Blue Bucket of Gold

Due to persistent and unpredictable rains, I haven't been carrying my camera around. So, without new photos, I've been putting off a new blog post. However, it feels like time for an update, so I hope you won't mind a couple old photos.

After about two weeks of semi-regular games, we have two, maybe three chess games left in our school tournament. Next up, the champions of the eighth and ninth grade classes will play to compete in the championship match against the top sixth grader who beat the seventh grade representative last week. If we're organized, we'll have a match to decide the third and fourth place winners as well.

I planted my first batch of 200'ish seeds on March 15th--mostly marigolds but also pansies and primroses. However, due to a late snow and leaving them outside, this batch has yet to germinate. Though it's a poor excuse to blame the seeds, I tried a new batch of marigolds from home on March 21st (100'ish seeds), using 80% a different pack of marigold seed and 20% the previous type. After four days, the new seeds started to show their first sprouts and now almost all of them have germinated while none of old ones have had any success. Coincidence? Today, I used an egg carton to plant thirty more marigolds, so hopefully I have an army come summer.

Today's title comes from an album that I've listened to at least seven times in the last two days--Carrie & Lowell by Sufjan Stevens. This mellow album has been so easy to just throw on and listen from start to finish regardless of what I'm doing: cooking, studying for the GRE, planting, or writing like I am now.

Matching the theme of Carrie & Lowell, here's a graveyard in Kukes during my Valentine's Day visit. An endearing Albanian graveyard tradition is to rub your palm on the grave stone of loved ones.

An apartment in Kukes. Across the country, Albanian housing buildings resemble this exterior brick facade, with almost identical interiors as well. 

I'm the Urban Spaceman

In four days, I'll have been in Albania for one year. Though it may seem a benchmark for reflection, none of that has sunken in quite yet. Rather, it reminds me of a quote by Katherine Mansfield that a friend sent me on a postcard to describe his own move to a new city: "One may as well rot here as anywhere." To defend my friend and I against temperate readers, what I extract from this isn't really the pessimism, but rather an enjoyment of the present that doesn't idealize time and setting. More so, life moves on one day at a time in a way that makes such an anniversary seem irrelevant.

Anyhow, putting all that aside, things are going very well.  

This past week, my sitemate and I started a chess tournament at my school as part of a larger project to promote youth sports and after school activities. We started with sixty-five participants and are slowly narrowing down to our school champion. Since I only see the students in English class, it's been awakening to see shine students who rarely participate in my classes. Even more, I'm glad that they have the chance to demonstrate a talent that few of their teachers and classmates have had the opportunity to recognize. 

The week before, my counterpart and I used our free topic lessons to teach songs to our fifth grade students. Different classes learned different songs, like "Love Me Do" and "Yellow Submarine"by the Beatles, Sam Cooke's "Wonderful World," and "Stand By Me" by Ben King. Also, I finally had the opportunity to realize a long-time dream of mine to teach the students, "Ain't No Mountain High Enough." At first, it didn't go too well as I underestimated the difficulty of the song. However, on their own, the students practiced the song over the weekend and came back to give a strong performance. Especially for those of you who know me, you can imagine how new of a experience it was for me to be singing in front of classes thirty plus students.

Taking the lack of connection between my posts' titles and content to another level, "I'm the Urban Spaceman" is a great song by the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band that I found this week. For months now, I've been going through the UK's top 100 charts. Starting in 1952, I've now reached 1970. 

The setting to our school summer day presentation. Afterwards, we sampled local foods made by our teachers (pictured below).

A less common dish, the pallaxhinka in the back are made with flat cakes similar to crepes and, in this case, were filled with a mixture of boiled meat with tomato and onions. The petulla on the right are a common breakfast food that is basically a quite standard bread dough fried in oil. To me, they taste like slightly savory jelly filled doughnuts minus the sugar and jelly.

Halve is a traditional Albanian dessert that's made by slowly cooking flour and sugar into melted butter. To this, sometimes people add nuts. In this case, it's made with something called tarhana.

Byrek, on the right, is probably the most popular dish in Albanian cuisine. It consists of very thin crepe-like layers that can have cheese, spinach, pumpkin, onions, green onions, tomato, meat, and a lot of other fillings. Sadly to me, Albanians never mix these fillings when I think that that there's a lot of potential in mixing fillings. My goal is to make a byrek with cheese, spinach, shredded carrots, and onions for my colleagues to try. The pete misri on the right is a fried dough made with corn flour.

Here written as, "dollma," these seasoned rice balls wrapped in grape leaves are called, "yaprek," in most of Albania, while they're called "sarma," almost exclusively in Dibra (the region in which Peshkopi resdies). Back with my host family when I first arrived and even now, I sometimes mix up the the "yaprek" with "yastek," which means pillow.

Today, I finally bought some more flower seeds. The kind owner of the "plant pharmacy" said that he rarely receives people interested in flowers and, therefore, was eager to help. Tomorrow, he's giving me a planter in which to start growing the seeds before putting them in the ground. 

The Sun

Winter is drawing to a close in Peshkopi. I've stopped sleeping in my sleeping bag and wearing extra socks and sweaters to bed. During the day, I can write on my balcony with the windows open while my laundry dries outside. And, with about two fires worth of wood left, heating my apartment at night has stopped being a problem.

My creative writing project ended last week. I had doubtfully set the aim of twenty participants for our final goal--Albania's Write On! essay competition. After administering the exam at five schools, we ended up with eighty-two participants! Regardless of whether the students win or lose, most of the students seemed to have enjoyed the new experience and I feel motivated to reach a hundred essays next year.

With Spring on the horizon, today's title comes from a powerful 1973 Korean folk album, Now, by Kim Jung Mi and Shin Joong Hyun. The song is almost too cinematic. If you close your eyes, you can see a cowboy riding off into the sunset as the credits start to roll.

A friend that I have been collaborating with lately--Veli. He works as an urban planner for the Peshkopi Municipality. Veli became Peshkopi's first English teacher in 1972. Besides speaking fluent (British) English, he speaks remarkable French, German, and Italian (maybe Arabic and Turkish too). However, what makes it difficult to ascertain his specific language competencies is his amazing memory. For example, I've interrupted him after he's recited several minutes of Goethe in German. However, I've only witnessed his incredible memory and have yet to see him converse in any of these languages.

A closer look at one of Veli's models. As an example of his linguistic pride, he insistently calls this neighborhood "Aksion," which is an older Albanian name for what 49 out of 50 people would now call "Kamen," which Veli claims is a foreign origin.

The small town of Kelcyre in Southern Albania. From the perspective of the photo, the main highway lies a thirty minute drive ahead through the valley where runs the River Vjose.

A shepherd from Kelcyre. The item that he's carrying is something similar to Muslim prayer beads that many Kelcyre men occupy their hands with. 

I recently visited this man's shop to replace a button on my winter jacket. He's a wonderful example of the Albanian jack of all trades. Besides this zipper and fabric shop, he operates a small carpenter's workspace in a cellar to the left. Behind my camera, he owns a belt shop that features two more cellars: one for soldering protective bars for windows and the other for repairing aluminum wood stoves.