according to my experience, one takes a pair of tweezers to the tick, as close to the skin of the subject as possible, squeezes tightly but not too tightly (this is the hardest instruction to follow - what exactly is not too tightly?! - how strong is a tick's body??), and pulls slowly until the sucker comes off.

Now I can't say how strong ticks are in general, so I don't know if this little guy had super-strength or what, but he was holding on like his life depended on it (which it did, I realize as I write this sentence). A couple of times my grip slipped - remember, tightly but not too tightly(!?) - but I just grabbed him again and on the third try he popped cleanly off. No broken pieces were visible and the area looked clean. The tick is now residing in a ziploc bag to show to the vet.

And through all of this, the Pump was a champ! Even as I was pulling his skin up with the tweezers, he didn't whimper once, he didn't try to shake free of Margo's grip, nothing! This dog has nerves of steel! Even as I was sweating and holding my breath from nervousness, he was just laying there with his head upside down, looking around like this was all completely normal.

We learned through subsequent research into his Frontline medicine that it does not prevent fleas and ticks from getting onto him, but it kills them once they're on him. This could explain why the tick was not moving at all during this ordeal or afterwards. This made us all feel a little better.

I mean, really, who needs this? Spoon, indeed.

Tirana Marathon & Half-Marathon

Yesterday, October 25th, was the Tirana Marathon & Half-Marathon here in lovely Tirana. I would have mentioned this sooner excepting that nobody knew about it until five days ago when, literally, a handful of posters were put up in the park here. Thankfully, most runners run in the park, so when somebody from my running group saw the sign, the email went around.

No registration fee, no goody-bag, no kilometer markers (21 for half, 42 for full), no timing chips, none of the things you typically expect from races of such distances. The only thing approaching normal was that we got shirts, but these resembled very basic white cotton shirts, with the back reading “Maratona e Tiranes – Nene Tereza – 2009,” and the front of the shirt had your bib number printed on it. No normal bib, so when I wear this in the future, I will forever be number 28.

With 48 hours notice, I decided to gamble on the half. There were maybe 60 people running and at least 50 of those were for the half. I would be surprised if the full marathon even had 10 people running. I have the feeling that this may have been tied into the mental challenge as much as the physical. You see, the half-marathon did one lap through the center of the city (maybe 3 kilometers), and than proceeded to lap through the park 6/7/8 times (more on those numbers later). This means that the marathon was around 15 laps. First off, that is unbelievably tedious. Second, the lap begins with this winding, steep hill that goes on for about a third of the lap distance. Oy, it was killing me and many others, I can’t imagine doubling the number of times on that hill. The water station was at the lap point and was just a handful of people with cups of water, which was actually sufficient with the low number of runners.

At that same point was where they counted your laps. The problem here is that their method of tracking your laps is just a handful of people, sometimes paying attention and sometimes not, trying to mark down the number on your shirt and which lap they think it is. But when you have a couple different people doing this and they are distracted, you get discrepancies on the number of laps. So a number of people did 7 laps – the correct number, a number of people did 6 laps – one lap short, and I heard of one person stuck doing 8. It seems easy enough to keep track in your mind though, right? So if you’ve done 6 and they say you’ve finished, you say no, I have one more. Well it is easy to keep track and everyone did, but nobody knew how many laps we were supposed to do. When people signed up, they heard anything ranging from 4 to 8, and on the day of the race, everyone heard 6.5. How do you do a half-lap? Nobody knew. So nobody knew if 6 or 7 was the most accurate, and so we all just stopped whenever we were told that we were done. And for those of you thinking that we could have maped out the loop ahead of time, nobody knew what the loop was going to be. Originally, the course was from Mother Teresa Square to Skanderbeg Square to the train station, and then back, and this was to be the loop – no park. Then it become that loop one time, and than some number of loops in the park, but nobody knew where the loop in the park was supposed to be. And the morning of the race, the police decided they couldn’t block traffic to the train station, so the street portion was truncated further.

Sadly, I only got to do 6 laps. So technically, I didn’t even finish my first half-marathon! I thought I did, the “officials” said I did, but I mapped it all later and I was 3 kilometers short. Alas. Still, I have to say that as unorganized as it all was, it was fun to have something going on in Tirana and when it comes around again next year, I’ll make sure I get in my full number of laps. I’ll do an extra one to be safe. Only in Albania, right?

Some Dubrovnik Pictures

Here are some pics from Croatia.

Dubrovnik, Croatia

This is the first Balkan road trip, the first European trip. We’ve been very excited to go driving through a handful of countries, to get out of the city for a little while, and to take the car for a drive of more than 2 miles. We were surprised by the quality of the roads on the drive up. Through Albania, Montenegro, and Croatia, the paving gave way only a handful of times. There’s no real system of highways like in the US, not even connecting countries – most of our drive was on two lane roads, some that barely fit one car at a time. A lot of it was back-country winding where we encountered horse-drawn carts and cows wandering in the middle of the road. The entire drive is only 180 miles and we did it in 6 hours. You spend a lot of time weaving through many little towns, going back and forth (and back and forth) through hills, so while we were lucky with no real traffic to speak of, it’s rare to get above 30 or 35 miles per hour. All border-crossings went smoothly

Dubrovnik is a beautiful city that falls just short of enchanting only because it relies so completely on tourism that the shops and restaurants sometimes seem to extend their hand a little forcefully in the face of the city’s old world charm. And we are talking some serious Old World charm. The city has been here for hundreds and hundreds of years and is still encircled by a defensive wall that was built to keep back the ever-encroaching Ottoman Empire. To this day, in order to enter the city, you must walk across one of two drawbridges and through some winding corridors before reaching the wide boulevard that runs the length of Old Town. Outside of the city walls, a small mountain reaches upward on one side and the Adriatic surrounds on the other three. So the defensive wall, along with this limited access, kept all invaders and malicious parties out of the city (at that time city-state). The only one to ever overtake Dubrovnik was Napolean, who was allowed inside the walls with his army only after he had sworn no funny business. He lied. This set into motion the events that would bundle Dubrovnik into greater Croatia, which was later bundled into greater Yugoslavia, until the early 90s, when Croatia declared independence – one of the first steps in the violent dissolution of Yugoslavia. Dubrovnik was shelled pretty badly by the Yugoslav army but they very quickly and very efficiently put the pieces back together to the point that it’s difficult to imagine that the attacks occurred less than 20 years ago.

I get caught up writing so much about the history because to walk the streets of Old Town is to come face to face with history at every step. Even as they rebuilt after the war (referred to here as “The Yugoslav Aggression,” nothing about declaring independence), they kept with the old style of the city. Hundreds of years old churches can be found every few blocks. Because the city is built up on a hill, all of the side roads on one side of the city are essentially staircases. These are the same stairs that were built and used hundreds of years ago as the city was built and expanded (before the wall was built). There are no cars inside the walls, so the streets were never re-engineered, allowing the stairs to remain instead of sloped streets and the streets were allowed to remain narrow and winding instead of being straightened and widened for vehicles.

Physical descriptions aside, the bulk of ones time in Dubrovnik is primarily spent wandering these old streets, visiting the old churches that pop-up every few blocks, exploring where the streets narrow and wind around the city walls, and... well, that’s really been the bulk of it. During the warmer months, this is very much a beach town and our hotel has a lovely set-up with sea access and a pool or two, but even as the rain has ceased, the cold snap is still in effect here. So it’s been two days of city exploring; with a small city, exploring only lasts for so long. Today, Wednesday, will be spent in town just for a little while, and then probably be spent working in the lobby of the hotel or out near the water. Even the lobby is a great place to spend time because the wall facing the sea and the Old Town is just glass and it’s a beautiful place to watch the water – not to mention thy have great cappucinos and espressos to pass the time with.

**Update** - not actually Wednesday, as noted above. Just to wrap this up though (again, have to work on these where they come together over numerous days and get ramble-y), we walked the city walls Wednesday afternoon after Margo got out early from her conference, and it was the highlight of the trip. Almost 2 kilometers in distance, you get the breathtaking view of the Old City, of the towers built around the walls, of the surrounding areas and islands, and of course, the unobstructed view of the sea. We caught this just before sunset which gave us more than a few really beautiful seascapes to gaze on. Amazing.

The drive back was uneventful – 6 hours even, again. Rained the entire time. Seriously, the wipers were off for maybe 10 minutes. No border problems, but we only got fast-track edat one of them – oh well, not something to rely on but to appreciate only when it happens. What a trip – I highly recommend a few days in Dubrovnik.

I also recommend writing blogposts in one sitting so that they don’t ramble on like this. Sheesh.

License Plates

I am very happy to report that as of yesterday we have our license plates for the car. For the past 5 weeks we've been driving around with the expired, temporary paper tags from Virginia that we got when we bought the car (temp. because we did not need to register the car). This hasn't been a big deal on the streets but A) it's been an annoyance when going anywhere official and B) we were unsure what difficulties would come up trying to cross borders. Our passports and ID cards were good enough for Tirana city driving, but crossing into Montenegro and Croatia was going to be a little more awkward.

But they rushed our plates for us, we paid all of the necessary fees, and now the new plates have been mounted on the car. I look so much more official now when driving, even if it makes me stand out in ways not necessarily preferable (I prefer normal, local plates - no need to further signal my foreign-ness). I guess I'll take what the law calls for over what I would prefer, even as I drive past any number of seemingly counterfeit US plates here.

Gjirokaster/Butrint Trip

This past weekend we finally got out of Tirana for the first time since we've been here, taking a two day trip to Gjirokaster and Butrint in the southern part of Albania. How far south, you ask? Well, if you could see in the direction that I'm looking in the picture, you would see a line of mountains and on the other side of those mountains would be the border with Greece. The reality is that this is a small country and the drive shouldn't be all that long, but the drive out there was 4 hours and back was 6 hours. This is what you get when you have to drive over and around mountains on long/steep winding roads instead of through tunnels, because tunnels don't exist.

But I get ahead of myself (every post is going to start like this, I swear). Gjirokaster is one of the oldest cities in Albania and is "famous" for the architecture of the homes, for the castle (2nd largest in the Balkans), as the birthplace of Enver Hoxha (former dictator), and as the birthplace of Ismael Kadare (very famous writer, first winner of the International Man Booker). It's also fairly small - you're looking at most of it in the picture up there. Butrint is what they call either an ancient city or an antique city - I'm fairly certain I saw both on signs on the way there. It hasn't been inhabitable for hundreds of years, it was instead thriving during the time of the Romans and was even being used up through the time of Ali Pasha and the Ottoman rule over the Balkans. It's a two hour trip where you walk around the ruins, get a sense of what the place used to be and what it was used for, climb some of the old stairs, etc. Not that exciting on paper, pretty cool in actuality.

We were on the trip because the language program here occasionally puts together these one or two day trips around the country, mainly for educational purposes, to get a better sense of the history and culture of the country. So twelve of us climbed into a van at 7.30 on Saturday morning and began our trip. Let me just say that the roads we took on this trip are not uncommon, but they were occasionally crazy. I thought the roads heading south were winding and steep but coming back, we weaved back and forth up these mountains to the point that we were in the clouds. In the clouds! It was crazy - fun and exciting and kind of scary - and crazy.

Gjirokaster was very interesting - we toured the castle there, went to the museum that is inside what was the birthplace of Enver Hoxha, and just walked around the streets a bit. It is a beautiful, old city with narrow, steep streets and all of the little shops and restaurants. Nothing of great value in these places but very, very charming. The next day was Butrint which, again, was only a 2-hour visit but it reminded us very much of Angkor Wat in Cambodia. This ancient structure that is in... decent shape, all things considered, that you tour around, getthe history of, and take some pictures of. We had an English-speaking guide which was nice for comprehension, but it would have been an interesting test if she had only spoken Albanian. Oh well, I can't really complain.

Sheesh, I wrote all of that in about 7 84 second bursts. Did it make any sense? Did I write anything? Did I write the same thing 14 times? I need to work on this thing. And there are more pictures - let me see if I can get in more than one per post...