And so I’m here. I am now living with a host family in Thanë, Albania, which is a small town just 15 minutes to the south-west of Elbasan. I am in a house at the top of a hill where I can see almost all of Albania, or at least the valley in which Elbasan is contained. The house is tidy and clean. There is a great room downstairs where the family seems to gather, and there’s a kitchen in one corner of this room making it a nice spot to get-together.
That paragraph above, that was from yesterday. Today is Sunday and there are some initial impressions that I’d like to change, or at least expand upon. First, the house is tidy, because it’s a show house. They may sleep here and bring guests here, but I don’t think this is their true living area. I’d like to compare it to a family room and a living room, where the living room is where the family spends their time watching T.V., talking, eating, and maybe playing games. I have not yet seen the living room. I seems that they want to put their best food forward because I have met the grandfather, the daughter, the son, and the wife, but I only ate dinner with the father. It was just him and me sitting down in a beautiful and modern great room to feast on a dinner of rice and chicken. The host mom stood by and got us anything we needed, but did not eat.
So where did the others eat? I think they were probably in the grandmother and grandfather’s house which is situated just behind this show house. It is the old style house with the clay tile roof, and it interests me just as much as this concrete, three-story, modern house. The one point that this does make to me though is that I’m the guest. I hope as I’m here longer that I’ll become a member of the host family. I mean, I’ll always be the American, but if integration is the goal, I’d prefer to be in the grand’s house eating dinner with the rest of the family.
They are always away too. This might be because they told them that Americans expect a higher level of privacy than Albanians. But most often, there’s nobody around, and I just wander aimlessly around the house. It was nice that last night my host mom explained how to make coffee for myself in the morning. This was very helpful, but I think I’m going to get myself a super-pack of instant so I can make more than a four ounce glass of coffee.
My room itself is a two twin bed room, where one of the beds is serving as my closet. They also saw how wrinkled some of my dress shirts were and lent me a iron. I also have a balcony off my room that overlooks the city of Elbasan, which is an amazing view. The third floor is tiled, but unfinished with windows so it’s like one huge balcony, and it has the best views. The host dad keeps wanting me to go up there and read.
With that said, what I’d really like to do today is some laundry. I have not seen one in over a week, and although I now have some fresh clothes to choose from I don’t want to be surrounded by piles of dirty clothes. I don’t know what the rest of the day holds because I don’t understand anything, but I’m going to try to get some laundry done.
Writing later that same afternoon, I have all my laundry out on the balcony on a clothes hanger. I doubt that they’ll get dry though since it’s been raining all day, including onto the balcony. Tomorrow’s another day though, and so I’m hoping for sun even when I saw some news I think was local that was calling for rain. I don’t have any Internet, so I can’t verify.
On an off note, I hate white light in homes. It seems that white light is cheaper that yellow light, but it makes everything feel cold and sterile. In my case in particularly, the light isn’t even strong enough to light my keyboard. But I’m going to type on because I’m waiting for another twenty minutes so I can take a shower. They have a solar hot water heater, so I’m not real sure why I’m waiting except that it hasn’t really been sunny all day and I think I understood that might mean that the water isn’t warm. The end result is that I’m not sure what I’m waiting for.
I went on a walk today through my village. I was on the hunt for a market so that I could buy some instant coffee. I wanted something warm to drink, and there are no coffee bars around. They are every other building in Elbasan, but there aren’t really any around here. I’m sure I’ll sniff one out by tomorrow when we have access to our English Teachers, and they can ask some of our questions for us. I couldn’t find a market though, so I just stomped around through the mud and made my way back to my host house. I did made tea twice today though. They called it mountain tea, and my host mother added Chinese lemon to it, which is the color of an orange and made the tea delicious.
I also came across a couple of stuffed animals guarding against evil spirits. I took these as I plan for an upcoming blog post about how to keep away evil spirits in Albania. Stay tuned because I just stumbled upon another one - a weird one - today.
Great post; super interesting
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