Paradise Lost In Translation

In the name of....

2011-11-24T03:45:00.000-08:00

Do you know, Iota mentioning about Daniel the Spaniel reminded me I had completely forgotten to tell you my choice of name for our dog.

I wanted to name him after the famous self-appointed king of Albania. A king whom many people have heard of even if they don't know where exactly Albania is.

His name was Zog. King Zog.

Zog the Dog. The dog for a family who once lived in Albania.

Perfect.

But the joke would probably wear off. Quite quickly.

And "Zog" is quite hard to call, & people would probably mishear & think I was calling "Dog".

Which would make me look a bit silly, & lacking in creative imagination.

I mean who has a dog called "Dog"?

Well, or Zog, for that matter.

And if people didn't know about King Zog, then perhaps they would just think it was Zog because I'm into easy rhyming doggerel. With made up rhymes. Zog -Dog. Like Dr Cheat Zeuss.

So no, fear not King Zog, I will not take your name in vain.

Puppy Power

2011-11-23T07:01:00.000-08:00

Sorry for the lack of posts recently. I have been rather preoccupied....

This little 7 wk old thing came into our lives 11 days ago. As I expect some readers may remember, I rashly promised our son that when we moved back to England (in the foggy, out of focus future) , then yes we could get a dog. I have not heard the last of it since getting back from our holiday in October (the last obstacle & the other reason for my silence).

I had set him many, as I thought impossible, obstacles to over come, namely:

This dog mustn't shed hair (I do enough of that for one family), mustn't smell, mustn't slobber, not need 5 mile mile walks every day, be good with children, & be easily trainable. i.e as unlike a dog as possible really.

So my son, bless him, went away & researched it, & came up with a cockapoo (cocker spaniel crossed with poodle) It's true, they do meet all those criteria. He even did some empirical research (mainly on the beaches on the Isle of Wight) Whenever he saw a cockapoo-like dog, he approached the owner & asked questions about their canine. All in the name of research & grist for the 'Mummy Convincing' mill.

So, reader, I caved. 3 against one. The pooch won. I grew up with a dog, loved it, took it for walks, even took i t to school to give a talk about it. But since then I see it as one more thing on the 'To Do List'. One more 'person's' needs to meet. And I do a lot of that already....

So for the last few months I have been looking on the Internet but golden female cockapoos go very quickly. 2 Saturdays ago I realised I hadn't had my quick daily search, so that night i had a look & found 4 females for sale in Newark. My husband, much to his chagrin having not travelled for 3 months, also happened to be flying to Ghana that day so I drove up with the 2 children on my own to what turned out to be a bit of a puppy farm; a very nice owner & clearly full of those sorts of people who are slightly nutty about 4 legged creatures, but nevertheless a puppy factory.

We pulled up into the concrete yard & got out to a cacophony of Blood hound- Spaniel- Westie- Bassett- Poodle - & er ...other breeds barking their proverbials off. There was a farmhouse with the requisite horse brasses, horseshoes & china figurines in the windows & an outbuilding full of puppies amidst the unmistakable odour of straw & dog wee.

After years of intense longing on the part of my son, I was rather surprised at how quiet & seemingly non committal he was. Turns out he was in agonies over which to choose, the ones not chosen, what if he made the wrong decision, how would the others feel about not being chosen etc. (Oh dear anthropomorphising already.....)

Anyway as I imagine often happens in this situations, she sort of chose us. My husband had chosen the name: Bingo, after a PG Wodehouse character, a very gentle amiable soul who would frequently fall hopelessly in love. Relevance? None. Rationale? Good name for a dog. This is an unusual departure for my husband who is not an aficionado of English Literature, or anything much literary at all in fact. Science & maths yes, art & literature, no. So who was I to knock this foray into literary allusion?

And so I am a new mum again. It really is like having a needy new born & a very mobile active toddler rolled into one. I am potty training again, dealing with separation anxiety, need child locks again, must leave nothing on the floor & offer lots of reassurance & cuddles.

The first few days it was doing my head in, she needed constant monitoring, she whimpered & yelped vociferously when left, in fact she has quickly developed a quite impressive wolf howl for such a tiny animal; she kept trying to climb into my lap whilst driving, & I kept inadvertently stepping into her 'offerings'.

However she has quickly wheedled her way into my good books. It is quite sweet being adopted as someone's mum; she finds a shoe or item of my clothing to drag into her bed when I leave her. When I stand still for a few minutes she curls up on my feet or leans heavily against me for reassurance, or just because she wants to be near me. They're very cunning these animals. And it's certainly true they do give you an amazing welcome. Unconditional love has a lot to be said for it....

My son has already trained her to sit on command & I have got her (mostly) performing on newspaper now, though she does like to throw a random curve ball in occasionally (usually early in the morning when I come downstairs, the light is off & I am in bare feet.....)

And I have found a practical use for her as a hot water bottle even as I am typing now, in our very cold house.

But most of all, we have had such a laugh as a family, the children adore her. To our daughter she is a 'live teddy' who gets cradled & carried around the house incessantly. She arrives home from school & tells Bingo,

"I've misssed you SO much. You're so precious, yes you are. You're my special girl!"
I keep thinking she's got the wrong person, but no, she's definitely talking to the dog.....

She is very entertaining & we are looking forward to taking her out into the big wide world once she is fully inoculated. And a bit bigger. However, a male friend gave my husband a friendly word of advice, saying that perhaps it would be better, for the preservation of his macho image, if he waited till she had grown a little before taking her out for a walk. Or he might receive some unsolicited attention (& not from other dogs).....

Below, our puppy enjoying her "dog's life"

Shopping Errands

2011-10-15T04:49:00.000-07:00

My husband went to the supermarket this morning. First time this century I believe. To buy bread & milk.

What did he buy?

Wine, port, pate, a size 4 rugby ball, an All Blacks rugby shirt for our 11 y-o, & a South African rugby shirt for himself (he was born there) .... so he's covering all his bases.

Honestly, I despair...

Falling Foul of Rule Britannia

2011-09-28T04:25:00.000-07:00

Coming home should be easy right? Easier anyway. I had lived in Britain for 38 of my 39 years before we left. I knew the language, the customs, traditions etc. However, things change, things move on.

Two things which have been 'doing my head in' are recycling & health & safety.

We have been putting all our rubbish in one bin for the past 5 1/2 yrs abroad, & taking it to the roadside skip. Or if you are a very good citizen you burn it yourself, poisoning your neighbour with the fumes. If not, you dump it in the river, or throw it out of the car whilst driving along, leave it on the beach, wherever...

In fact before we left the UK, we were composting but there was no recycling collection. We took bags & cardboard & bottles to the bottle bank bins. That was it. Now we rinse, & separate our (soft) plastics, card & paper & glass. At least it all goes in one bin. But it reminds me once again just how law abiding & obedient Brits are, by & large. This would just never work in Albania.

But I have often wondered how it gets sorted & recycled. Or if it does even...My parents told me the story of how a friend in their village asked what happened to all the recycled stuff when he saw it being mashed up all together, in what looked like the regular rubbish lorry. The two Polish guys on the back of the truck said "Oh, it goes to landfill"

When this gentleman phoned the council they were, unsurprisingly, rather cagey about this, before admitting that once they had met their 'recycling quota' (for that month, year??) it all indeed went to landfill. So not only are we obedient, we are gullible & mugs too spending ages sorting stuff that is never recycled. The trouble is you don't know when it will be recycled & when it won't. I'm all for recycling, but only if it really is being recycled.

Now that we have a puppy, the recycling box is one more source of treasure & doggy delights & the cause of a few Mummy Meltdowns too as plastic chicken trays, milk bottles & cardboard get raided & strewn round the kitchen. That's not the council's fault of course, but mine for getting a dog.

Then there's Health & Safety. Where do I start? Let's just say it is a completely alien concept in either of the two overseas countries we have lived in, in recent years. So it has been a steep learning curve. I know about booster seats,, I am not sure about riding in the front seat & I definitely don't know at what age you can leave children alone in the house. But 2 health & safety rules recently took me completely by surprise.

1.) I went to fill the car up with fuel & my son got out of the car to watch & help (he had never seen self service!) Within seconds an authoritative & urgent voice came across the tannoy asking, "the woman at pump number six" to put her son back in the car immediately before any petrol defied gravity & splashed upwards into his wide eyes. Children, evidently, aren't allowed on the forecourt, I was informed. I dutifully obeyed, I was so dumbstruck (the art of public humiliation works well in Britain). My husband announced it was lucky for Tesco, he had not been there. He sees red at most Health & Safety rules in this country & can't stand any sniff of being 'nannyed'. I would love to know what he would have done! I presume though it's more an American import: the fear of litigation.

2.) I went to the tip to dump one of the many loads of abandoned tenant-detritus left in our house & my hapless son got out of the car again to help me. Within seconds a man, unmissable in his fluorescent jacket, marched over to me & told me to put my son back in the car as it was dangerous for him to be out amongst the hazardous skips of cardboard & garden waste. This was followed by "Can't you read the signs?" I had been looking right at all the skips trying to identify where a broken sandwich toaster might go, however, the signs bearing a 'crossed out child' were on the left hand side of the road, so no, I hadn't noticed.

Of course the thing I do now, which is infinitely more dangerous, is driving with a puppy in the car. Talk about distracting. She chews my hand as I change gear, tries to climb on my lap, so I have my largest handbag with me, barricading my lap. If I put her in the back she scrabbles through to the front. If I put her in the boot, the protesting howls & whines are very offputting, not to mention the sight of an off white ball of fluff pogo-ing in & out of my rear view mirror as she tries in vain to leap the back seat.

Now there should be a law about that. In fact I'm off to 'Petworld' or some such place tomorrow to find the canine equivalent of a strait jacket...
The picture is of the dog sitting on my boots (she misses me when I go out) poised above the recycling box, ready to find a delicious plastic milk container.

Observations of a OneTime Outsider.

2011-09-28T03:31:00.000-07:00

People ask what we notice coming back here & I hardly dare mention two of the glaring ones because they are such sensitive subjects. But for the sake of documentation accuracy I will tell you. Suffice to say, I am not passing judgement, I am just observing:

1. the number of seriously obese people
2. the number of different nationalities living here.
3. the cost of living in Britain.

1. I have been to America many times & it feels like America in this way now. According to statistics 1 in 10 adults in Britain are obese. British women are the most obese in Europe, though still behind their American counterparts. In 1980 the average BMI for women (body mass index, healthy being anything between 18.5 & 25.9) was 24.2. Now it is 26.9 for British women. fro British men it is 27.4 (the 4th highest in Europe if you're interested)

2. Ok, so we live in Oxford & visit London, both of which are highly international places. We also have lived in the most homogenous society in Europe, so the contrast is stark. Nobody 'immigrates' to Albania, so apart from its handful of missionaries, NGO workers, embassy staff & for some reason a small Chinese population (the communist connection perhaps??) EVERYONE is Albanian. So much so that they really don't know how to treat ethnic minorities at all. A West Indian friend living there used to get called 'monkey' & such like in the streets.

But where I live here in Oxford, when I travel on the bus, I am a minority in terms of language certainly & colour sometimes. When I shop at Lidl, apart from elderly couples, I only hear other languages around me. I can't work out why other normal British families don't shop there. Ok so you can't get everything there but it's SO much cheaper, yet it's pensioners & foreigners who shop there, because, like me, they find Britain frighteningly expensive. Maybe other Brits aren't feelign as crunched by the economy as we are.....

The net result overall of all this is, it just feels very different &, to be frank, a bit disorienting. I am surprised it has changed so much in 6 years, but it really has. I guess living abroad you feel your 'Nationality' much more, I felt very British & identified strongly with my British roots. Coming home, I'm not sure anymore what that means....

3. As for the credit crunch, much as I said I want to have some space before commiting to anything, as well as training the puppy when we get it, decorating the whole house (which I keep putting off) & helping my children adjust, as the cracks are beginning to appear, I think I may have to go out to work to supplement the charity salary my husband earns. Maybe it's just 'set up' costs & once we have replaced the boiler, bought a car, decorated the house, things will ease up a bit.

One thing I loved about living abroad & working for an NGO, is they look after you & we could live within our means. Easily. And you could afford to have a cleaner, a shared driver, believe it or not, for the school run (it was cheaper than me driving everyday), eat out, employ babysitters frequently, travel, get private health care as part of the package, & stuff like tennis lessons etc were really cheap too. I guess I was very spoilt in some ways despite it not being an easy place to live. It's quite a shock, & one of the anomalies that whilst living in a developing country, with infrastructure issues, power cuts, pollution, horrendous traffic & much less available in the shops, you did have these significant perks, which I must admit, made the frustrations a lot easier to cope with. So I need to adjust now to a different & much more thrifty lifestyle.

The good news is I can do supply teaching, which is well paid; the bad news is it's soul destroying, & the very worst aspect of teaching there is. I have just met anAmerican woman who has moved here & put her children in the local state school (in middle class Oxfordshire. Ha!) & frankly it's horrific. The kids swear at the teachers & nothing is done about it, the walls inside the school are covered in grafitti, their daughter says there is complete lack of respect for the tecahers, the children talk all through the lessons, they have had no homework in 3 weeks, the Head of year has told the parents that they don't need to keep coming in (this was on day 2) when they have had NO information at all, the kids haven't had timetables even. her son went to the wrong lessons for an entire week. How could that happen? I couldn't believe it. Ok so not all schools in Oxfordshire are like that (though the primary schools have the worst Key stage 1 results in the country & are in the bottom 10% for Key Stage 2) I have taught in 6 of Oxfordshire's secondary schools & whilst 3 were pretty tough, none were that bad & certainly had better discipline & support structures in place.

So I am not looking forward to the prospect which couldn't be further from my 'perfect job' in GDQ International School in Tirana. I fear this reverse culture shock is going to take me a while to process....

Back to School

2011-09-07T04:26:00.000-07:00

Today really marks the beginning of a New Beginning for us. It also marks a few firsts. Not only did my two children start new schools, in the UK; my son's 3rd school in 6 years, my daughter's 5th school, but it is also the first time my daughter has been to school in England. And it is my son's first day at secondary school. Up to now, being back has felt the same as every summer back in the UK, pretty much. But now, September has come, the leaves are already falling, the air is cold & we are still here. And I am resolutely refusing to let my mind wander to what temperature it still is in Tirana.

Needless to say, both children were very excited, uniforms, (a new concept), tried on repeatedly, pencil cases packed & repacked & ties learnt to be tied. And with true ex-pat style, they sailed into their first days with ease & confidence. I was very proud of them.

Needless, also, to say, I sailed slightly less confidently into the day. In a way the whole re-entry adjustment has somewhat eclipsed the momentousness for every parent, of their first child starting 'Big school' (Incidentally I rather liked the fact that at my son's school, one of the buildings is actually called 'Big School'. It even has an elegant little plaque on the wall saying so. I have yet to discover the history of this primary school-ish name for a building, but I like it.

I found myself once again sitting at the kitchen table (different tables, different countries, same scenario), wondering, not for the first time, what my new beginning would be. What was I going to do?

It is time, once more to re-invent myself, or time to invent/create a life for me here. My husband has a new job, my children have new skills, I have..... the shopping to do....

I also have the cleaning to do, the ironing & the ferrying of children to & fro. It's one of the peculiarities of living in developing countries, (in particular), that whilst there may be poorer infrastructure, power cuts, worse communications, less choice of available goods, what you do have is cheap labour & people needing work. So, slightly uneasily, I have enjoyed the privilege of having someone do my cleaning & ironing & even school runs for the last several years. So that is something to get used to again. And looking back wistfully, I wonder at my squeamishness at this benefit...

But on this first morning, I went shopping. I must confess I haven't suffered the horror at the 'obscenity of choice' in supermarkets in Britain. I have to admit i have rather revelled in it. Of course I do find the packaging ridiculous & wasteful; the sanitised polystyrene & cellophane wrapped meat slightly unreal & plasticky (having been used to seeing my meat butchered on the street) & the regular, perfect, shiny fruit & veg even more so; but I never baulked at the variety of choice available. I love cooking & get very excited at the plethora of options & foods on offer. I get excited at the thought that I could cook pretty much any recipe I fancied (I am sure this will wear off.....) And I love browsing the aisles. Sad, but true.

Of course I do get the ex-pat 'choice anxiety' about choosing between the myriad versions of the SAME item. I just stick rigidly to either what I have used before, or which is the cheapest.

The second thing i did was go to the library, partly for the novelty factor of having access to a library full of English language books, & partly because I wanted to do something for me. I am going easy on leaping to help out at church, school, interest groups etc until I see how our new 'routine' pans out; but I have always wanted to be in a book club, since forever, as they say. I joined a rather boozy teachers' one in Colombo, which was a mainly an excuse for consuming cocktails. I used to feel a real girly swat because I had 'done my HW' & wanted to talk about the book. No one else seemed to. Still I learnt some very nice new cocktails. It was also hampered by a lack of available English language books in Colombo. Then i joined one in Tirana which was set up as a rival one to an 'invitation only' group, but that fizzled out as people moved away & titles were even harder to come by in Tirana. Then a friend was talking about one she was in, here in Oxford, so having learned from experience overseas of the need to be proactive& get stuck in & involved, I took the bull by the horns I asked if I could join.

Reader, I could. My first book is 'People like That'. I may not have a new uniform or pencil case, but I am very excited about mynew Book Club.

So there we are, small beginnings; but there's a verse in the Bible which says "Who despises the day of small things?"

Not me. That's a lesson I have learnt abroad. Little by little. Bite sized achievements & goals. And not to be too hard on myself. It takes time. That I know for sure.

Reconnecting with British Culture.

2011-08-10T08:08:00.000-07:00

It has been interesting, endearing & quite amusing seeing how our children react to things they are not used to & seeing the things they don't know about.

As I said, they are thrilled with the house which they don't remember at all. It is interesting the things they love about it. Our daughter spends every waking moment playing on the banisters as if it were a jungle gym. She just loves having stairs. She thinks they are really cool! They both love the fact that you go out of the kitchen straight into the garden & can come in & out at will, unlike in our Tiranan 2nd floor flat.

They also love the fact that we have a land-line & a postman. Every time the phone rings or the door is knocked, they race to get there 1st to answer it. It is evidently such a novelty to have a front door accessible to the outside world & to have a phone line into the house, which we haven't had for the last 5 1/2 yrs. They can't get enough of it. Suits me they can deal with the cold callers....

I am slightly less enamoured as I had forgotten how many door to door salesman you get, cold callers & people selling things, or trying to con you on the phone. And then there is the long ensuing discussion when the children want to know who they were & what 'That Person' wanted. When we set up the landline, we joined the telephone preference service & asked to be ex directory. Good old BT somehow managed to overlook this, so within 24 hours of getting the line, (before we had given the number to ANYONE), both Mr NGO & I had calls telling us there was a problem with our computer & trying to get us to buy something etc. BT told us it would take THREE weeks for us to become ex directory & on the telephone preference list. And meanwhile our number is 'out there.' Grrrrr.

Despite all their travelling, living in 2 different cultures abroad & in many ways seeming very mature & worldy-wise, there are some things (normal to us in the UK), which they haven't really experienced. After his grandparents phoned the other day our 11 y-o said,

"It is amazing what you can do these days; I was talking to granny & grandad at the same time! They were on 2 different phones"
In Albania in June, on a short trip where we had 2 hotel rooms, the kids kept calling each other on the internal phones & collapsing in giggles at this technology they had never used (in THEIR living memories) Hearing their sibling on the other end was just too much evidently. I don't know why it should seem so different to mobiles or skype, but they had never used a normal landline ... It was like using those tin cans on a string & marvelling that it actually worked.

On one occasion we were talking about things we were looking forward to about living in the UK, & I said I was really looking forward to having central heating in the winter. Our son immediately pipes up with,
"What's central heating?"
And why indeed should he know? But what a treat he's in for!

A friend of his was telling him about a gig he was going to for 'youth' on the holiday camp they were on & asked whether our 11 y-o wanted to go too. Our son said "I don't know, I don't know what a gig is."

Perhaps it's just as well they're on a "Rekonnect" holiday camp this week for third culture kids returning to live in their home country. I guess it's time to learn some jargon, gain some street cred & acculturise to the good ol' British culture, (though events this week hardly endear us to the culture we have returned to.) Their innocence & refreshing delight in everything is hard to let go of. It's a bit like when your toddler says words wrongly & you know they need to learn & say it properly, but it's hard to correct them when you just love their little malapropisms.

My daughter came up with a good one actually on the way to this holiday camp. (not a cultural issue, just a vocab one!) It got corrected in the nick of time. She was asking me about the holiday & said,

"Will there be lots of girls in the lavatory with me?"

"Well, yes you'll probably share one, but not all at the same time of course."

"So I'll be in there on my own?"

"Of course, they won't expect you to share."

"But I thought you said there would be lots of other girls in the lavatory with me?"

"Well it depends if they want to go at the same time, but you'll just have to queue."

"Why would I queue?"

"Because there may only be one lavatory & obviously you will need to wait your turn."

7 y-o seriously confused now.

"Why do I need to queue up to go to sleep?"

11 y-o starts laughing & says,

"You mean dormitory, not lavatory."

Seems obvious now, but driving a noisy little Fiesta up the M1, whilst keeping an eye on 3 bikes strapped to the back & watching my speedometer so as not to go over 70 because of said bikes, I obviously wasn't concentrating very hard.

Well by this time on Friday perhaps I will have returned to me, 2 newly cool, culturally adapted, street savvy TCKs (Third Culture Kids) But actually I just hope they had a great time connecting with other TCKs, sharing their rich life experiences & having lots of "You too?" moments, & celebrating their lives abroad, rather than feeling odd, different or 'out of it' . And realising that what they have to offer is unique, valuable & amazing.

Hello England

2011-08-10T07:18:00.000-07:00

Well, we've been back 6 weeks, our shipment's arrived, our house vacated by our tenants & we have moved back in. The children are very excited to be in a house, not a flat, to have a garden, and grass, stairs AND bannisters (to swing on, slide down etc) & a bedroom, each.

We have cleared out of it innumerable sets of bedlinen, 7 pyrex dishes, 6 duvets, 5 very wobbly & chipped Ikea bookshelves, 5 woks, 3 sandwich toasters, 2 kettles, 2 slow cookers, 2 spare beds, 3 complete sets of cutlery, a wool rug, 2 bike helmets, 2 coats, & a sports bag full of XL football kit.

I think we must have had a 'better class of tenant' or, to be more exact, better off. Often tenants nick your stuff; these left stuff they no longer wanted. So we had a major task on our hands before 100 boxes arrived a week later. I started off with good intentions, wanting to recycle, give to charity shops, good causes & not dump in landfill. However, my motivation wore a bit thin, when Homeless charities tell you, you need to wait a month before they can collect, others say they don't take furniture, some say it's not good enough quality; & then there's things like 3 manky sandwich toasters you have to spend hours cleaning before they're good enough to give to a charity shop. I ended up, I'm afraid, going to the tip more than I would have liked. Duvets are particularly difficult to get rid of. Can't put in textile banks, charity shops don't want them. Well, here's a top tip. Animal sanctuaries will take them - for cosy bedding for their cats & dogs. So, there, you can feel doubly smug, you've recycled AND kept a dog warm this Christmas.

Since being back the question I'm most asked is "What will you do? Will you get a job?"
I think people are surprised when I say no, not for at least a year. But then of course I will be settling two children in schools, painting & decorating our house, training a puppy, putting a house on the market, selling a house, buying a house. And then painting & decorating again. I think I'll have plenty to do.....

No one asks about Albania, but then I expected that. It's more a case of; "Well you're back now, business as usual."

The books tell you not to expect to slot straight back in to your old life/friends etc. We actually have, by & large, which feels weird. Don't get me wrong; I am very grateful for the welcome, love & support we've had from friends, it's been lovely. Several local friends have said, "It's just like you haven't been away."

Not for us.

We feel very different.

But it is all very familiar; same house, same friends, same social circle, same routines & so it has the effect of compressing the last 6 years. But I don't want them to be wiped out. They have changed us, we're not the same people. They are a vital part of our history. That's one of many reasons why we would like to move & start afresh somewhere else, though still in this town.

And the children? How have they fared? Well, that's a subject for my next post. You see I'm not ready to give up blogging quite yet. I think I'll still have a lot to write about over the next few months...

Goodbye Albania. Mirupafshim Shqiperi

2011-06-23T01:51:00.000-07:00

Today is the day we bring 3 ½ years of our lives to a close as we leave Albania. Inevitably we have very mixed feelings. A blogging friend has said on several occasions “I bet you can't wait to be out of there.” This is a misunderstanding of how we feel about living in Albania & probably my fault for blogging too much about the exigencies of life here. But much like literature, when everything's happy & jolly, you don't need the catharsis or 'sense-making' process of writing, quite so much. It's what I tell my students when they ask why so much poetry & literature is depressing or gloomy & unhappy.

Perhaps if this was more of a travelogue it would be more upbeat & merely descriptive. However it is about everyday life bringing up a family abroad, which is why I am seriously considering winding it up & closing this (blogging) chapter of my life.

The main frustrations of living here have been developing country issues: infrastructure (power cuts/shoddy workmanship, sewage problems) or bureaucracy & corruption issues. Those aside there is much that I love about Albania, Albanians & our life here. My husband always says that I am a slow starter. It takes me about a year to adjust, settle, & make a life but then I get stuck in & enjoy it.

Leaving in the summer is doubly difficult because the weather is just so....fabulous & I am definitely a summer girl. It's in the summer that you realise that we are living in the Mediterranean. In the winter, it's definitely the Balkans. As I leave, I must remember the flat's winter temperature of 12 degrees & the frequent power cuts & our landlord frustrations.

But I have decided to correct the balance & tell you what I love about living here:

I love...

The blue skied days, even in winter. Albanian skies are Georgian ceilings compared to English low-ceilinged cottages. The sky always seems so high. You don't get that too frequent British grey blanket hanging just above you.
The café culture
The weather.
The aroma of coffee in the streets as you whizz past the multitudinous cafés on your bike
The fact that you can buy fresh flowers SO cheaply on the streets as villagers come into Tirana to sell their garden produce in buckets on the pavements.
Waiters walking through the streets balancing a tray of tiny espresso cups delivering to local shops their 1^st 'quick coffee' of the day.
The mountains. How I love the mountains
The many, many hours of sunshine.
The wonderful (mostly organic) fruit & veg, the food markets & the fact that young & old,men & women are interested in good food & press, prod & test the fruit before buying.
The way fruit sellers always tell you what part of the country the fruit has come from.
The beautiful gorge where we go swimming.
The greetings routine, where you stop & greet even if you are in a car with a queue behind you & the person is walking past.
The way Albanians put their hand on their heart when thanking you sincerely for something.
The still present feeling of community. People have time for each other.
The amazing culture of hospitality.
The lack of health & safety restraints or a nanny state. And I love the slightly anarchic, fiercely independent Albanian spirit, as well as a generally easy going attitude to things.
My classes: multi-cultural, lively, amusing, intelligent, engaged, surprising, appreciative & great fun. And best of all the fact that they laugh at my jokes.
The dedicated missionaries who have given up their comfortable, suburban live s back home, & made Albania their long-term home, learning the language, integrating into the culture & giving so much to their communities & to the country as a whole. Did you know that it was the Christian community, 0.5% of the population, who were responsible for 80% of the aid to Kosovan Albanian refugees in Albania, many taking refugees into their homes to live with them until they could safely return? They were given a public vote of thanks on TV by the president of Albania after the crisis.
Finally I love the untamed, wildness that is Albania. Raw, beautiful & wild. Called by many Europe's last true wilderness. There are still bears & wolves in the mountains, many roads are untarmaced, people still ride on donkeys, till the fields by hand,shepherds graze their flocks, families harvest the olives. It really is a 'Bible-lands' landscape.

We have made good & often unexpected friendships here. My children have spent significant childhood years here & our daughter, in particular, passed through many miles stones; lost first teeth, learnt to ride a bike, to read, to swim. And both have made friends, gained awards, and scars, said many goodbyes. We have made a life here and we will miss it.

Goodbye Albania.

Hospitality

2011-05-23T07:48:00.001-07:00

I should have said in my last post that one of the reasons I found those lessons hard to learn is because I am, in Myers Briggs terminology, an extrovert. (ENFJ if you want the whole thing.) 'Extrovert' & 'introvert' doesn't mean lively versus shy. It means you get your energy from people & feel buoyed up by a party or gathering or conversation. Introverts are drained by people.

So, I love friends dropping by unannounced (or announced). I like cooking for lots of people, having people to stay, talking, interacting, generally being around people. This is one of the reasons I found moving abroad so difficult, dealing with the initial loneliness, lack of interaction, lack of human contact sometimes. Being stuck at home, with a small child, in an alien environment, without toddler groups & without a very large ex-pat community, didn't make life easy for an ENFJ bod like me. The getting started bit is never easy. The language barrier was a significant hurdle, and the culture shock effect meant I felt so tired & drained by the culture, my lack of understanding of its ways that my normal desire to 'get out there' & meet people was quashed. Bit of a Catch 22 then..

I also found the transition hard because in the UK I lived somewhere with friends walking distance away, we had regular contact with friends, & living very near the M40 Oxford junction, people passing through would call & ask to drop in. I just love that. Of course as people get older, busier & more tied up with work & families, people don't just drop by the way they do when at university, when they are wafting between coffee bar, lecture & doing their laundry.

However, we picked a good country for our second move. Albania excels at hospitality. People make you feel so welcome. The guest is honoured above all else in the old Kanun code. A host was duty bound to protect you with his life. Nowadays the treatment still makes you feel like a VIP even if they don't quite take a bullet for you. Even in small ways they make you feel so welcome & help you out, such as when we arrived at our rooms by the beach last summer; we couldn't find the owner, so the family in the room along from us invited us to sit down & join them for lunch. The raki (plum/grape brandy) was immediately cracked open & offered to my husband, we were urged to share their fruit, byrek, cheese & bread & baklava. We had in fact just eaten our picnic lunch, but they wouldn't take no for an answer!

On another occasion my husband got a flat tyre & had to walk 45 minutes across the city in the midday summer sun to reach the 'bike shop road'. The guys, who only charged $3 for a new inner tube & nothing for labour, offered him a glass of cold water, then one of them went out to get him a chilled fruit juice from a shop. They then shared their bread & lamb with him which they were roasting over a little stove. My husband found it a truly humbling experience. These men, who mend bikes there, are pretty poor & had so little, yet shared what they had with him, simply because he was hot & had arrived at their lunch time.

But the piece de resistance was when some very long suffering shepherds in the middle of nowhere took pity on my husband & 4 fellow mountain bikers whose 'map memory' of Google Earth had failed them & they ended up not so much lost, as without a path to follow, the wrong side of a massive lake, in the dark, in a thunderstorm.....

Albania has very few maps. Well they have old Russian military maps but (still) no one is officially allowed access to them & they are indeed very hard to get hold of. There are no marked paths, certainly no mountain rescue, route markers of any sort, only sheep & goat paths which may (or may not) lead anywhere. On this occasion, a p.e teacher was taking 3 teenagers biking with my husband who just tagged along, not knowing that the route had not been examined that carefully on Google Earth. Had this been done, they would have discovered steep cliffs on one side & no discernible path on the other, or that the lake was enormous.

They set off at 7.30 a.m & reached the top of the gorge at 10.30. As it was still early they decided to carry on & see if they could get round the lake & link up with the next gorge over. 5 hours later they decided they couldn't go back & that it would be quicker to continue. The path was so muddy & steep at times that my husband ended up carrying all 5 bikes (one at a time) as he was the only one with cleats on his shoes so he could grip. Even so he slipped down the slope & plopped straight into the lake at one point, bike & all.

Then it began to rain. Then it began to thunder. It was also getting dark. They had had only a few snacks all day & it was by now 8.30p.m. I hadn't heard from my husband since 2.30. His phone had succumbed to mud & died. They then came upon 2 shepherd's cottages. The shepherds were adamant there was no way round the lake & that the only way out was by boat. They didn't know the name of where they were living & there were no roads at all. They offered to put the bikers up for the night & row them back across the lake the next morning. They insisted on washing the guys' feet, gave them all a supper of bread, yoghurt, sheep's cheese & some fruit & made up beds for them by the fire in the 2 roomed cottage. He took them along the corridor of the unfinished upstairs & opened a door at the end into thin air & via gesticulation indicated that that was their bathroom. They just opened the door & 'went'. If they needed to do anything else he told them to find a bush outside......

Sure enough at 6a.m the next morning, the shepherd rowed the guys across the lake to the next gorge & the welcoming committee of the International School's director (who was translating for them by phone & trying to ascertain exactly where they were), a doctor from the international clinic (his son was on the trip) the teacher-parent of another of the lads & another teacher on a motor bike who knew the area very well. Needless to say this ensured that this story has gone down in Tirana history in the ex pat community, though for what reasons I would not like to hazard a guess. My husband is still greeted with 'I heard a story about you the other day' & he knows invariably which story it is. They all thought it was a grand adventure; wives, girlfriends & mothers were slightly less impressed. I did ask why, when the route was SO non-existent they kept going. The answer? To quote Macbeth they were "stepped in so far, returning were as tedious as go o'er" They assumed it had to get easier & because the return journey would be at least 4 hours back, it would be quicker to continue....

My husband was due to fly to Georgia that same morning, so he had a narrow escape. He got home & washed, while I packed his stuff, fed him brunch & drove him to the airport for his 11.30 flight.

When you look at the google earth image, there is NO civilisation that side of the lake at all. Only a few stone folds & a few cottages nearer the beginning of the route. My son thought they must have been heavily disguised angels looking after his dad. I think they were typical hospitable Albanians who would never turn away someone in trouble.

We're going camping by this lake this weekend, so wish us luck. However at least we will be carrying our own accommodation & I'll be navigating....

Hurry hurry

2011-05-15T06:15:00.000-07:00

It's one of the things I absolutely love about Albania. People are not in a hurry (unless they're male & driving a big flashy car). People will pass the time of day, greet you, (even if they are in a car in front of you & the person they see is a pedestrian) but in general they have time for you. Some people bemoan the fact that as Tirana (not Albania) develops, this is changing detrimentally. It's true of the Balkans in general, and, I suspect of many developing countries where time does not determine everything, & where people are not suffering from Hurry-sickness. People & relationships are what count.

There is, in fact, a new-ish movement called The Slow Movement. Books have been written e.g 'In Praise of Slow'

People are recognising the negative effects of stress, of hurrying & of never having enough time, as well as the dehumanising, joy robbing effects of being in a permanent hurry.

I read a book recently which was about various 'disciplines'. In it the author says hurry is the enemy of love. They are incompatible. You cannot show love & concern for people if you are in a hurry. He also talks of 'Sunset Fatigue' the fatigue at the end of the day when we are too drained, tired or preoccupied to give love to those we care for most. How very true.

He gives a funny example of how one evening he was bathing his young daughter who, when she got very excited, would run round in circles singing 'Dee Dah Day, Dee Dah Day' His response was to say, “Hurry up Mallory & get dried & dressed”.

She stopped, looked at him & said “Why?”

She was living in the moment (as children do, & enjoying that moment greatly it seemed!)

And he didn't have an answer for her. He didn't have anything specific to do, appointments, calls, not even a TV programme to watch! He just wanted to get through the bed time routine, get her to bed & on to the next thing. And it made him think. He said we spend so much of our time preparing for the next thing or racing through something to get onto the next thing. But why? (Note here it was the father doing this, not the mother who might have had just cause to want to hurry if she had been looking after miniature people all day.........)

And I am sure you have all had that most discomfiting experience at a gathering when you are talking to someone & you see their eyes look past you to somewhere else or someone else, or look around the room, before flitting back to you as you struggle on with what you were (so interestingly) saying. I dry up when that happens to me. I am ashamed to say my worst experience of this was a pastor of a church I was introduced to. He clearly was far too busy & preoccupied to be talking to me....

The author also suggests that hurry makes us multi-task (which research now suggests is less effective or productive than focussing on one thing at a time as our brains prefer) & that 'hurry' also contributes to superficiality. In our internet, information age we have perhaps traded breadth for depth. Depth isn't achieved quickly. This is something I struggle with as a teacher, for example, with students who are used to abbreviated writing forms (Twitter, Facebook, Texting), constantly changing images, a plethora of social media, surfing rapidly from one topic to another on the internet. Trying to read a novel or keep such students' attention for an hour is quite a challenge.

Two things which the writer recommends to 'cure' hurry-sickness are: 'slowing' & 'solitude'. He suggests deliberately choosing situations where you have to wait or slow down – not jumping the queues in a supermarket, driving in the slow lane, not honking your horn (that's a tricky one for me here in Albania, where my hand rests permanently on the horn), waiting to let people out from a side road. Try & focus on one thing rather than multi tasking, or bite your tongue rather than finishing your children's sentences for them, stop making To Do lists. The list is endless, so to speak.

The other – solitude, is the place where we can gain freedom from the forces of society which try to mould us. The truth is, as Kierkegaard once said, “The press of busyness is like a charm”. It makes us feel important, keeps the adrenaline pumping. It means we don't have to look too closely at the heart or at life. It keeps us from feeling our loneliness. It's good sometimes to stop & question why we do certain things. Is it because it makes us feel needed or important? As an experiment go somewhere with no phone/Blackberry/ipod/book/notepad & just sit & do nothing. It's incredibly difficult & agitating when you are unused to slowing. It's like being on the treadmill at the gym when you look down thinking, “I must have been going at least 6 minutes already, only to find you've done 2.” Again it's something I saw a lot both in Sri Lanka and here. People just watch the world go by. I am constantly amazed at how people can just sit & do nothing, not even read. I am not necessarily advocating that but hopefully there is a middle ground.

It is for these lessons that I am, strangely, most grateful to my time abroad for. The very things that I have found most challenging, I have learnt most from. I have had enforced slowness & solitude. I have experienced loneliness & I have learnt the value of gratitude, enjoying simple pleasures (e.g. electricity!), of contentment, of having time for people & valuing every relationship, even if it is the day to day interaction with a neighbour or shop assistant. It is dignifying everyone's humanity & worth I believe. It says 'I may be busy but I am not in too much of a hurry to greet you & ask how you are doing'.

Our children have had fewer opportunities and less to do in terms of school & activities perhaps, but in the school of Life, they have travelled all round the Balkans & Asia, lived in two very different cultures, interacted with multiple different nationalities on a daily basis, and are incredibly close for boy/girl siblings 4 years apart. As a family we rely heavily on each other, we can make our own entertainment & we truly appreciate community & inter-dependence.

I hope I can hold onto these lessons when I dive back into the British rat-race & the maelstrom of middle England.

What Did You Do?

2011-04-30T12:19:00.000-07:00

Several Brits & ex-pat bloggers have talked about being sad to be away from home for the Royal Wedding. I wasn't. I think I probably had a more fun day that if I'd been at home, when I'd have just been watching it on the telly. And I probably felt more British & proud because I was away from my home country. And suddenly, of course everyone thinks you're an expert on the wedding & all things Royal simply by dint of nationality.

All the Brits in Tirana were invited to the British Ambassador's residence for a 'street party' & to watch the wedding. I thought it was a pretty cool place to spend the day. Where were you on Will & Kate's wedding day etc.....?

Dress casual. But my flamboyant British friend of the leopard print shoes, decided it was her one & only chance to wear a hat in Albania, so she wore a patriotic red hat, red coat, red shoes, navy trousers & white blouse. I donned a posh summer frock & sandals, & raced off to school as usual to teach my 3 morning lessons, then went & picked up 5 Brits from the Lower School , who were all in red, white & blue, having somehow purloined Union Jacks, flags with Will & Kate on them & even Union Jack scarves. My dress was turquoise & taupe (hadn't occurred to me people would wear red, white & blue.......)

Sadly Albania being post-Communist & not post-Colonial, the Ambassador's residence is more Barratt home than Viceroy's villa. Nevertheless, a lawn in Albania is something of a novelty. What am I saying? It's unheard of. So, standing on a lawn, in a garden, felt very English, even without the herbaceous borders. The Ambassador's lawn was festooned with bunting, balloons, red, white & blue 'swags' between trees & even Union Jack paper chains inside. And of course Emma Bridgewater napkins & paper cups. All brought in, in the diplomatic bag no doubt. We had Gin & Tonic on tap, with the Albanian waiters pouring the gin saying,

'Tell me how much you want, I don't know how much you are supposed to have!' Or what to mix it with I discovered....
So I knew for sure I wasn't in a British pub being served a watery one measure G&T. I haven't had such a strong gin since my husband's great aunt in deepest Devon used to pour ones which made the plants wilt (should you have disposed of yours in that way). Strong gins are even named after her in the family.

There was even a raffle with Walkers' shortbread, tins of tea, marmalade, sherry, Will & Kate tea towels, Union Jack mugs & cushions, all laid out on a Union Jack cloth. It was fantastic, so over the top.

We watched the wedding on about 6 wide screen TVs & I loved every minute of it: the dresses, the music, definitely the maple trees in the Abbey, the sermon, Harry joking around, the verger doing a cartwheel down the aisle in the empty abbey afterwards, the mix of ceremony & informality, the roaring, well behaved crowds. I felt proud to be British.

Actually no, those hats. I couldn't love those. They looked to me like UFOs perching on a hostile planet; Tara Palmer-Tomlinson & the Fergie Sisters were the worst culprits. Oh & Victoria Beckham's shoes. 6 inch heels with built in platforms, & the same UFO landing up top. And she's pregnant. And poor Samantha Cameron getting stick for NOT wearing a hat. I'm sorry but if those hats were the options........& anyway why should she?

Oh, & I learned a new word - Fascinator. For those sculptures masquerading as hats. Turns out it's not even a new word; it had fallen into disuse by the 1970s, but it's back with a vengeance now. I think Abominator would be better, but hush, I'm beginning to sound very middle aged & like Victor Meldrew. And what do I know about fashion?

I must show the pictures to my children & get their honest, uninhibited verdicts.

I went to a garden party at Buckingham palace with my parents when I was 20 & loved it, partly for curiosity's sake & partly for the 'sense of occasion'. But that was a poor shadow of Friday's ceremony. Everyone says it and so do I,
'No one does pomp & circumstance quite like the British.'
Funny thing to be good at, not necessarily a terribly useful national skill, though as my husband says,

"Wow, that's some project management, planning & executing a day like that!"

In our bleak & economically straitened times it was good. It was good to have a day like that with a good-news story, full of pageantry & celebration; something positive about Britain, & more particularly a day when for once you feel 'allowed' to be proud to be British. It was quite a fillip to my ex-pat soul. But indeed a fillip to anyone with a sense of wonder & romance left in their world-weary souls.

Head banging & Heavenly Thoughts

2011-04-20T02:54:00.000-07:00

My husband has been away in LA & last weekend my son had a swimming party , so it was a good opportunity for some mother-daughter time. We went into Tirana to vandalised play ground that had finally been renovated . My daughter tried a few things but her heart wasn't in it, doing it alone. she is very close to her brother despite the 4 year age gap & they get on incredibly well 80% of the time. She is very dependent on him as a play mate. At times like this (& quite a few others) I am ashamed to say I momentarily forget to be grateful for my 2 miracle children & wish ours was a bigger family with smaller gaps & so more playmates. The minute one or other is off somewhere, it seems SO quiet & diminished. Both my husband & I grew up in big noisy families where there was always something going on & someone around. I guess it won't matter so much when they're older. But of course my son will reach that stage before my daughter is ready to lose her playmate.

So partly to change tack & partly because I was by then desperate for a coffee, we decided to go to the French Cafe for an edible treat. It is one of only 2 or 3 innovative cafes in Tirana where you can actually get something to eat alongside your espresso. They do French pastries, tarts & 'flan'. It has lots of mirrors, sparkly glass lights which my daughter loves & chic black & white, atmospheric Parisian posters. And yummy cakes. So it feels 'treaty' & grown up, which also appeals to her. As we have observed many a time here, the business opportunities for entrepreneurs are endless, (though the taxes, bribes & lack of a middle class with disposeable income are admittedly stumbling blocks) Yet when a new shop opens here it is invariably a cafe serving only drinks, a wedding dress shop or a fruit & veg shop. It makes sense in that everyone goes out for coffee (& it's cheap here), weddings last 3 days & often involve 3 changes of dresses & fruit & veg is local & cheap too.

So I guess the French cafe appeals predominantly to ex-pats who have different routines, there were people in there having breakfast, students studying & single guys reading the paper. We had a croissant aux amandes, a cappucino & a fruit juice, which meant the inevitable trip to the loo at the end of our visit. We walked through the glass dividing wall which separated the restaurant stalls from the cafe. As we came out of there, my daughter ran ahead, there was a crack & a yelp a she crumpled to the floor.

She had walked straight into the glass door. Someone had closed it behind us for some reason &, this being Albania & window cleaning (along with house cleaning) being something of a national obsession, she hadn't 'seen' the glass, it was so sparkly & clean you didn't notice it. Admittedly there was a large handle on the door , but not at her height. The waiter rushed off for ice &, as always with these situations, especially one involving a child, everyone rushed round offering advice & comfort. This distresses my daughter even more than the injury I think. She can't stand people seeing her cry, or laughing at her or watching her or touching her. Being constantly kissed & cheek pinched in Sri Lanka & Albania put paid to that.

I don't know what it is about my daughter & her head. She is always banging it. I mean always. I have had more notes about head injuries come home for her in 2 years than my son has had in nearly 4 years. She gets them all the time. She is one of those little girls who hangs permanently upside down on the monkey bars. She has fortunately now given that up & only does the monkey bars 'right way up', but she also always seems to be on a collision course with others, or in the way of a ball etc. I have half wondered whether to say anything or ask the teacher on duty to watch out for 'things she does' but then I thought that's just being too over-protective a parent.

Still, it doesn't seem to impede the use of her brain. She is constantly asking questions about things, or coming out with her various 'theories' . She's big into theories at the moment.

Theories & heaven. I don't have many answers for any of them.

For example, recently she told me how she couldn't believe that every snow flake was different when 'you think of all the snow in the world.' but then told me her Theory of Snowflakes'.
She told me she thought that when it stopped snowing, that was when God was making more patterns & thinking up more designs & when He'd got more, then it started snowing again.

She couldn't believe God could think up so many different patterns.

"I guess I could come up with maybe 20" (i.e a very big number) & meanwhile He's done 1000 million."

She also told me that she thinks an earth quake is when God lets go of the world with one hand for a moment, or else is sneezing or shivering. Fortunately we haven't got onto whether God can catch a cold or could in fact accidentally 'drop' the world on that basis. I guess children are used to living in a largely incomprehensible world in which amazing & mysterious things happen which they can't explain. Trouble is our children assume we can explain much of it....

I don't know where she gets this stuff from, but I am glad to see the old grey matter is ticking over & wrestling with thoughts (despite multiple head bangs).

She also has been asking me lots of questions about Heaven, prompted by a library book I think (& of course she has her own theories here too)

"Is Heaven 'up' there in the clouds?"

Before I can answer, she kindly furnishes me with her own theory & then goes on to explain why she has subsequently discarded it as a working theory.

"I thought clouds were each of our houses in Heaven but I know that can't be right because when we fly, we fly above the clouds & I don't see any houses in them, there's just nothing but fluff."

I agree there are no houses there. And she has already decided that Heaven must be 'beyond outer space'.

She seems content with this for the time being & has had enough theorising for one night. She pops her thumb back in her mouth, to indicate the discussion has ended & snuggles down under the covers.

"Night Mummy, see you in the morning."

Accolades, Blogging & Coming to Terms......As Easy as ABC

2011-04-11T05:17:00.000-07:00

In the good, old, early days of blogging, & the new Mummy Blogger phenomenon, when everyone was giving each other awards, being in the Tots 100 Index was the mark of Mummyblogger success & people were appearing in magazine articles, or being interviewed by a Mums' websites etc; bloggers would coyly put up a post (if they were British) or with a fanfare of trumpets (if they were just about anyone else) drawing attention to their particular success.

And why not? That's why bloggers love comments, it shows people read you & have engaged with your subject. It affirms & encourages you. It works the same with awards & so on. It makes you feel it was worth all the hard work.

I must confess I am not at all 'techy', (you mean, you noticed?.....) I am not very good at putting myself out there, 'increasing traffic', jumping through all the hoops, I keep reading that I need to, in order to get more followers, more traffic etc. I honestly don' t know how people manage to do it, & have a real life & a family & work too. The little I do do takes me long enough! So maybe I don't work hard enough at it. The writing comes more naturally, the 'putting myself out there' doesn't. And now it's all about monetising your blog, advertising, sponsored posts & making your blog 'count' or pay. And I feel all at sea again.

So I just bumble along. I keep writing because I love it, even though I wonder sometimes why I do it (& whether I will carry on once back in the 'normal' UK). I think I do it to make sense of the extraordinary 5 1/2 years I've spent abroad. And that's another reason why this blog will never be very popular in Mummy-blogger or Expat-blogger terms. I find I have to write about stuff which happens & is relatively normal here. But it doesn't always make for light hearted reading. it's also about a country people know little about, & probably care even less about.

I am not making excuses, I'm not complaining. It's just that something happened on Friday which made me feel like I was barking up the wrong tree & should just accept who I am & what I am good at! I always want to fit in & be good at whatever I try my hand at, but deep down I have always felt I don't fit neatly into any particular category in the blogging world & don't seem to have my finger on the zeitgeist pulse of what people want to read (oweeee, how's that for a jumbled metaphor) and it frustrates me, especially amongst so many who are so good & do it so effortlessly.

So what happened? Well on Friday the little nascent high school I teach at put on their play. It was called "The Jolly Roger". I don't teach drama at the school & had nothing to do with it. My IGCSE students kept asking if I was coming & how it wouldn't be the same without me there (which I thought rather strange) So I went along with 6 & 10 y-o in tow. I was handed a programme & inside was an insert from the cast which said this:

I blotted out my name, but it was addressed to me, honest! I only teach 14 students & 5 were in the play, who wrote the comments.

So that was why they wanted me to come along. I was so touched. I have never had an accolade like this in 20 years of teaching. Sure a few thank you cards, & certainly good reports every time an OFSTED inspector entered my classroom. I went easily through all the threshold assessments in teaching before I left (which means I'm probably too expensive to get a job in the UK when I return, should I want one); but this was compeletely unprompted, out of the blue & ovewhelming. In the interval people kept coming up to me & saying, 'Well done' & 'Wow you should frame that.' etc.

I think the problem is, I am my own worst enemy. I have always discounted teaching because of the, 'If you can you do, if you can't, you teach' aphorism, which irritates me intensely but nevetheless niggles away at me. So I have never valued myself as a teacher. I'm a teacher, so what, I think? I have always felt I needed to prove myself at something else professionally, to somehow validate the teaching choice - (i.e. "I could do something else, but I chose not to.")

But this, more than any OFSTED inspectors, for some reason, finally jolted me into accepting that I am a good teacher & that I should be proud. I think because it came from the students themselves. Ok, so my humour is appealing to teenagers & they regard my 'dry wit' as sarcasm, but not even that can take away from the fact that I am just chuffed to bits. I'm going to drop the old British reserve & give a little toot on my trumpet, saying I am a teacher, I'm darn good at it & I'm not going to apologise for it.

As for blogging; well I need to accept I'm just an amateur, dabbling in a hobby, who is, like my own students, trying to learn & improve as she goes along. So please bear with me.

Business as Usual....

2011-04-04T05:41:00.000-07:00

I'm sure you'll all be pleased to know it's business as usual back in 'Paradise'. The natural order that demonstrates the phenomenon of "When your spouse is away the children always get ill." & also the phenomenon of, "When you get back from holiday lots of things always go wrong " was alive & kicking last week.

When we got back we heard that 2 days before, colleagues in our NGO were involved in a head on collision with a Mercedes. Two staff members died (1 a 32 y-o mum wth 2 young children) & 9 were badly injured, 1 critically. They were in a furgon (A furgon is a minibus taxi with no seat belts usually & fairly fast drivers.) They almost certainly had no seatbelts, but the accident wasn't the driver's fault. The worst of it was that evidently there are no emergency services here, only police, so you have to sort it all out yourself. Imagine that for a moment....

So the nearest NGO office workers went out & had to administer 1st aid, pull the bodies out of the wreckage, then drive the injured AND THE DEAD BODIES (of their colleagues) to the nearest hospital which was ill equipped, so they then had to go & buy mattresses for the injured to lie on. They were all badly shocked, the hospitals are terrible & the injured are in them on their own, far from their relatives in Tirana or Librazhd. One of these injured was in the furgon not able to move with 2 broken legs & watched her colleagues die whilst they waited for help....

A friend here, who does 'member care' as it's called, (bit like being a counsellor for overseas workers) did the 'Critical Outcome' Debrief- 1st proper one he'd done & found it v harrowing. He is leaving this summer & had prematurely (as it turned out), packed up all his notes & resources on this topic.

He said responses were text book amongst Tirana office (who had colleagues hurt/die but weren't actually there) but for the Elbasan office, where they were the ones who pulled bodies out, saw colleagues die etc (& people were pretty mangled) they were all very resistant to being there but had been told they had to be. So my friend was in this room with glass on 3 sides, AND a corridor running down one side, told them to turn phones off so they put them all on vibrate on the tables in front of them & weren't at all focused. Most said they didn't want to be there because it brought it all back, they wanted to bury it, not think about it, & said they felt worse now doing the session than they had the previous few days when they thought they were getting better. It's yet another of the many examples here where people just don't 'know' stuff we take for granted. My friend was trying to explain about post traumatic stress disorder coming out 6 months later, or illness, hallucinations, whatever, if you don't deal with 'the stuff'; and that it would be far worse, but they've never HEARD this stuff & thought he was faintly unhinged.

It has really shaken everybody up & reminded us just how dangerous the roads (& much of the driving) is here.This week my husband was handing over to his colleague, the CEO of his partner NGO in Kosovo, so he was driving to their branches all round the whole country over last wk. Fortunately his driver is a very careful &  good driver, so much so that my husband has nicknamed him 'granny' (after his own granny who brought new meaning to the words 'careful'&  'slow') Unfortunately though, you can do nothing about the other nutters on the roads... he came back safe & sound anyway. But made for a bit of a wobbly wk for me.

It's funny when you're just about to leave you feel, 'Yay, I'm almost there,  I've survived without killing  a pedestrian, being in an accident, falling down a pothole or being electrocuted in our dodgy flat' but now I have become slightly paranoid. Friends of mine who rode bikes EVERYWHERE safely, (1 had been here 3 yrs, the other 7) both had accidents within a few weeks of leaving.

Ok, then much more minor but still horrible; on Tuesday we got sewage seepage again in our mains. To misquote Oscar Wilde, to happen once 'may be regarded as misfortune' but to happen twice 'looks like carelessness' Yes, someone was definitely being careless.

Here's what happened: when the kids had a bath on Tuesday night, I went in & the bath smelt of poo! It was also a faint browny colour though we get that after rain as our water comes from a well.
So I tried the taps & they were all smelling dreadful. I had made the mistake too of making tea with tap water before I had run the bath (or fully realised what was going on), but as I poured the tea it stank, so didn't drink it. Phew, saved by the smell...

Two days later, after ignoring my messages, ('saving face' issue again), the landlord put a few randomly selected chemicals into the tank after draining it, & chlorine down the well. A water engineer friend says you should empty the whole system & flush it through multiple times with anti-bacterial chemicals. Hey ho, that's just NOT going to happen. Oh & the reason? He told my husband it was because the villas around us until recently weren't on mains sewage so their sewage just seeped into the ground (maybe so)....but I don't believe that caused it because we have been here 3 years & if that happened every time it rained, our flat would be a permanent sewage works. In fact it has only happened once before which was when the landlord had switched everything off & was re-laying his own sewage pipes & his daughter turned something on which meant (on that occasion) raw sewage went into the well. Yeurrrrrrrgh. Anyway for me once was more than enough. Twice & someone somewhere is definitely being careless.

Personally I think it's from all the building work going on round us.  They have probably broken through a sewage pipe somewhere.


By Friday 3 of us were laid up in bed with a diarrhoea & vomiting bug, despite not drinking the water (we don't ever anyway.) The children had bathed in it & did do their teeth in it. I didn't. We had washed dishes in it. Maybe it was just coincidence. At least this time round our typhoid is up to date....

Twenty Years

2011-03-31T00:23:00.001-07:00

Apologies for the break in transmission, but I've been away. I've been here in fact:

And also here........

And here....... in Anguilla.

Enjoying a bit of adventure. One cliff we needed a rope to get down it.

And even had a gallop along some stunning beaches. I encountered a spoilt brat New Yorker, who, as soon as I was offered the middle horse in the picture said "Oh I wanted to ride the palomino, the riding instructor said I could, Oh please let ME have that horse." This was not addressed to me but to the groom & to my husband, who gallantly assured her that I didn't mind in the least, & would be happy to swap." (Grr)
This was my 20th wedding anniversary trip to Anguilla, this girl had been coming every year for 10 yrs (she was 16) & rides there regularly. Hey ho. So I got put on the little pony behind called Biscuit. At least she was very game & very fast (my horse, not the spoilt 16 yr old). My charitable self says that the girl genuinely wanted to ride the 'palomino' & (was used to getting her own way) it wasn't at all that she knew my horse kicked out at other horses, or liked nothing better than a good roll, whether or not she had a rider on her back.....

Yup I had a genuine West Indian pony. About 15 minutes in to the ride we were cantering along the shore & then veered off up to the softer sand up the beach. My horse immdiately knelt down (never had this happen to me before) & I just had time to get my feet out of the stirrups & jump off before she rolled over kicking her legs in the air. The Anguilla guide rode up to me & said

"Ah yes Biscuit jaas lov dee saaf white san. It cool her aaaf when she all sweaty."

Oh great. Thanks for telling me. I spent the rest of the ride determinedly riding through the water & avoiding the delicous Caribbean powder that my patriotic little pony adored so much.

So that was our trip. We had left our children (for the 1st time in 6 years) with my In-Laws in England (who ensured they had an absolute ball) & swanned off to the Caribbean for a week in the sun to celebrate our 20th wedding anniversary.

Still seems funny to say that; that I even KNOW someone who has been married 20 yrs, let alone that it is actually me.

We always joke that, when we met, my husband was a tea lady, which, strictly speaking, is true as he was working in an Isle of Wight tea shop between leaving Sandhurst & finding a job. I was just back from working in South Africa, & because of my involvement in the End Conscription Campaign, was very anti-military, very keen on going abroad again, whereas my husband wanted a dog & to live in the country. 20 years down the line, we've done the 'abroad' thing & looks like we're on our way to doing the 'dog & country' thing now. Amazing really that we got it together! But here we are 20 yrs on, having been through many job changes, unemployment, years of infertility & IVF treatments, 2 miracle children, mysterious illnesses, heart surgery for our daughter, nearly 6 years living in developing countries, & all the exigencies that brings with it, & now a move back to England.

What a roller coaster & what an adventure. But I am very grateful for the 20 years we've had together & hope for many more. My husband is incredibly stubborn, perfectionist, & a bit anal retentive. He works far too hard & he irritates the hell out of me sometimes. (And I do him of course, though much less frequently, because he's more tolerant...)

But he is also a man of faith & integrity; he is very patient, a fantastic father, & a helpful & supportive husband. He makes me laugh, he finds me funny, he gets angry at the same injustices as I do. In short he is still my best friend & I love him to bits. Even after 20 years, & even on our own without the children, we still never run out of things to discuss or talk about. And amazingly we still find out things about the other we didn't know, although that may well be because we 1st told each other so long ago & our 40-something brains are beginning to fail us, so we had forgotten.

And we had such a good time on holiday that he suggested we ought to mark our 25th Anniversary too, as that is an official 'landmark' anniversary. Why not, I say?

But in the meantime we need to sort the next stage of the adventure: Pack up, change jobs, move house, move country, send son to secondary school. It's all change once again in the Paradise Household.

Cruelty

2011-03-17T05:13:00.001-07:00

I know Albania is sadly not unusual in this at all, but sometimes it feels like a really brutal country. Of course, I am used to stepping out of my car into a little stream of vermillion blood & disembodied chicken heads where the live chickens are selected & then decapitated before being popped into a bag to be taken home with the rest of the weekly shop. We are all used to seeing animals slaughtered on the streets & whole cows hanging on meat hooks beside the road in various stages of undress in terms of their hides. And it's no secret that animals here are not treated well at all, & I hate it, but when it's man's inhumanity to man, it just makes my blood boil. I must hasten to add there are many lovely & kind people, & I intend to blog about the amazing hospitality & about the things I love here, at a later date, but today I must tell you another story.

My friend, a Loreto nun called me 10 days ago to say she couldn't meet me the next day because of a crisis at one of the Roma camps. She works with traffiked woment & also the Roma. The Sisters of Loreto are an order concerned with social justice who do humanitarian work all round the world. These Roma live in shacks on a derelict piece of land near the railway station. Almost 40 families have lived there for 10 years. And they pay rent. They pay $20 a month for the privilege of putting up their corrugated tin & cardboard huts, no running water, no sewage system of course. The Roma are the untouchables in Albanian society. They beg, they hunt through the bins for tin cans & glass to sell. And they are ostracised by the Albanian population.

One night 10 days ago a group of men came to the camp with guns & ordered all the families off the land, they smashed the huts, set light to them & threatened to murder the men, rape the women & kidnap the chidlren. Again, as I said they pay to stay on this land. They weren't illegal squatters. These men were probably hired hit men because the landowner had finally resolved one of the many, many land disputes ongoing in post communist Albania & so could finally build (yet another) apartment block on the land & wanted someone to do his dirty work. They came back several nights in a row, intimidating the people until finally there were only 3 families left who had nowhere to go. This time the men burnt down the huts while they were still inside them. There were many children under 8 amongst these including a 5 month old baby.

They were found by my friend the nun the next day huddled against a wall. They had nothing left. We managed to collect together some blankets & camping mattresess, some old clothes etc for them & the Catholic mission offered to pay a month's rent at another Roma camp & buy them building materials to help them start again.

Helping the poor is never starightforward. I have worked with the Roma on my card project & it is not always easy. They are not used to rules, structure, routine etc. They are used to travelling light & moving on, so they often leave stuf fbehind. They sold all the building matertials because they neeeded food. In factthey should have got a team of volunteers to help build the huts as part of the deal.

This man here is surveying the devastation & seeing what he can salavge. He is 40 believe it or not, & actually has favour amongst many shopkeepers because he is always honest, always truthful, tries hard to find work & is courteous. So they give him credit, or food. And everyone speaks well of him.
But look at the poor man, how hopeless he looks, how world weary. The Roma are used to prejudcie, but this kind of inhumanity beggars belief.

A friend of mine, a very tall, striking & flamboyant Brit with a penchant for leopard skin shoes & bags & a former class mate of Nigella Lawson, visits them every week with her church; she hugs them gives them food, talks to them, takes tehir children to hospital. She just loves them & they respond. I hope she restores their belief in humanity a little.

There are many shining examples in Albania of 'Samaritans' & Mother Teresas, most of them are missionaries who came in when the country opened up & have stayed. They have started schools, set up churches, fought traffiking, visited those in prison. My son has a new girl in his class, she's a Roma girl born with a shortened & twisted arm. Her American mum, a single woman here since 1991, set up one of the first schools for Roma in Pograddec. She found this little girl being used to beg because of her arm, her mother was a traffiked prostitute in Italy & the rest of the family deliberately made her condition worse so she would get more money. This American lady adopted her & her brother & they are just delightful, well adjusted, balanced kids. Their mum is still single.

I have often thought Albania is a little like India. There are of course the bears with rings through their noses that appear with their owners to earn money at every festival, the man with the python charging exorbitant fees to pose with the snake round your neck, much like you find in the markets in Thailand & India. Then there are the beggars with horrific injuries or birth defects. The worst I saw reminded me of 'A Fine Balance' that terribly depressing but absorbing Rohinton Mistry novel. This particular man had no arms & no legs, he was just a torso sitting on a mat in central Tirana begging.

My friend (of teh leopard print shoes) told me that even here the beggars have pimps & they also maim beggars or exacerbate or neglect injuries in order to attract more money. What a brutal world it is.

But then the reality of the Roma's lives is brutal in itself. The children are often married off at 13. One girl from this camp is 26 & has 13 children. her husabnd is 17 & he now makes her work as a prostitute servicing much older men.

And brutality is in the very fabric of society which was so dehumanised under Hoxha, when people were encouraged to inform on their neighbours, where you were severely punished imprisoned or executed if wealthy, educated, intellectual; or if you did something as heinous as listening to the World Service on your radio or, Heaven forbid, telling a joke about Hoxha. A friend's grandafther was imprisoned for being an intellectual, in the infamous Burrel windowless prison. After many years, he was allowed home to visit his family for 1 day per year he had been in prison. So in his 60s he was on his way out for a 16 day visit when he gave a dying man in the prison a cup of water When the gurad saw him he beat him & kicked him so badly that 2 days later at home with his family, he died. The family in those brutal times saw this in fact as a blessing because it meant he was with his family & could receive a proper burial. If he had died in prison the body would not be released & who nows when the family would have been told even. I have another friend (who is only 30) whose mother sold her own blood in order to feed her child. everyone here, though, has a story like this.

But by far the worst story I heard was about Hoxha's double. A man who was a dentist was found who looked quite like Hoxha. He was arrested & placed under house arrest, given plastic surgery, then had to eat exactly what Hoxha ate, to maintain the same weight, read what Hoxha read & see no one. He often stood in to give speeches for Hoxha, who had the usual despot's fear of assassination. The plastic surgeon was inolved in a 'car accident' when his car went over a cliff. Anyone who knew about the 'double' was killed. At the end of communism the poor man was released only to find that people saw him & screamed (Hoxha had since died) & ran away or tried to attack him. He discovered all his family had been murdered soon after his 'arrest' distraught & mad with grief, he deliberately scarred his face with a knife & put out one of his eyes. Eventually he took himself off to live in a labour camp where people didn't know what Hoxha looked like before finally killing himself in despair.

I'm sorry this is such a depressing post, but this is life here & the legacy that Albania has to emerge from. Thankfully there are unsung heroes like my nun & my flamboyant friend here, as well as a handful of NGOs & mission organisations who are fighting for justice, showing mercy & trying to ameliorate the lives of those who suffer here.

A Moral Dilemma & the Word for Integrity

2011-02-28T11:09:00.000-08:00

One of my husband's interns has just left for another job, (& a 40% pay rise) having been with him for nearly 2 years. She was exceptionally bright, talented & hard working. She was fun, friendly & reliable. Sadly she left under a cloud. Here's why:
3 months ago my husband sent her (willingly) on a course in Romania. A s is standard practice, he drew up an agreement which said that if she left before she had completed another year with his organisation, she would be liable to pay back pro rata for each month under the year that she hadn't worked. he asked her if it was ok & she said yes she was fine with it. However, being completely snowed under & working too many hours, meant my husband forgot to get her to sign it. the week before she left, somehow it cropped up with the finance manager so he talked to the intern about it & said "You only went on the course 3 months ago so you are leaving 9/12 of a year early for our agreement".
Her response was that she had hoped he had 'forgotten about it.' And as was apparent, she certainly wasn't going to remind him. Anyway, after lengthy discussion, it became clear that this 22 year old girl was adamant that she was not going to repay it. My husband admits he has no legal leg to stand on;
"A gentleman's word is as good his bond" according to Charles Dickens in "The Old Curiosity Shop" but that doesn't wash in Albania, or in England I imagine anymore; if it ever did. Hard to prove a verbal agreement, which of course she claims she 'doesn't remember' anyway.

My husband tried to meet her half way & offered her a retrospective pay rise, so effectively she would only owe half the amount, but no she wasn't budging on that either. Furthermore, she said she had consulted with her uncle who was a lawyer, who told her to stand her ground & that her CEO (my husband) couldn't 'make her pay'.
At this point my husband explained that he & she were working for an NGO, a not-for-profit organisation, so they weren't awash with money & more importantly trust, integrity & honesty were very important as it was a Christian humanitarian organisation working to help the poor.
We were talking hundreds, not thousands of dollars too, but in a small organisation like this one, it all counts.

Nada. Nothing doing. Immoveable.

Now tell me reader, what is your response to this? I confess I was utterly gob-smacked that this 20-something student had the confidence, verve & sang froid to eyeball my husband, admittedly a not very intimidating boss, but still 20 odd yrs her senior, & say effectively:

"Shan't. You can't make me."
All true, but the gall!

This girl won a sponsorship to that Boarding school in Wales (I forget its name) which is in a castle & did all her high school education there. Then she went to Dartmouth College in the States, very prestigious again, I'm told, because where Harvard & Yale have 20,000 stuents each, Dartmouth is Ivy League but with only 5000 students, so it's much harder to get into.
Smart cookie. But, as the saying goes "A person is not given integrity. It results from the relentless pursuit of honesty at all times." You can't learn that in college.

Confucius says "The strength of a nation derives from the integrity of the home." What hope has this girl got when her elders are advising her, not what is right or just, but what she can get away with?

I know this is politically incorrect, but this is the single, biggest problem with Albania. Everything here seems to be about what you can get away with & who you can bribe to get out of trouble. No one has to take responsibility for their actions.

It is endemically corrupt. Communism left a moral vacuum. And it is something I have come across time & again. Lack of integrity , or outright corruption. An Albanian friend told me they didn't even have a word for integrity in Albanian, they have Albanianised the English word. So it's Integritetin.

John Gardener 1912-2002 who wa s a US secretary for Eudcation, Health & Welfare sums it up very well
"Men of integrity, by their very existence, rekindle the belief that a s a people, we can live above the level of moral squlaor. We need that belief, a cynical community, is a corrupt community".

By contrast this week, several of my husband's Albanian colleagues have heard he will be leaving, & I have been quite bowled over by the kind words & observartions they have made. They have seen that my husband is someone who 'does the right thing even if no one is watching.' (these are verbatim)
"You strike me as someone who practises what they preach.
"You have been a good example to me"
"You are highly appreciated for your good example."
"We have seen enough people preaching one thing & living another."
"Thank you for your honorable leadership".
"In my long working experience with NGOs I have worked with many internationals, however, you will be one of the best, who has left an indelible imprint in my memory"
"Albania needs international leaders like you who role model the profile of true leaders, who inspire their staff by 'what they say' & lead 'through their example.' "

Ralph Waldo Emerson said "A little integrity is better than any career."
I am so proud of him. I wonder, in his heart of hearts whether this girl's uncle can say the same of her?

Mission Accomplished

2011-02-09T02:45:00.000-08:00

Reader, my son has been accepted into the school we chose. My parents were sent the letter in the UK & they opened it 'on air' via skype. They got as far as "We are delighted to inform you......." and I didn't hear the rest.

Yay!

And even more amazingly, last Wednesday my husband was, out of the blue, offered a job working from home (ie UK), with the same organisation, with travel to Africa about one week a month. He had had a rather depressing round of meetings whilst in the UK & everyone had said
"What you're trying to do is really difficult" that is, stay in development but work in the UK.

We knew that, my husband has made a career out of unorthodox moves. But obviously word had got round despite that. The job is only a 2 year contract but I have got (slightly more) used now to living with uncertainty & in the current job climate this isn't anything new. We are just very grateful & very excited.

And having felt we were doing things in such a cock-eyed order, applying to schools before anything else concrete had happened, I feel much the same as Iota, who said

"Gosh it has all come together so quickly. Can't keep up with you! Cart before horse, then horse bolted, then cart went careering off down the road!"
Then added "Am so thrilled for you. Just what you need".

Yes, it was just what I needed actually. It takes a bit of getting used to, everything coming together so quickly. My husband was unemployed for 7 months before we secured our 1st overseas posting, then he got a promotion in Sri Lanka 6 weeks before his 1st job in Sri Lanka finished with nothing else in the pipeline. And we got the Albania job 4 wks before his job in Sri Lanka ended. So not going right up to the wire this time around is a rather pleasant experience!

I don't wish to cause the horse & cart to crash, but I think I could almost say Mission Accomplished. Who could have foreseen that only 10 days ago?

Operation Return Home (Stage 3)

2011-02-04T13:59:00.000-08:00

Today was our son's interview at the school we've applied to for him. On this occasion I was very glad that I am naturally punctual & so had left plenty of time to get there. The reason being the police, who were stopping cars at a roundabout, decided in their random way, to stop my car en route to the school. This is my £450 eBay car which sits off road all year at my parents until I come back from Albania, like this week, & tax & insure it for a week.

The police told me they couldn't find my car on their system. Arghhhhhhh. Serendipitously (& bizarrely) I had my insurance certificate, car registration document, MOT certificate, driving licence & even passport with me. Eventually, after a 12 minute delay, they confirmed what I could have told them, that all was in order, & they let me go. My son told me to 'chill' as we still had 30 minutes to get there & it was only another 15 minutes drive away. Just not good for my nerves.

I felt like a fish out of water, parking my little fiesta alongside all the smart cars at the school. All the other interview candidates were in school uniforms or very smart outfits. Our son doesn't have uniform or smart clothes. No call for them in Albania. However, the registrar remembered 10 y-o from the open day & greeted him warmly by name. The headmaster was doing the rounds, sipping orange out of a carton, chatting to parents & then mopping distractedly at the spilt juice on his trousers. In fact everyone seemed very low key & normal, except the parents.

After his interview the teacher who had conducted the interview, lingered chatting about Albania. He taught 20th century European history so was fascinated by Albania.

Whilst my son went off to the loo, he said to me:

"You know I've talked to lots of great boys this last 2 days, but they all brought in a rowing medal or a cricket bat, but your son was so different and produced this fantastic 100 square quilt". H emadde it for his school's 100th day celebration (I knew his effort would be worth it one day!) He said it really had been delightful talking to him & getting to meet him.

I could have kissed him. It's such a relief when you've been living in a tiny little Balkan backwater, your son attending a little missionary school with few facilities & small classes. You think: is he really bright or is it just in the context of his small multi cultural class? What sort of competition is he up against? Will it matter he hasn't had so many extra curricular opportunities or a grade 5 in piano? Would it seem really odd amongst mini rowers, budding Beckhams, & 'rare wood' cricket bats that my son had sewed & brought in a home made quilt as his 'significant object'?

Clearly I needn't have worried. And in fact living in Albania, amongst blood feuds, money laundering, uncharted mountains, abandoned military vehicles & tunnels, not to mention power cuts, chaotic traffic & unmechanised farming only seemed to add to his appeal. What my husband had said all along in fact. I thought it would just make him seem odd & a little too different & too 'out of the UK educational loop'.

They have a very specific ethos & a certain type of boy that they're looking for. I hope our son fits the bill. I htink he would be very happy there. After all, he won't be at school with the parents......

We find out on Monday.

In Case of Emergency....

2011-01-27T11:36:00.000-08:00

Today my husband & son flew to England for stage 2 of Operation Return Home. My husband has some meetings about his future, & our son has an open day at one of the schools we have applied to.

Tomorrow in Albania there is another protest, 1 week after the last one. As a result; largely because of the violence & deaths at the last one, the American embassy is closing all day & advised schools to do the same. So my children's school will be closed, the high school, where I teach, will be closed. As one of my American students commented,

"My friends in America have 'snow days', we have 'protest days' which close the schools."

Another organisation which supports missionaries here in Albania sent out the following guidelines today. Guidelines I think you'll agree are worthy of the American embassy. Perfectly practical, but a little excessive.

Stay away from large crowds. While things may start peacefully, they can easily and quickly get out of control.
Ensure that you have important documents where they can be easily accessed.
Try to keep cell phones and computer batteries charged in case the electricity goes out for a long time.
It might be wise to keep your vehicle filled with fuel – if there is a need to get out of the area (or country) quickly, you do not want to run out of fuel!
Let your teammates know where you are! Stay in touch with one another so that you can be easily reached in case of an emergency.
Be prepared to stay in your homes for a few days at least – that means ensuring that you have adequate food and other supplies to sustain you.

Right better go & buy some tins of tuna to put in the cupboard tomorrow...

Needless to say we have heard nothing from the British embassy despite being on their 'list'. I remember during the swine flu scare, we did get an email from the British embassy which basically said , (in the nicest possible way) "You're on your own chaps, we can't do anything to help, should there be a pandemic!"

so my husband wrote his own version of what he thought the British embassy might write should they bother to give us advice about the political situation:

Hello Chaps,
As many of you are aware, the Albanian Socialist party is revolting. Or, to
be more precise, demonstrating, in central Tirana on Friday 28th January.
Protestors are expected to start gathering from 1200 onwards. The
Demonstration is expected to start around 1400.
The Demonstration will create further traffic congestion in the centre of
Tirana and we strongly advise all members of the local British Community to
pack their G&Ts and ankle away from Tirana for a long weekend on a golf
course somewhere. After all, in Albania, incidents of violence cannot be
ruled out, and we wouldn't want to be a part of that, would we?

Mum's the word.

Consular Section
British Embassy, Tirana

I know it's a stereotype, but the pastor of our church on Sunday was advising all Americans to register with the embassy, not just to be on an email list but so that you have 'the full backing & resources of the embassy wherever you travel'. Then the guy says.
"I use it whenever I travel, even if I'm going to Canada!"
The exclamation mark is mine, not his. It wasn't a line in self deprecating humour.

I'm sorry but when you see the American embassy here, you do begin to think they're paranoid. I took my daughter to the American compound for a birthday party. We were late. well, not until we got there & had to go through security checks worthy of Heathrow.

We had to pull over & have our car examined with one of those extra lareg dental mirrors which looks under the car for bombs. Then we had to 'pop the hood' so the security guy could check our engine, only here Albania added a spot of pure Albanianism into the mix. My car bonnet wdn't 'pop' (it's very temperamental) I tried. The security guy (Albanian) didn't even try for me, he just shrugged, smiled & said "no problem" & waved me on. Unchecked, bombs n all. I then had to drive through the bollard chikanes, but even after being checked, I wasn't allowed to drive into the compound, so we parked outside the compound & then went into the office to walk through the metal detector & put all our belongings (including our suspicious looking birthday present) through the x ray machine, and then sign in with the security guard on duty, say whom we were visiting & for how long. And then the dad had to come & meet us & escort us in. I then left &, believe it or not, had to go through the checks all over again exactly 2 1/2 hrs later when I came to pick her up. I guess it's not really surprising the spouses don't leave the compound much. And why would you when it's so nice & safe &, well, American in there?

Once inside my daughter thought she'd 'died & gone to heaven' as the cliche goes. Lots of suburban white houses, complete with pillars & double garages, sweeping vistas of grass everywhere, housewives chatting in the street, a huge children's play area, a soccer pitch & a swimming pool. Even a shop! Like Eurocamp in France. All for 18 embassy staff families. To say my daughter was awe struck would be no exaggeration. 'It's like another country' she said.

Well yes exactly, America, in fact.

My daughter still talks about 'all that fresh grass' She couldn't believe, here in the land of city apartments or village muddy vegetable patches, & her own gardenless flat, that her best friend had all this grass to run around on!

I mean, I could understand if there was a terrorist threat or Americans weren't liked, but to Albanians America is nirvana. Everyone here loves America & wants to go & live there. Maybe there's a 'standard issue' American embassy compound design...

Anyway hopefully, it will be peaceful tomorow & things will have calmed down by Saturday so we can nip out, with full tank of petrol, charged mobiles & tins of tuna & make it to the airport to join my husband & son in the UK.

Tests & Protests

2011-01-24T09:24:00.000-08:00

At 8 o clock on Saturday morning, having bounced out of bed with a "yay, this is the big day!"10 y-o & I set out to complete Stage One of Operation Return Home. Our son has been preparing for some school tests to get him into a school in September, should my husband be able to find a job in the UK, and we return home, and we return to our home town. so a tad tenuous. This seems slightly crazy, like putting the cart before the horse, but if we don't apply for schools now & we do go back to the UK in the summer, it will be too late to apply then. So we are doing things in a rather surreal,back to front way, before we have a job, a location, or anything concrete really.

This being Albania, even this Stage was not entirely normal & straight forward. Firstly we drove up the main boulevard where the protest/riot had happened 12hrs before. Half the boulevard was cordoned off & was still strewn with rocks & lumps of brick which protesters had 'dug out' of the paved road & thrown at police. Then, outside the prime minister's office was a growing memorial of flowers & candles for the 3 men shot dead, one in the head, 2 in the chest at close range. A fourth man lies critical in hopsital. And Albanian hospitals aren't good places to be in a critical condition at the best of times.....

Further on still, were the burnt out carcasses of 5 cars, poised drunkenly on the steps of Hoxha's former mausoleum pyramid. The centre was eerily quiet.

Arriving safely at school, we met the head of lower school & our son's teacher who had very kindly given up their Saturday morning to invigilate him. The school in the UK had, amazingly, suggested our son sit the test here in Albania so he didn't need to go back to the UK.

I had also had to bring my husband's scanner with us as the school had phoned to say that the school scanner wasn't working properly. So, because I am who I am, my husband gave me a crash course in how to use it. I just knew something would go wrong. Sure enough the scanner didn't copy my son's pencil answers, so the deputy head had to use the photocopy, sharpen twice, then darken twice every page of his tests: all 20 pages & then I scanned them for her.This had the added disadvantage of me seeing my son's answers, furiously trying to do mental arithmetic to guage which he had got wrong & reading his compositions, which, compared to practice ones he had written, were dreadful.

All in all not a relaxing morning. I am trying not to think about it anymore. If only I hadn't seen the papers, I would have only had my son's ebullient confidence to go by, which reckoned he had done a "pretty good job!"

Still Stage One complete. Stage two is travelling back to the UK for the open day & interviews & for my husband to have some meetings about his job situation. Of course there are about 47 more stages to go, but it feels good to have begun........

Tirana Drama

2011-01-21T08:53:00.001-08:00

School finished early today. At 12.15 in order for students to get home before roads were closed & the protests started. The Socialist party had called for an anti government protest because of an ongoing 2yr long battle over ballot boxes not being opened, an election which was not free & fair & many corruption scnadals. People are very angry.

The Democratic government as well as many of the Socialists are all 'spot changing' former Communist party members. Berisha, the Prime minister was the man in charge of the pyramid scheme collapse. How does someone like that stay in power??

Anyway we drove home uneventfully, choosing a back route, far from the main boulevard where the protest was happening.

I'm glad people are protesting. I am always amazed at what citizens here put up with without protest, though I can also understand the resignation with so much corruption, no independent judiciary, rule of law etc. I guess also it is the communist legacy, not only having to just put up with bad government but also the huge legacy of fear which understandably makes people wary of sticking their necks out. But today 20,000 were on the streets protesting, storming the prime minister's office, throwing rocks, setting fire to police cars. There were lots of loud explosions but then there always are! People here love fire works, fire crackers....... and guns.

So far 2 protesters have died, the news doesn't specify how; 17 police injured & several protesters too. It even made it onto the BBC.
The pyramid in the picture was designed by Enver Hoxha's daughter-in-law (at his request) as his mausoleum. Presumably it had to be that size to fit his ego in...... When the communist party were defeated, his remains were quietly removed & the pyramid has just been left to decay. What I like best about it is that people irreverently climb up the ouside of it & slide down, & no one stops you. No health & safety Jobsworths here. Seems an appropriate way to treat the mausoleum of a tyrannical meglomaniac dictator. You can see in the picture the numbers of protesters standing on it.
Here's an article about the clash with police.

I just hope the protest achieves something. Albania is such a fragile, fledgling country & though it is making strides, or rather baby steps, it is always, also, taking a few steps back at the same time.

Sleepwalking

2011-01-06T00:54:00.000-08:00

Our children went back to school on Tuesday. They were not that keen on the holidays ending, like any normal children, but certainly not anxious about it.

Since stopping wearing night time nappies 4 months ago, our 6 y-o has, like clockwork, got herself up, usually around 10.30 or 11, to go to the loo. We don't even help her, she is so used to it & literally 'does it in her sleep'. Even when in Bosnia, in a ski chalet, with a very steep narrow attic staircase & no lights on, she would get herself up, negotiate her way successfully down the stairs, through the living room & into the bathroom & then retrace her steps, quite happily. In the dark. She never remembers doing any of this.

On Monday night this week, I heard the familiar creak of her door opening, a pause of roughly 'visit to the bathroom' length & then she came into the kitchen, rubbing her eyes. I talked to her, telling her what a clever girl she was & suggesting we 'go back to bed now'? She nodded, & I led her back to bed, tucked her in & kissed her, closing the door as I left. Less than a minute later she was back in the kitchen beside me saying “I can't do it. I just can't do it.” I was a bit confused until Mr Ngo suggested maybe she hadn't actually 'been' to the loo. When asked if she needed to go she nodded, so we walked out of the kitchen & she went ahead of me straight of me &.....into the spare-room.

No, it's this way.” I said. She sat on the loo, eyes closed, feet dangling. Once finished, again I led her out & pushed open the bedroom door, turning to speak to her, only to discover she was no where to be seen. I called “Where are you?”

“Here.” she said. She was in the sitting room. “What are you doing in there?” I asked. She didn't know. Of course. Next morning she had no recollection of this whatsoever. She is also convinced we make up these stories for our breakfast amusement. She is very sensitive to being 'laughed at'.

Later that same night, around midnight, I saw the children's bedroom light on, so I went in & found our 10 y-o sitting on the floor in nothing but his underpants rummaging through his drawer looking for socks.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Getting dressed,” he replied “But I don't know what to wear.”

“How about pyjamas?” I suggested. He looked at me as if I was mad, so I explained it was still night time & he still had quite a few hours ahead of him. He checked his watch, gave a little smile & put his pyjamas back on.

They say sleepwalking is not indicative of any psychological disturbance,but you do wonder what's going on in their little minds.

It normally occurs between 11 & 1 in the 1^st third of the night, only usually occurs once a night & is hereditary. It is also most common in children aged 4-8 & also commoner amongst bed wetters. My daughter isn't a bed wetter, since abandoning nappies. If she didn't sleepwalk, she would be though...

It is also supposed to be hereditary. I know my mum used to tell me I would engage her in conversation at night or sit bolt upright in bed when she came in to tuck me in saying “I am awake you know” (Strange child that I was.) It also doesn't have to involve actual walking but more often repeated or routine behaviours.

The only 'sleepwalking' I've known my husband to do once in 20 years was when he got up for his customary visit to the bathroom, but mistook the landing for the bathroom. Fortunately, having been disturbed, I often get up too, & on this occasion followed my husband out onto the landing. Let's just say spotting the characteristic stance, I got there in the nick of time & steered him into the bathroom.

Of course he is convinced I made up the entire incident for a joke. Like father, like daughter.

A former colleague of mine had a husband who had a severe sleepwalking problem, he had got out of the house, tried to drive the car on several occasions, & , more helpfully, when they were moving house, was taking pictures off the walls & packing boxes in his sleep. Seriously though, that would make me lose sleep. What a worry.

It has always been something of a mystery & wasn't even seriously investigated until the 20^th century. It seems the reality is much more mundane than all the literary & musical allusions make it out to be. And indeed there are some interesting cases of people who have committed murders whilst sleepwalking & been acquitted. Legally it's called temporary insanity.

Do you have any experience of sleep walking?

Happy New Year

2010-12-31T08:34:00.000-08:00

Well, it's New Year's Eve. We are safely back in Albania.
I have discovered a few things I didn't know,namely:
1.With clear rds you can drive from Albania to Bosnia in only 9 ½ hrs, not 16!
2.Bosnia is ¾ covered by forest, yes 3/4! And is beautiful with mountains, river canyons & pretty valleys.
3.That on a 4 wheel drive all the tires need to be the same or the circumference will be different (2Pi r etc) & so cause big problems for the 4WD mechanism. Guess what? Ours were all different....More noises, more repairs needed.
4.That in the space of a week, we could spend a third of the car's value on getting it fixed.
5.My husband will run over & kill a puppy rather than swerve on icy, snowy rds to avoid it & cause an accident. I know this is what you should do, I am just glad he was driving as I think I would instinctively have swerved. Fortunately our dog-besotted children were both asleep when this happened.
6.That the effects of a holiday can be erased so fast with the appearance of pot holed roads, mad drivers, death wish drivers, daily power cuts & a house hovering overnight at 5 degrees & 10 degrees during the day.

Both Mr Ngo & my hearts sank as we crossed border. I had been to a 'cross cultural' talk the year I arrived, which talked about when you notice your 'grace levels' going down & you get unreasonably angry & irritated by every little thing, that you normally cope with. e.g the traffic, the bureaucracy, the litter, the bad driving, the noise & pollution, corruption etc. yes I have been like this for about 2 months! But the speaker said that this is caused by the stress of living in another culture particularly if it is very different or difficult (e.g developing etc) This happens about every 2-3 months & you need to get out to recharge your batteries.

Normally this rejuvenates you to enter the fray once more. This time however, despite not having had a brilliant holiday, so it wasn't 'end of holiday blues', we still felt depressed! Mr Ngo said he thinks he's getting to the stage with Albania that he got to with Sri Lanka. Fed up with everything & wearied by the never ending fight against bureaucracy, unfair taxes, & hurdles the Albanian government put in International organisations' way to make it so hard for them to grow & make a success of his microfinance organisation. This for a perfectionist adds to his stress at being thwarted constantly from doing well.
It just so happens that we are going to try & return to the UK next year. Our eldest will be 11 in May, so it is a good time to repatriate in time for secondary school. However, for my husband who works in international development, this could be easier said than done! So far Mr Ngo has changed career 4 times, from Army, to British Airways, to children's charity to overseas development in his 21 year working life. All very successfully I might add. He reassures me that if he cannot get a development job back in the UK, he will opt for career number 5 & retrain as a teacher & send me out to work full time for a year whilst he qualifies!

I have come to the conclusion, that he lives by Mark Twain's quote “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”
He's much more of a “throw off the bowlines” man & I am a “safe harbour” kind of gal. I never used to be, but now I am. I am tired & I want to go home. I hope 2011 is the year we manage to do so.
We are off to celebrate New Year with friends of 5 different nationalities. On such occasions it's nice to dress up. However in an Albanian winter when you know everyone else's house is as cold as yours, you opt for Practical not Party Frock. And of course when, anyway, you always get given 'shapka' (slippers) to put on, it rather defeats the fashionable effect of little black dress, tights & heels. So thermal vest, woolly tights, plus socks & at least 3 more layers it is.
Albanians have been 'warming up' with their fireworks night & day for the last few days. At midnight in Skenderbeg square, all hell breaks loose. People let off fireworks in the crowd, in the street, everywhere. It's utterly mad, chaotic, dangerous & very......Albanian!
We will be watching from the safety of friends' 7th floor baclony!

Happy New Year one & all!

The Sarajevan Samaritan. Our Christmas Tale.

2010-12-25T06:36:00.000-08:00

My winter's tale of Balkan adventures seems to be becoming a regular fixture. For the 3^rd

year running we have had an adventurous ski holiday, on each occasion, the adventure being just the getting there!

This year's has to win the prize though. We set off at 6a.m to drive to Bosnia; through Albania, through Monte Negro & up into the mountains where Paddy Ashdown goers skiing. An 8 hour trip.

(Above, a digger removing an avalanche from our mountain road!)

We got to the capital of Monte Negro, Podgorica in 5 hours. This was where the snow started. Our speed halved from 80km to 40 kmh. It was falling thickly, the roads were covered & there were no snow ploughs in sight.

The conditions carried on getting worse & worse. Fog, sleet, snow. As we drove up the Tara canyon to the Bosnian border, through tunnels & a winter wonderland of thick icicles & snow laden pines, we came to 6 cars stopped on the road. Ahead the road just ended, in a wall of snow & beyond it was a digger digging out the road which had a massive landslide of snow across it. It was about 20 feet high. The children wondered if the digger would unearth a car beneath this avalanche. It had obviously happened very recently. Fortunately no car was buried. This little event took an hour.

We also had to keep putting on & taking off the snow chains so as not to damage the tyres, as the road wavered between slushy covered tarmac & snow packed roads.

By 7p.m we were just getting to the turn off to climb into the mountains where we were advised the road was impassable (it was also dark & snowing heavily) So we had to take a long detour. By this point we had been going 13 hrs (had had 1 coffee stop but no lunch stop, to make the most of the light, & run out of rolls, tangerines & biscuits) & we were getting anxious about our 4 wheel drive which wouldn't disengage when we changed to 2 wheel drive. (We were later to learn another useful piece of mechanical advice; you just reverse to disengage it. That knowledge could have saved us 600Euros).......

At 8 p.m 14 hours after leaving Tirana, we heard the noise we were dreading, as something ominous made a sudden, horrible grinding clanking sound & we ground to a halt On the side of a mountain road, in the dark, snowing lightly, very few cars passing, -15 degrees & 8 o clock at night..

Now what, we thought? No international breakdown recovery, in a foreign country, where we didn't speak the language.... We did the only thing we could do; phoned the guy we were renting our ski chalet from. And said 'Help!' We waited in the car with no heating in -15 for 2 hrs.

Zlatko turned out to be our guardian angel. We couldn't have asked for better help if we had constructed a detailed job description. He spoke fluent English, was calm, efficient, & so very, very kind. He called a breakdown recovery service, (turns out they didn't want to help because, understandably, we didn't have an account with them, but in true Balkan style, he knew the general manager so 'persuaded' them to help). He kept calling us back with updates, then drove from the ski resort to where we were (a 50 min drive) to collect me & the children to take us to the ski resort, whilst Mr Ngo waited with our car & went with the breakdown vehicle into Sarajevo (a 1.5 hr journey).

We arrived at the resort at 11.45p.m. We were greeted by Zlako's parents & given apple cinnamon baklava & warmed up by the roaring wood burner in the cosy wooden chalet. Meanwhile Zlatko drove back into Sarajevo, another 50 minute drive, met Mr Ngo at the garage & took him back to his own apartment where he put him up for the night. The following morning he drove both of them back to the ski resort.

Today, Christmas Eve, his parents drove us from the ski resort into Sarajevo to collect our mended car, which had had to be moved to another garage which could find & fit a spare 4x4 part. Zlatko paid the bill at the first garage. He has been phoning the garage & checking progress.

It turned out the car wasn't ready. So we went ice skating at the rink where Torvil & Dean won gold in the 1984 winter Olympics & then Zlatko who insisted on meeting us, & this is where it gets really embarrassing, drove us to to the garage so we could collect our suitcase of Christmas presents left in the car. Our old Isuzu was jacked up 6 feet in the air on a ramp, with another car under it in a tiny crowded garage, so after the mechanic had given Mr Ngo a guided tour of the underside of our vehicle pointing out all the (many) other things wrong with it, or badly mended in Albania, they had to then get a ladder out & Zlatko & the mechanic held it whilst Mr Ngo climbed up it, opened the back door & climbed in to retrieve the suitcase & our Dwarf Christmas Tree, emerging seconds later wobbling atop the ladder & waving the midget pine triumphantly aloft. This was just too much, I couldn't watch, I felt so awful about the whole debacle. The kids reasoned with me:

“Mum, it's not at all embarrassing, we're children & everyone knows children like presents. It IS Christmas Day tomorrow after all.”

Zlatko then drove us back to his apartment where his parents took us back to the ski resort. No amount of arguing, protesting, offering remuneration for petrol etc. prevailed. They said they felt bad for us that the snow had all melted on day 3 & wanted to help give us a good holiday! However they did finally accept our liquid & edible presents offered under the guise of “Christmas.”

I am sure hospitality is as much a part of Bosnian culture as it is in Albania & frankly it puts the West to shame. How many of us would put ourselves out this much for people who were strangers & foreigners merely renting an apartment from us? And refuse to accept any remuneration, petrol money & wave aside our profuse thanks as if it were nothing. It was a truly humbling experience.

This man was a civilian defender in Sarajevo during the 92-95 siege of Sarajevo. He was on the front-line. With generosity of spirit & character like his, I am not surprised the indomitable Sarajevans held out during the longest siege in modern history with no water, gas or electricity for 3 ½ years. They coped & persevered in horrific & dangerous conditions, being targeted by Serbian snipers in the hills as they went about their daily lives. They helped each other & kept going against the odds. A great fictional account, but based on real life stories is 'The Cellist of Sarajevo' by Stephen Galloway, which gives a graphic example of what daily life was like.

I am sure the war taught the Sarajevans something we have learned living in a foreign culture where infrastructure is not always established & where it is not always possible to be self sufficient. That is, that we are interdependent. We need each other & we should do all we can to help our fellow neighbour. And it is something we feel privileged to have experienced on many an occasion.

The original parable of the Good Samaritan was Jesus' response to the question 'Who is my neighbour?' when Jesus said we should “Love our neighbour.” The answer given showed that our neighbour is not the person who lives next door, or someone local or someone who can repay us or simply our friends. In the story the man who actually helped the injured man was a foreigner, an alien, a hated person amongst Jews, a man of different, or no religion, a merchant, who knew the value of time & money & the 'cost' of helping, but he extended the hand of practical friendship & did all he could for the man.

In much the same way as our Sarajevan Samaritan did for us.

British "Mustn't Grumble day".

2010-11-29T03:25:00.000-08:00

Although we live in Albania, the 90 strong little school my children go to is 50% American. So it goes without saying Thanksgiving is given as a holiday. The school has a British director & follows the British National Curriculum (Don't ask, I've no idea why) but Thanksgiving is non negotiable. And really, what's not to like? A 4 day holiday towards the end of a long 16 week term. Hooray, or to get into the American spirit, yay!

However us Brits, & indeed the Europeans here, feel slightly 'left out'. And of course being all about 'Thanksgiving', gratitude &, Heaven forbid, expressing it, it sits slightly uneasily with the British psyche. But we all felt we wanted to mark it in some way as the Americans were all having their Thanksgiving dinners somewhere, after playing in the annual Turkey Bowl, the 'friendly' American Football match, which, though Mr Ingo & our son play, they were not invited to join in with. So we felt we needed to mark it in some way for ourselves.

So I suggested to the assembled Brits & honorary Brits that we have a “Mustn't Grumble Day”. It seemed suitably, well British. It is now an unofficial Tirana Thanksgiving European Tradition. Last year it took us to the beach. This year, as it has suddenly turned wet, to a shopping mall & play area. We only have bowling & very expensive ice skating left & we have exhausted Tirana's child friendly offerings. I should add that the British contingent in Tirana is tiny, tiny, which perhaps explains why we felt the need to assert our own tradition.

We spent the day together & had fun, reverting to British type very quickly. We all escaped for a coffee whilst the children played. The coffee took ages to come. This was of course noted & remarked upon, but still, we thought, mustn't grumble, so we patiently waited, & of course didn't mention a thing to the waiter & still left our tip, even if slightly underwhelmed by the non existent service.

It was a lovely relaxing, hilariously familiar day. We talked about the remembrance service, tutted about the Albanian president holding up proceedings by arriving late 'just because he could', reminisced about the Defence attache's splendid spurs, talked about what a jolly affair the Guy Fawkes night had been, if unBritishly mild at 20' . We even discussed the Royal wedding. I am sure none of these subjects would have crossed my lips living in the UK & out for coffee with friends. But it was British Mustn't Grumble Day so we had to fly the flag.

The rest of my Thanksgiving w/e? Well: I took the kids out for Breakfast Pancakes (they are willing participants in American culture), walked 10 mins up to the clinic to drop off yet another of my daughter's urine samples, then we walked back, all in the pouring rain, looking in vain for a bus to take us home. There are no bus stops signs here, youjust guess or watch people. Our car was being MOT-ed & we are not very used to taking buses. It took us an hour to walk home, during which time ONE of our buses passed us. Right at the entrance to the road our house is in. One bus in an hour. Grrrrrrr.

Our car failed its MOT. Still only on two minor things: steering & suspension......

We had a power cut from Saturday night (during dinner with friends), through to Sun afternoon, 3 hrs of power then another all nighter power outtage.

On Saturday afternoon, Mr Ingo (aka my husband), was changing the light bulbs in the sitting room, & our daughter was handing him the screw driver. The glass light cover fell (because Mr Ingo discovered it didn't have all 4 screws in place) & sliced our daughter's cheek as it bounced onto the sofa. Said light cover was 14 inches square & weighed about 2 pounds.

At times like this I feel particularly vulnerable living somewhere with as limited medical resources as Albania. The good thing is you can call the (lovely) American Dr any time & the entire round trip takes less than an hr. No long queues in A&E. The down side is, you just have a general practitioner sewing up the gash with 3 stitches & you just hope he paid attention in medical seamstress classes. If not, our daughter, as my husband joked with her, will forever after be able to go to fancy dress parties as a pirate, with a ready made & genuine scar rakishly slashed across her cheek. I thought our 6 y-o took this in remarkably good spirits, considering she would never entertain going as a pirate anyway, quite apart from being told she would be scarred for life (which wouldn't go very well with her princess outfit she said). Fortunately our daughter is used to her dad's style of humour & just rolled her eyes at him. Equally fortunately, being so young I am sure it will heal very well.

And when you see how close to her eye it cut, you really do think, I mustn't grumble, this could have been a whole lot worse.

And for that we are very thankful....

Dear So and So

2010-11-23T05:43:00.000-08:00

Last week I had one of those situations where you write a letter & then burn it. Or rather the cyber equivalent, you write an email & then press delete.

It was a situation that really upset & hurt me & left both my husband & I perplexed & dumbfounded. We just felt shabbily treated. And it was over such a small thing. The trouble with situations like this is you can't say anything & so it doesn't get dealt with, so it forever changes your perception of that relationship.

So anyway it got me thinking about those Dear So & So letters Kat introduced over at her blog 3bedroom bungalow. And I decided I would write a few of these to express my frustrations at other (but less personal) circumstances we live in & ones which are responsible for my comparative silence over this Autumn.

Dear Landlord,

Please, please could you take our advice, honed in the fires of bitter experience (to date 7 electrical items destroyed by power surges), & buy yourself a surge protector for the modem we share?

To lose one modem, I grant, is unfortunate, to lose two is careless, but to lose 3 to power surges, in the space of a few months & do you not see a teensy bit of a pattern emerging?

Oh & while we are on the subject, could you also get an electrician to mend our (& your) electrical safety cut-out circuit, so that a.) we are safe & b.) when all these power cuts happen we could actually use the generator which has sat idle for 4 months now tantalising us with its hefty, useless back-up bulk.

I know, I know, the damage was caused in our fault & we were cavalier, I admit, to plug things into sockets with such 'gay abandon', without any consideration of the consequences of doing such a thing, but it was a guest of ours who wanted to charge his mobile phone &, well, silly us, we said “Go right ahead. Use our electricity. Enjoy!”

Whilst I have your attention, do you think you could also fix our blind (broken since we moved in 3 yrs ago), our daughter's window, the oven (the fan has broken & is burning everything I cook), oh & when you light a fire in your sitting room 2 floors below, the smoke climbs up to the third floor & instead of carrying on up, it seeps out into our sitting room, filling it with smoke, to the point where you can't sit in there.

However, we have found a solution to this; we light the wood burner whenever you have a fire & all the smoke goes up the chimney. This is not an unpleasant solution, & I know how you like to find 'home made' solutions, but, as you can imagine, it rather limits my daily activities. I have not, to date, found a stoker to keep the home fires burning,whilst I go about my daily life.

Yours

Ever Patient Paradise.

Dear Internet Provider Number 1.

I know you are facing large hurdles in getting Albania 'online' but really, is stringing our internet cable across the street from our tree to a pole on the other side really the most sensible solution?

Because there is building work on both sides of us, there are a lot of concrete lorries, cranes etc. passing by. Twice now a lorry has driven through our internet wire severing it. Fortunately our landlord has a (rapidly dwindling) roll of insulating tape & he has made the pole higher but there is a limit to how high he can go.

I admit sometimes our internet problems have been down to the landlord's modem breaking, but you could come & help a bit sooner & better still not just shrug & say you don't know what the problem is. It's all very nice speaking to you every day on the phone, but I am not phoning for a chat, I mean, really I don't even speak to my husband on a daily basis on the phone. But if I did he would soon get the message that something needed attention, so why don't you?

2 ½ months is a long time to be without internet. I have unavoidably developed a '40 a day Balkan Passive Smoking' habit as a result of resorting to internet cafés. Please sort it out.

A Gradually Losing Patience Paradise.

Dear Internet Provider Number 2

How can we be 20 metres short of being able to be connected to your provider? Don't you want our business?

A Perplexed Paradise.

Dear Internet Provider Number 3.

Thank you, thank you for getting us online, though please refer to my letter to Internet Provider Number 1 to see that I really do no think this 'high wire' stuff is a good idea. I See you have installed a new wire.... from our ROOF terrace, 4 floor sup, across our courtyard, over the road beyond the houses opposite to the apartment block one road over. I realise I know very little about these thing s but it does seem a tad...... precarious. Though I admit, I wish I had been here to see you set it up...

It's a shame with all the power cuts I am still not getting internet very regularly.

But thank you for your efforts which, as well as acrobatic, have been better than other providers.

Yours

An Increasingly Wearied Paradise.

Dear Electricity Board,

A small tip. Invest more money in infrastructure. Winters are wet, the country is covered in high mountains & large rivers. Hydro electric is the way to go. One of the few things Hoxha got right. But it needs upgrading badly, it can't cope with today's power needs.

I know things have improved a lot & I know it's a difficult job, though I have also heard your board is the most corrupt company in Albania, but we'll gloss over that for the moment.

Our electricity supply has actually got more erratic over the last 3 years. Could you possibly send someone to look at our antiquated little substation because every time it rains, I mean EVERY time it rains, our power goes off, & stays off. For a long time. And our generator doesn't work because our landlord has not fixed the fused circuit that connects the generator, which was fused when our friend plugged his mobile phone into one of our sockets. But I digress & it's hardly an electrifying tale (except perhaps for our friend who had a narrow escape..)

And so the flat is cold, gloomy, with no heating (except the smoking wood burner) & 2 gas rings for cooking. Oh & the electric gates don't work of course, so I have to park up the road & carry all the shopping & my school bag up the road, across our flooded sewagey courtyard & up 3 flights of stairs.

SO I would really appreciate it. Maybe it's something as simple as a hole in the roof ? Could you just take a peek?

Yours

A Powerless Paradise.

Dear God,

We have had a beautiful warm colourful Autumn this year, for which I am truly grateful. Thank you, it's been lovely.

I know Mediterranean climates have wet winters & actually I don't mind the rain too much (as long as I have a warm, well lit flat to be in....) I love the mountain-ricocheting thunderstorms too.

But the trouble is rain here means several things:

Power cuts – floods - sewage drains overflowing in our courtyard - lots of mud on the unmade up roads - & no internet often (even when there IS power). And traffic worse than usual & crazier than usual. I mean yesterday cars were driving on pavements to beat the queues....

So you see I was just wondering.... obviously I am not asking you to move mountains (though of course, I know you could.) or to shift the rains shadow, alter an entire climate, but how about sending just a little bit less? It seems we get a month's quota in a day. And then the same again the next day. It's like a Mediterranean Monsoon.

Alternatively perhaps, my son's suggestion, could you make it colder so it fell as snow?? (& then there'd be no school, & we could make use of the mountains by toboganning & maybe even 'crosscity' skiing instead of using the car.) But I'm not convinced because we'd still have power cuts from overload, so I'd still be cold, internet-less, light-less & have to get by on stove-top pasta

A Precipitation Averse Paradise.

Blood feud

2010-10-26T03:57:00.000-07:00

“This belongs in a history text book, not an event occurring in the middle of Europe in 2010.”

So spoke the director of the Evangelical Alliance in Albania. We attended a rally on Saturday morning in the middle of Tirana, joining with 1000s from churches across Albania to protest the killing of a pastor in Shkodra. My husband worked with the pastor's sister in law. The pastor himself has left a wife, a 6 yr old & a 9 yr old. (Incidentally, the poster above says "No to blood feuds, yes to life.") The woman on the podium is the pastor's wife.

The killing was the result of a blood feud. (I'll tell you the story in a moment)

It was incredibly moving & yet incredibly surreal,because of what it was about. I've been teaching Romeo &Juliet this term & have got the students to research blood-feuds in Albania & compare it to 16^th century Verona. It really has brought the play to life as they are living in a context where “ancient grudge break(s) to new mutiny” & “civil blood makes civil hands unclean.” Amazing, a 400 year old text, & it's still happening.

There isn't much history of protesting in Albania. I think it's the fear legacy of the communists probably. But the churches came out in force on Saturday morning to commemorate this brave man who died as a result of this anachronistic practice that still rages on in Albania.

In 2010. In a European country. One which is desperate to join the EU. It is scarcely credible.

Blood feuds were an ancient device (pre FIFTEENTH century) for resolving conflicts & bringing about 'justice'. It has been common in many cultures but rarely has it been so formally codified as it has in Albania in the Kanun (The Code) the code governed all aspects of life in the northern clans (marriage, property,taxes) & the 2 most important aspects were (& still are) Honour & Hospitality The Kanun also attempted to regulate revenge killings & reconcile feuds between rival clans.

If a man is killed by someone in a rival clan (even accidentally), then the family of the murdered man must preserve family honour by killing a member of the rival clan, preferably the murderer himself, but failing that any close male relative. It isn't rocket science to work out that surely that means eventually both clans will die out. But this went on for generations.

The Kanun method of ending blood-feud was 'besa' a truce brought about by negotiation; a marriage between families (Friar Lawrence's intention in Romeo & Juliet), a Meal of Blood truce, or the payment of a 'tribute' (that's cash not compliment) But it didn't always work & wasn't always permanent. And so the cycle would begin again involving the male members of society. This led to men locking themselves in a 'lock-in' tower for years sometimes, till a blood feud was resolved. Such as this one.

This is in Thethi, the only remaining one in Albania which is accessible to visitors. They wd climb up, pull the ladder up, climb up to the next floor & pull the ladder up again. With very little light & only slits for windows, it must have been a miserable existence. Because the women aren't vulnerable in a blood-feud, they would bring food to their men folk.

Communism suppressed blood-feuds pretty comprehensively for 45 years, (they were pretty good at suppression).However, they re-emerged in the 1990s & have become a serious & ongoing problem. The Code excludes women & children from revenge killing, but, whether because the Kanun code was maintained orally, (not written down until the 19th century), or whether it is just blood lust, is hard to say but the ancient Kanun customs have taken on insidious interpretations. Many young boys cannot go to school to leave their house (the Kanun says you are safe in your house but if you leave it you can be killed. Furthermore any male relative is now fair game, no matter how distant. In fact women & children have also been killed on occasion too.

The Director of the Evangelical Alliance who organised the rally, appeared on TV with four young Albanian boys who are “in blood”. Victims of a blood feud. They appeared on a talk show under police escort, wearing black hoods. One boy described how he had never left his house in 13 of his 14 years. This was his 2^nd time out. He has had no education. The government pay the family 5000 Lek 'compensation' There are currently about 1350 families still caught up in a blood-feud.

Shkodra is particularly badly affected by blood-feuds. It is 2 hours north of the capital. The system of 'besa' has broken down too. One well known activist, of the Reconciliation Missionaries group who had helped negotiate hundreds of reconcilaitions between families, was himself murdered in 2004. A revenge killing of different sort.

The pastor in Shkodra had an uncle who had murdered someone. He was very careful for about 4 years, but then said that he was a pastor & he needed to attend to his people & church & couldn't do his job in hiding, & shouldn't live in fear. He had actually been interviewed on camera about it all a few months before but at a conference, not on TV. He had said that if he was killed, then at least that would save the live of the 23 other male members of his family as the family have said they do not intend to continue revenge killings to retaliate. He was shot in broad daylight outside his church office in the middle of a busy street.

Oh & get this. The mother of the murdered man, which precipitated the feud, would say to her other son every day for 7 years as she put his meal in front of him.

“How can you sit there & eat when your brother's death goes unavenged?”

It really is like something out of Shakespeare isn't it? It was Lady Capulet in her feud who called for Romeo's death “I beg for justice...Romeo slew Tybalt, Romeo must not live.”

The man was caught (& will be out of prison in 10 years if he's good). Albanians have told me that the sense of honour is so strong that people don't mind being caught, in fact they are proud of what they have done for the family honour.

Of course many Albanians are appalled by this practice too & are desperate for their country to move into the 21^st century, but so much here thwarts that goal. The government need to take it seriously of course & clamp down. But how do you begin to change attitudes? Suppression clearly didn't work, you have to change hearts.

Well, that's what Pastor Proj's life was about. He preached reconciliation & forgiveness. And love. He is a modern martyr & his death has certainly had a big impact. I hope it is not in vain.

An Italian Foray

2010-10-19T03:19:00.000-07:00

Sorry for a distinct lack of transmission recently. 2 reasons: the boring one is what seems to be our annual Autumn internet blackout, lasting 3 wks so far. The 2^nd & much nicer reason is we have just had 'Fall Break' & been to Italy. One of the constant wonders (to someone from an island) is the serendipity of living with 4 countries on one's border, (incidentally do you know which 4 they are?) & Italy just across the water, which is, together with Greece, in fact the most visited of the 'spitting distance' destinations, (probably because it its the most developed).

Hoards of car ferries plough back & forth across the Adriatic sea leaving at 11p.m & arriving around 8a.m the next morning. They are all manned by Philippinos who work them 7 nights a week, floating (literally) stateless & living a life between countries & having an abode in none. They cram the cars & huge numbers of lorries in so tightly that when we came to return to our car, we had to weave back & forth in a metallic maze until we found a way to squeeze through the gaps between cars, only to reach a point too tight & so we had to double back & start again.

We were going to spend a week on the 'spur' of the heel of Italy's boot. A place called the Gargano promontory – limestone cliffs, beech forests, escarpments, wild & rocky beaches one side & sheltered powdery beaches the other. And of course endless white washed medieval towns with cobbled streets & bleached churches on rocky outcrops.

The south is becoming very fashionable, but it is still cheaper, slower paced, poorer, with strong traditions & family ties & much friendlier. In fact, more like Albania than Northern Italy, we felt. And the traffic? Not mad at all, very civilised in fact, but then I am coming from Albania.

We stopped off at a co-operative in Bitonto to buy some of the area's famous olive oil, & have breakfast. Much like Albania, many o f the cafés & bar s only serve drinks, so we went into a little unassuming shop with the ubiquitous fly-screen tassles. I remember these from my childhood (IN Britain. Perhaps there were more flies 30 yr sago.......?) They are on every shop & apartment in this s area of Italy. This little shop sported a huge variety, for its size, of prosciutto crudo & hard gran padano style cheeses, so the shop assistant kindly made us rolls stuffed with parma ham & some salty cheese which we devoured sitting under this window.

We had lunch in this farm restaurant which was full of 3-generation-families enjoying lunch together, & consisted of whatever they had cooked that day, on this occasion, at least 10 mini courses of olives, antipasti, tiny soup portions, pasta etc., ending with

nuts, mini desserts & espressos. It took about 3 hrs. Fortunately our daughter

fell asleep, & our son had 'The Young James Bond' for company.

Then we stayed overnight in an old monastery in Trani where we breakfasted in a citrus tree-ed

courtyard. Our 10 y-o took this pot(below), experimenting with Mr Ingo's cast off camera. We were even served olive & sun-dried tomato focaccio bread. Salty, doughy & warm. You can get used to anything for breakfast in this kind of environment.

I must admit, loving cooking as I do, I was very excited at the prospect of eating genuine Italian food (as opposed to an Albanian version of it) & going to their food markets. We saw fishermen selling their catch from the night before & in Vieste men selling mushrooms in baskets.

Even the supermarkets sold huge brown multi floreted dark brown mushrooms which had more in comm

on it seemed, with alien life forms than those anaemic white things you get in blue plastic cellophane-wrapped tubs in the UK.

We spent our days on the beach surfing (the children in wetsuits), me doing life guard duty (spent too long in warm climes to cope with cold water anymore) & MrIngo surfing with no wetsuit, we also mountain biked in the national park & played beach cricket: as well , of course, as sampling the local red wine, cappuccinos & gelati & roaming round the little medieval towns' old quarters. On one occasion we stumbled upon a carabinieri Fiat Cinquacento in one of these impossibly narrow, hilly cobbled streets that locals drive around with such aplomb & alarming speed. The 2 policemen were escorting a young man, in hand cuffs from his home, pursued by his 'mama' clutching her cheeks & wailing dramatically. And we hadn't even stumbled upon a film set.

The only down side was our car breaking down but even that meant we got a new starter motor & a check up in a reputable garage with a mechanic who knew what he was doing & didn't rip us off. And the owner of our self catering apartment even offered us his car to use that evening should we have wished to go out somewhere.

Next time we'd like to go down to the heel & also in Basilicata, visit Matera, with its ancient cave dwellings inhabited since the Palaeolithic Age & the Mediterraneean's most extensive troglodyte complex, now , of course turned into hotels & houses, but still awe inspiring. A UNSESCO world Heritage Site. Mel Gibson's Passion Of the Christ was filmed here. This is definitely one of the perks of living abroad, the accessibility of travel options.

A welcome break, I've finally kicked off my chest infection & it's still warm back in Albania. And I have a large stash of imported olive oil, red wine & other food goodies to see me through the winter.

A Wee Celebration.

2010-10-02T07:48:00.000-07:00

My daughter is 6 years & 5months. She has worn nappies for 6 yrs & 5 months. Until September 20^th 2010. On that day we went cold turkey. Complete withdrawal from nappies.

A friend back in the UK told me what she had done. I decided to take her advice. She bought 2 mattress protectors, & made the bed up twice over so that in the night when her daughter wet the bed, she would just strip off the 1^st sheet & protector to reveal the next layer of sheet & protector. She said her daughter just decided to stop wearing nappies. It took 3 wks of 50% wet, 50% dry nights until she cracked it.

So I drew a deep breath & decided I would try it. After all, I could manage 3 wks couldn't I? My 6 y-o has never been dry at night. Aged 2 ½ she went about 7 days of dry nights, & I thought 'Great, we're nearly there'. She never did it again for 4 yrs. I can count on the fingers of (possibly) both hands the times she has had a dry night.

Her paediatrician in the UK has always said not to worry, some children just are late, no investigations till she's 7, don't 'lift her' at night, wait till she's ready. So I waited. And waited.

Of course I felt somehow it was a failure on my part. My parents (the Dr Spock generation) had us all dry, by day, at 18mths, with the 'catch whatever's passing through after a meal' school of thought. I don't know when we were dry at night but certainly we weren't late. Until I admitted it to someone & suddenly the stories came 'flooding' out, I had had no idea that statistically, in fact, it's very common.

My son was potty trained really quickly, & very annoyingly, by my husband. There was I, going by the book, doing star charts, soft rewards, lots of praise etc. but still we had very regular 'poo' accidents. So Mr INGO took it upon himself to ask a good friend of ours who had had 4 children what she would recommend. She said, without hesitation “Bribe him, with edible treats.” So he decided chocolate biscuits were the order of the day. Reader, it worked. Immediately, instantaneously & without a blip. Grrrrrr.

Our son also decided he wasn't wearing nappies at night & aged 3 was dry at night. I remember one night waking up rather startled to hear the sound of someone in the bathroom. But my husband was in bed next to me. We had no guests. Was it the Phantom Bathroom Burglar?

Nope, it was 3 y-o. He had got himself up, walked up the two little steps into the bathroom, done a stand up wee, in the dark- (gets that from his father), & retraced his steps, all without putting a light on, or calling for us. To coin a phrase I was 'gob-smacked'. Where did he learn to do that I wondered? Maybe that had been part of my husband's alternative potty training methods.....

So I assumed this was genetic. Early potty trainees. Hooray. Imagine my surprise when my daughter followed no such pattern. Chocolate biscuits? If only.

She had accidents every day at a nursery aged 2 ½, then managed to survive the 3 hours at nursery “pantus intactus” as it were, only to wee on the floor of our garage in Sri Lanka, as soon as we got out of the car at home. It was so perfectly timed, I found it hard to convince myself it wasn't deliberate. Potty training whilst living in Sri Lanka, at least, was easier climate wise. Tiled floors, hot weather, no clothes needed.

But on 20^th September, I decided I would just have to 'hit the wall' & run through the pain barrier of being a 44 yr old having to cope with broken nights. So I did. And we had a dry night. Then another, then another. From the day of removing her nappy, my daughter has been dry every night for 2 wks without fail. I am ecstatic & she is pretty pleased with herself too. Though I do find myself wondering if she was perfectly capable before but just couldn't be bothered....

And like her brother, she gets herself up in the night & takes herself off to the loo. Unlike her brother, the 1st night this happened, she just yelled for me from her bed telling me she needed the loo, so I escorted her, then got her a torch & told her she could go by herself & so she does now, most nights, wakes herself up & goes to the loo.

So it seems it's actually much more a mental thing than a physical thing. I am now kicking myself at the pounds I have wasted on nappies wondering whether she could have done this aged 5,4 or even 3.

But my daughter, in so many ways, is a law unto herself. She just lets me think I'm in charge, when really, she knows the truth & every now & then gives me a little clue to prove the point. Mum training the child....? Ha, you wish....

Beaching it.

2010-09-23T01:01:00.000-07:00

One of the nicest things about living here is that when we come back from a 'summer' in England we know we will always have at least 4 if not 6 wks of warm weather (up to the 30s) to enjoy.

So we often go to the beach. The water is still warm & the beaches are empty. Albanian have a very funny attitude to swimming 'out of season'. The local pool, heaving from end of May onwards, is always quite quiet at the beginning of September, & in fact it is always closed by the 15th of September. Albanians seem to think that the minute August ends, if you stick a toe in the water you will contract flu. Believe me, there are far more likely disease scenarios than flu from our local pool & local beach So it means the beaches are all quiet too. And of course Albanians generally, like France & other Mediterranean countries where August is sweltering, if they can do so, take most of it off, but then go to the beach......

So we went to the beach. This is guaranteed to be an interesting cultural experience. Once we had made it to the coast, we turned North to head up an unmade up rd so that we were on a small beach well above the conurbation of Durres, where raw sewage is pumped into the sea & friends have complained of rashes, itchy skin & tingling sensations after swimming there.

Unfortunately Mr Ingo somehow managed to drive into a 'pothole'. I was map reading, vainly looking for clues as to how to get out of Durres onto the right rd. (using our 1 & only map which is of the whole of Albania.) Mr Ingo had pulled round the car in front who was dawdling. (Usual scenario; on the phone, changing a CD & lighting a cigarette whilst steering with his knees) - OK, so maybe only 3 out of 4 of those were true. In fact he probably had a small child on his lap steering for him. So neither of us saw the 3 ft deep, 3 ft wide hole until we fell in it. Well the passenger side wheel did & the underside of the car bellied onto the tarmac. Bit of a pickle. Fortunately in these situations, which are quite normal here, a passer by stopped, grabbed hold of the bumper & told Mr Ingo to reverse whilst he was effectively lifting our car. It worked. The guy gave us a cheery wave & continued in his crossing of the road. I was very thankful we hadn't been driving our 4x4 tank at the time!

So we continued on our unlikely way past the ubiquitous concrete mushrooms, a few lone houses & disused factories until we got to a military base, where we turned up hill & parked on the small cliff overlooking our little bay. We then proceeded to pay our 200 lek for a lounger & umbrella. The umbrella is vital because of the sun, & the umbrellas don't come without the beds. The price is non negotiable, despite the fact that most of the equipment is obselete; my umbrella collapsed on me removing most of the skin from one elbow & trapping me momentarily inside. It may look very Mediterranean & 1st world, but believe me, those umbrellas & sunbeds are ancient.

On the plus side, the little café at the top has a man who comes down to the beach to take your order, disappears off again only to return with our cappuccinos in china cups & saucers on a tray. Bliss.

Not being very frequented, this beach is reasonably litter free & quite pretty, though this year somewhat marred by a landslide which had sliced the beach in two.

However you'll never guess the main reason I like it. It is, believe it or not, because you can't get cars onto the beach. This was an eventuality that I had not prepared for BA (Before Albania) In Albania, people drive on the beach, for fun, for practice, for......I'm not really sure what. Slaloming through sunbathers, ball games, toddlers paddling in rock pools; it is, not surprisingly, unnerving. It seems nowhere here is free from traffic. Nor is it free of boy racers.

On one beach trip, to a different beach, we drove onto the beach to park, (on the very edge) & were entertained for the rest of the day by a couple of lads one 7, one 11 I would guess, driving a very old clapped out Merc along the beach. They weren't going fast enough to be joy riding & they had been fishing & were collecting a friend, but nevertheless they ploughed repeatedly up & down. You can just abt see the old Mercedes in the background of this photo. (& the litter if you look closely.) This beach isn't very busy either, but in Durres, a city beach, there are quite a few cars & loads of people to negotiate!

And the other big cultural difference is a Western/Southern Europe divide I surmise. Or developing/developed world one. What people take to the beach. The Albanians will go to the beach with their towel. Possibly a small plastic bag with a sanduic, qofte or byrek in it & a soft drink. That's it. And when they leave, the towel goes home with them. The plastic bag of food/leftovers doesn't. It is just left on the beach where they were sitting. Always.

Cue arrival of the Brits, the Germans, the Americans. It looks like a beachside garage sale: cool bags, boogie boards, beach bags, (no windbreaks but many bring umbrellas), buckets, spades, inflatables, changes of clothes, a towel per person, the list, & the bags, go on. I guess it's that Western disease of 'needing' all the equipment for any eventuality, (& being able to afford it.) the beach is a simple pleasure, the expedition there is not.

So what would you consider absolutely essential for the beach? And what marks out your nationality from others when on the beach??

A Bumpy Landing.

2010-09-14T03:37:00.000-07:00

I'm never quite sure what it's called. The jargon has it that 'transition' is moving on to another country, 're-entry' is moving back to one's 'home' country. I'm not sure what the word is for going back to the host country after a summer in the home country. But I do know the symptoms & emotions. And in my experience the transition is never easy.

The children find it easiest of course. In fact adapting back to the UK was more of an issue. They were great with all the moving around & behaved well, despite table manners seeming to abandon them whenever we were with either set of grandparents. They also seem quite feral compared to kids in the UK, as here they go to the shops by themselves, run way ahead on the roads, browse at the other end of the supermarket to where I am. It's much safer & also there's more of a community feel. People look out for other people's children. I guess I just needed to teach them about a different cultural context which they're not used to. It hadn't occurred to me, after all, England is home.......

Of course 're-entry' encompasses leaving friends & families, leaving behind an exciting & busy time to return to routine &, (in our case), a bit of a social wilderness. Being a developing nation it also involves adjusting again to amenity issues & infrastructure frustrations that it's so easy to forget after a summer in the UK..

And as a family it means jiggling the pieces to fit the jigsaw of our family unit together again after a summer apart. I am now after 5 yrs of this, at least familiar with our family abode morphing into a Bachelor Pad every summer, complete with hydration packs (Camelbaks), for cycling, draped over the backs of chairs, copies of The Matrix, The Bourne Trilogy & Lord of the Rings littering the sitting room floor & a fridge devoid of much beyond beers & chocolate bars (apart that is, from some of the food in there that I had left 8 wks before. I kid you not.) This effect was only added to by a 22 yr old work colleague living with him. I couldn't even get into his room, as the floor was being used as a wardrobe. And I'm quite glad my Albanian didn't stretch to what the cleaner thought of it, as it didn't sound very polite. I have to say I wasn't totally without influence though. On the lads' bike rides I did insist they picked blackberries for my freezer, so they dutifully went out armed with Tupperware in their Camelbaks, & contrary to other photographic evidence, brought quite a lot home...

Our 1^st inkling that transition was going to be a bit bumpy was when my husband (henceforth to be known as Mr INGO (i.e.international non governmental organisation, because 'my husband' sounds so pedantic. Ha!) Mr INGO didn't meet us at the airport. We were met at the airport by a friend who said he couldn't get there. Literally. Mr INGO had arrived back from work that evening to discover a 4 ft wide, 4ft deep trench had been dug the length of our street, & so he couldn't drive the car out. This happens all the time here. No warning is given. So our friend dropped us at the end of our street on the main rd, & then helped us negotiate our 6 bags down the unmade up road, under some pipes, along the edge of the trench & then form a human chain & pass them over a pile of sand & pipes & then edge our way round the rim of the trench, whilst the digger & cement pourer carried on working feet away from us. Still it provided evening entertainment for all the workmen & builders who were doing their bit watching the construction proceedings, (a universal character trait of workmen it seems) This was 10 o' clock at night by the way. They work through the night sometimes. The whole of our 1^st week back in fact.

And that is our current daily reality Our quiet little dead end street has become a hive of activity. On one side, the motel, which was knocked down, has had very deep foundations dug & has concrete being poured in, & on the other side, the villa 2 down from us has been sold , flattened, the hill is levelled & it is now swarming with a crane, diggers, bulldozer, 2 concrete mixers etc.

There was a quiet Albanian family there with a bit of land, vegetables, an unfinished house, the upper floor only half built, obviously the remittances had dried up; & a little Downs Syndrome girl amongst their children. Sadly, unusual to see a Downs child kept in the family in Albania. I just hope they were offered a fair deal for their home. I sincerely doubt it though. I imagine they were offered 'enough to make a poor family think it seemed a lot' But they were in a prime spot next to the zoo lake in a dead end rd. I hope they're not squashed in some little apartment now with no land, no view & no space. See the before & after photos?

The construction goes on all day so it's incredibly dusty. We all have an urban variant of hay-fever, caused by concrete dust. It has completely changed our immediate environment, which was a quiet forgotten little corner on the outskirts of Tirana, off the beaten track out by the zoo & the park. Quite weird to be living somewhere which is gradually being subsumed into a suburb of Tirana, to have it happening literally around us.

Then of course, there have been the power cuts, always seem to be loads when we 1st arrive back, plus our electrical safety circuit, or something, has failed so our electrics aren't very safe, so our landlord informs us. And that also means the generator (which we are only allowed to use in the evenings, once dark!) doesn't come on either. He also says it's our fault because we used a plug socket we shouldn't have (?) & so we need to fix it. And the tank keeps running out of water. Have I forgotten anything?

Added to all this we have all had a horrible gastric bug which laid me low for 9 days, then my son for 6, then on our last trip to the beach last w/e my daughter got it the day we arrived. And you don't really want to know this, but a really horrible bug, I'm talking blood & mucus in my poor daughter's case. We have survived travels with children in India, South America, Sri Lanka without getting anything like this. I guess we don't have global immunity to the different bugs in the different countries we keep hopping between. And now my 'very kissy' daughter has, albeit in a very loving manner, passed on her cold to me, which she had for a month.

Oh joy.

Global Nomads - A Conversation in the Science Museum

2010-09-03T02:49:00.000-07:00

On our recent visit to London, we were house sitting for friends in a quiet little Muse street tucked away behind the V&A. It was another world- so quiet.

As we had been rushing around a lot, we decided to have a quiet day & enjoy the luxury of being spitting distance from both the Natural History Museum & the Science Museum. So later in the afternoon we popped out & went into the Science Museum. We made a beeline for the 'interactive room' whereupon my children busied themselves with a crane & shovel contraption, essentially bailing sand ad infinitum. The sort of thing you can find in several playgrounds.

As I was observing various children participating in this & secretly hoping my son wouldn't get too bossy about who did what & who wasn't pulling their weight, a voice behind me said, "Don't I know you from somewhere?"

I turned round and immediately recognised the woman.

"Yes." I said, "You taught at my son's school in Sri Lanka, & I did substitute teaching there."

That was 2 1/2 years ago already. We had a nice chat & catch up and then she said,

"So are you based in London now?"

"No, Albania. What about you? London?" I replied.

"No, Thailand."

Global nomads whose paths intersect for 10 minutes at 5p.m on a Sunday afternoon in the summer. You know the cliche, small...... etc

So what is your strangest coinicidence or unlikeliest meeting?

When a friend & I were Inter-railing round Europe, we met Uni friends in several places/countries, but we weren't surprised; we were on a European tourist trail, seeing the sights. I did once bump into an Oxford friend at the top of the Empire State building (again at 5p.m) one random Autumn Tuesday. That struck me as quite a coincidence.

And of course when I moved to Albania thinking I would know no one in such an obscure country, one of my closest Oxford friends, who lived 5 minutes from my house, had an au pair, who used to babysit for us occasionally. I now discovered (to my shame I hadn't realised) she was Albanian & lives in Tirana. And a fellow English teacher at the school I taught in, in a little market town in Oxfordshire, whose desk was next to mine in our department, also turned out to be working in Tirana.

So go on, tell me yours..........

BFGs & Warhorses

2010-08-27T08:09:00.000-07:00

I seem to be stuck in a Roald Dahl thread right now, but two of the simple little highlights in London, for me & my 'too fast growing' family, were 2 moments when I realised my children are still capable of make believe & wonder.

We were travelling to London on the excellent Oxford Tube service which has a loo, wireless connection AND up to THREE children go free with an adult. Bargain (admittedly about the only bargain I discovered during my stay in Rip-Off Britain) My 6 y-o this summer has (thankfully) developed a taste for listening avidly to story tapes on a Walkman (remember those?), wearing enormous ear muff headphones (cos the dinky little ear plug ones fall out all the time) It has made travel a lot more palateable for her, and me.

She was listening to 'The BFG', a family favourite, & in my opinion, Dahl's best by a long way. Rather magically, she had just got to the part where they are travelling to London to deliver the dream to the Queen; they had crossed Hyde Park, and so had we, and as Sophie & the BFG leapt over Buckingham Palace wall & my daughter asked how tall the wall was, we went past it & I pointed out the high palace walls & Buckingham Palace beyond. Art meets life.

It was a great moment. "Wow! That's really the palace in there! The walls are so high, it's amazing the BFG jumped them in a 'snitchy little jump'." she said.

Of course, not wishing to miss an opportunity to impress my daughter, I said.

"I've been in Buckingham Palace."

I should never have mentioned it.

6 y-old's eyes lit up & she said,

"Wow, you've seen the Queen's bedroom, like Sophie!"

"Errrr, no actually, not the Queen's bedr..........."

"Oh so the ballroom then where they have breakfast?"

"Ahmmmmm, well, no, I saw some ante rooms on my way to the gardens, as it was a Garden Party...... And I did see Prince Charles & Lady Diana. And they spoke to us." (well, & everyone else gathered round). I trailed off.

The intricacies of extraneous Royal family members (whether or not direct heirs to the throne) was clearly distinctly underwhelming, only slightly less so than the mention of 'ante rooms', I mean whoever heard of them in fairy tales? Not a dicky bird.

She resolutely adjusted her ear muffs, stuck her thumb in her mouth & concentrated on listening to Geoffrey Palmer's dulcet tones as the Queen of England, nevertheless with her eyes glued to the bus window gazing out at the palace walls.

The second incident was with my son, & in a way it was the other way round. Life meets art. For the 1st time ever we had taken advantage of Kids' Theatre week when a child goes free with every adult ticket. My 10 y-o is an avid Michael Morpurgo fan, & loved Warhorse, so that was the obvious choice. He was utterly rapt. Apart from pantomime he has never been to the theatre to see a play, though in Sri Lanka he was in 2 school productions. He got totally absorbed in it, but at the same time, didn't understand any of the 'theatrical conventions' . He seemed quite at ease with people breaking into song, probably because of panto, but when they did a freeze frame whilst 1 or 2 actors carried on talking, he whispered,

"Why is everyone standing so still & not speaking?"

And the horse puppets (which were truly amazing, so life like & credible) had 1 person holding the head & 2 inside (I know, sounds like a panto horse, but it really didn't have that effect) The foal though had 3 people all working him, dressed as stable hands, & my son said,

"Why are three people surrounding the horse all the time? He didn't seem to get that they were working the puppet.

Maybe the 'suspension of disbelief' has to be relearned, once it has been unlearned as a child becomes an adult. As adults you just ignored the 'puppet handlers', because you understood they had to be there. The freeze frames, the singing, the birds 'flying' on long poles, the frieze across the back of the stage depicting war scenes etc. My son was obviously so used to films, it was puzzling to him, because so 'unrealistic', despite being a realistic story set in the 1st World War.

Fortunately, however, being a child & therefore flexible, adaptable & trusting, he accepted my waffle about dramatic techniques & got stuck in, even providing a very credible comparitive critique at the end between book & play for the benefit of his Godfather who hadn't read the story.

Next year I think we'll do The Lion King. That should push the boundaries even further, it probably covers about every genre possible.

And on the way home, on the bus, my 6 y-o daughter said,

"Mummy who is Father Christmas, really, cos I know he's not real."

And my 10 y-o son said "Shh, don't say mum, because I still believe in him & don't want to know."

Willing suspension of disbelief...

The Tower of Babel

2010-08-21T14:34:00.000-07:00

When we arrived in the UK, my son commented on how nice it was to hear English all around him again.
"I can listen to people's conversations & understand them." (clearly got his mother's genes there....)

In London, however, everywhere we went we heard numerous different languages, all around us, all the time, to the extent that my son asked what language people spoke in London. In fact a statistic in the Tower of London said that more languages are spoken in London than any other city in the world. I can believe it.

It was interesting to notice in shops, cafes & museums, waiters, assistants & curators spoke with foreign accents or spoke to each other in another language. It truly is a cosmopolitan city. I guess many of these are immigrants doing the jobs we are told Brits don't want to do anymore.

And in tourist shops like Hamleys & Harrods, we felt like the foreigners. We were definitely in a minority. It wasn't just the language, we also saw things that seemed quite different somehow. In Hamleys there were three very large lads, (I wont say where they were from) looking like (as my son put it) Augustus Gloops, each with one of those enormous bags they give you now to shop with. And each was dragging it behind him like a lifeless limb, because the bag was so crammed with toys it was too heavy & cumbersome to lift. My children were agog watching this display of conspicuous consumption. At this point, I confess, I was slumped on the floor by the Nintendo DS games, waiting for the children to finish their toothcomb search of that particular floor of Hamleys, having exhausted all the other floors (& me) previously. So when asked 'How this could be possible' (let alone fair), I resorted to similar 'literary' comparison & said they were like Veruca Salt (only boys).

In Harrods we felt even more alien, not only because it was more like the glittery, opulent stores you would find in Abu Dhabi airport than the reassuring familiarity of John Lewis, but also because once again the Brits seemed no where in sight or sound, it was full of foreigners & tourists.

We were going to the toy department, because an employee at Hamleys had told my son the lego selection in Harrods was actually 'much better' (in truth there wasn't much in it). To get to the toy department we walked through 'Pet Kingdom'. We had no idea what this was, but we were soon to find out. Everything for your pet is here, assuming that is, your pet has more in common with 'Trickywoo' of "All Creatures Great & Small" fame than the average family's pet 'labrador with a bit of terrier thrown in for good measure'.

You could get a 4 poster dog bed complete with silk sheets & a pink frilly canopy, a leopard skin dog bed, probably even a canine hammock, or doggy water bed. I didn't ask. We passed jewel encrusted dog leashes, before arriving in a room full of clothes rails with, you've guessed it, doggy coat hangers with dog tutus, dog mackintoshes, dog superman outfits, even dog bikinis on them.

Now I know us Brits have a soft spot for animals & are probably guilty of a fair bit of anthropomorphising, but I do not think, as a rule, we go in for luxury dog bedding, dinky doggy outfits & bejewelled dog collars.

So who is this (almost entire floor) marketed at? I know in America they have dog spas & probably dog therapy, & in the Balkans 'small dog as fashion accessory' & dressed in silly coats is very common, but surely not the British??

Anyway all this struck me as quite ironic that here we were in our 5th year of living abroad in other cultures, broadening our minds, adapting to foreign environments, yet London (& Oxford actually) struck me as far more cosmopolitan, eclectic & racially diverse than anywhere we've lived. It made me realise just how homogenous a society we live in in Albania. I mean everyone is ethnic Albanian. Apart from the Roma that is, who are marginalised & totally alienated in Albania. Nobody wants to emigrate TO Albania, most people want to leave (for America usually) so there are no immigrants there, apart from the few who have married Albanians, or ex pats working there temporarily. as a consequence other ethnicities are regarded with suspicion & overt racism quite often.

So my children hear & see sights in the UK they are totally unused to. They are used to seeing beggars on the street, dancing bears, people riding donkeys & animals getting slaughtered on the edge of the road, but they are totally unused to seeing a woman in a burkah (despite Albania beign 70% Muslim), electric wheelchairs & golf buggies, men with beards or people with bodypiercings. I had to stop my 10 yr old son staring fixedly at a guy on the tube with a Mohican & enough body piercings to keep a small jewellery shop in business.

Funny, I never really expected Britain to be so full of culture shock for them.

The Tower of London

2010-08-12T13:45:00.000-07:00

We have just spent a fabulous four days in London being tourists, house sitting for friends. A real highlight was visiting the Tower of London, So much to see, beautifully carved prisoner graffiti in the towers, the enigmatic murder of 2 young princes to investigate & the highly entertaining yeoman warders to listen to. Forget the Horrible Histories, these guys were the cat's pyjamas. They really brought the history of the Tower alive. Even the loos were an experience, being in a thick round tower, the most fortified loos I've been in.

And then of course there were the crown jewels, on display since the 17th century, & only one attempt to steal them. (It failed), they are now behind 2000 kg doors. I must confess to feeling a bit emotional (admittedly quite normal these days it seems) seeing the solemn regality of the coronation splashed cinema-screen-sized on the stone wall of a dimly lit room, & soaking up all that rich history, tradition & heritage represented in the Tower of London.

I also felt quite proud (yes, really), to be British as we filed through all the rooms leading to the crown jewels, thronged, as we were, by hordes of foreign tourists. This was my history.

I had to suppress the urge to explain things knowledgeably to my children in a loud (& clearly English) cut glass accent, as if this was all very old hat & familiar, despite the fact that we were there gawping too.

Of course most of the children's 'clear as a bell' comments put paid to any delusions of superiority & imperialist sentiments I might have entertained:

My son said “Mum those diamonds make the ones on your ring look like a little mouse's ring.”

My daughter then commented, “Oh I wish I had a crown like that. In fact I want to be a queen & wear crowns like the Queen wears.”

I think she believes the Queen wakes up, pops her crown on to eat her breakfast & then wears it to walk to corgis & watch t.v.

Actually some of the displays were more guilty of appropriating this casual, familiar air than I was.

As we filed past the Maces described as “versions of a fearsome medieval weapon”, there were 9 on display & one mysteriously missing, with the simple label underneath which said

“In Use”.

In what way exactly, one is tempted to wonder.......?

Then we filed past all the swords; the swords of spiritual justice, the swords of temproal jusitce, all in order, but “the Sword of State” ??

“In Use.”

Not “On Loan to ------ Museum”, just “In Use.”

Such casual little notices to explain the absence of a 'version of a fearsome medieval weapon” & an enormous “Sword of State” make for a moment's stimulating mental rumination.

So finally after all this ancient tradition housed within ancient walls, we had the rather bizarre & James Bond moment of arriving in the 'Jewel Room' where there was a moving walkaway around the crown jewel cases; & we were catapulted rudely into a 21st century 'viewing experience', gliding past the crowns. I had to go back & jump on it again 3 times to get a proper look at the jewels & take it all in.

I hadn't realised the Queen had so many crowns. The Imperial State crown had the 2nd largest Cullinan diamond in it, (the 2^nd Star of Africa), Queen Mary's crown has 2 of the smaller Cullinan diamonds in it, amongst 2200 other diamonds. And the 1^st Star of Africa (the largest Cullinan diamond, & the largest diamond in the world), was added to the sovereign's “Sceptre with Cross”.

Uncut it was 3025.75 carats. It's still pretty massive, the size of a (very) large goose egg. The children were particularly keen to see the Stars of Africa because their dad's cousin married one of the Cullinan family in South Africa.

So my son said “Wow, I'm related to the Cullinan diamonds!” though in the Gemstone Genealogy being only related by marriage, my 2 children would only be semi precious gems.........

Strange Meeting

2010-06-25T14:56:00.000-07:00

The children & I flew to the UK on Mon, through an electrical storm. Fortunately the childen fell asleep as soon as we took off. They have slept through earthquakes in Albania & violent thunderstorms in Sri Lanka during the monsoon season, so I shouldn't be surprised. It was the worst turbulence I have experienced in 2 decades of flying all over the world.

The stewards had reached the middle of the plane & were handing out the food boxes when it hit. We were shaken about so violently they couldn't even make it back to the galley & they also couldn't stand up, so the two stewards knelt in the aisle hanging onto their trolley all the while. I'd never seen anything like it. It lasted over 25 minutes & was, frankly, horrible. eventually the pilot came on saying, "Sorry about that the wind completely changed direction & doubled in speed very suddenly." Don't they have computers to detect that sort of thing? He sounded like it took him by surprise - a bit disconcerting.

We have come for our annual summer visit to the UK & are about to disappear into deepest sheep country in the Lakes & then on the Grand Tour of Great Britain, so won't be blogging for a while.

But I must tell you that on Thursday I had a strange but lovely meeting. Iota & I finally met, 3 years after exchanging emails & meeting in the blogosphere. I never had a pen pal. She was my 21st Century cyber equivalent. She had looked at one of my links to a photographer friend & recognised the backdrop of many of the photos. It was the place in North Devon where she & her husband had met. So she emailed me. The rest, as they say is history, or in fact herstory. And my story.

We had seen photos of each other, skyped each other, but still I wondered what it would be like meeting someone you have never actually met. Like meeting someone you hear on the radio. So familiar, yet also unknown.

But it was great. We chatted for 5 hours. I discovered, amongst other things, that she is the 2nd oldest, she too has an older unmarried sister & 2 younger brothers. Her youngest brother, like my youngest brother, was the 1st to have children. And we found we got on as well in real life as we did in the blogosphere

We sat under the shade of a tree in her mum's gorgeous garden whilst the children played, finally drinking tea & eating digestives as we had promised ourselves we would do one day 3 years after we had first met in cyberspace.

And though I love blogging & the blogging community, you can't beat a real cup of tea in a real English garden with a flesh & blood friend (especially if accompanied by chocolate digestives) . I am thankful for the blogopshere that has enabled me to meet people I would otherwise never have met. But you've got to admit, it's a funny, old world.

Ballet Balkan style.

2010-06-15T13:05:00.000-07:00

One of the things I love about living in a different country is that it is often unpredictable, often surprising, & it encourages flexibility & adaptability (as well as tolerance & resilience of course)
Everyday life is interesting just because the way of life is different, habits, routines, behaviour is different & is a reminder that, whilst people are pretty much the same the world over, their way of doing things or dealing with things is very varied.

Here in Albania there is the more Mediterranean pattern; of afternoons being very quiet & quite deserted, as people take a siesta-style break in the middle of the day. In the early evenings everyone goes out for a walk, to see, be seen, 'take the air, enjoy the cool of the day in summer, & meet up with friends. Children are all up till all hours because they sleep in the afternoons.

Then there is the more Balkan pattern; of conversation sounding like heated arguments, business being done over long coffees in cafés, horns blaring if cars don't shoot into action the minute the lights turn green, people telling you very directly it's time you got married, had another child, lost some weight etc. Albania has always been, & continues to be very much a mish mash, & certainly 'a law unto itself' - in more ways than several....
This struck me afresh at the week end when we went to our 2 children's ballet performance in the National Theatre of Opera & Ballet. Both our two have been having ballet lessons once a week. The ballet teacher had agreed to compromise her (to our eyes 'communist' style) intensive ballet lessons which are normally (& for all Albanian children ) 3 times a week for 1.5 hrs each time.

They have been working towards a performance of the Nutcracker & other pieces. Our two were desperate to perform on the 'very' stage they had seen the Nutcracker on at Christmas, done by an Albanian & Italian mixed ballet troupe. Turns out this ballet teacher, Moza, Albania's most famous former ballerina, teaches about 200 children, as well as a lot of girls & a few boys in their teens & twenties, several of whom are on scholarships to Italy but came back for the performance.

And it was a truly Albanian cultural experience. It lasted 2 ½ hours, with several interludes of long speeches detailing Moza's illustrious career as a former ballerina, lauding her teaching credentials & praising her multiplicitous achievements.

At the beginning there was quite a scramble & not a few rather heated discussions over seating, despite the fact that it was 'free seating', there were people with no tickets at all, insisting they had rights to sit in certain seats, there was the hapless, but fairly inconsiderate, TV cameraman who tried to set up right in our line of sight, slap in the middle of the audience seating. My husband gesticulated at him & said, 'We can't see actually, that's not awfully helpful being there, can't you go somewhere else please?' but, almost immediately, one large Albanian, with an even larger camera, waded in with a tirade about this camera man's position, who was half heartedly waving his video pass at him claiming rights to be there. He clearly hadn't reckoned with irate parents, never mind irate Albanian parents whose view was blocked. The angry Albanian parent kept this up until the cameraman slunk off to the back & tucked himself apologetically into the side aisle, to record this event for national TV.

The audience was nothing if not appreciative of their little darlings & the skills of the older performers. There was fairly constant applause, gasps, & oohs of admiration. Nevertheless there was also fairly constant activity; people were getting up & moving out of their seats mid performance, mid dance even; the guy behind us spent much of the performance on his mobile phone conducting a conversation in what could hardly be described as 'sotto voce', whilst filming his beloved daughter all the while.
The family in front of us broke open their picnic & started passing the byrek along the row (a pastry style Albanian fast food).

This picture only shows about a quarter of the dancers, & was taken before general mayhem broke out. it also only shows about a fifth of the costumes. The main performers & many of the children had about 5 changes of costumes unbelieveably.

At the end, as the entire troupe took their bows, after the 50-something, now rather plump, former ballerina herself had rather bizarrely performed a little routine with her fellow Italian director, several mums rushed on stage to take closer pictures, or hug their children. All the children started spontaneously chanting 'Moza, Moza' & one very tiny ballerina rushed up to 'Moza' to hug her, round the knees, whereupon pandemonium broke loose & all the little girls rushed up to hug Moza & she disappeared in a cloud of frothy pink & yellow tulle (well more likely nylon actually). Certainly not communist style in that regard, she was quite obviously adored by all her little pupils. And also quite clearly loved what she did, & loved to dance.

And it was even on the Albanian national news the next day. In fact at the market today, I was buying a bag of rocket from my usual supplier & it was the 1st time he had met my children so he was asking about their age & school etc & then he suddenly recognised my son & said he had seen him on TV in the ballet! My son was in all of about 15 minutes of this 2 /12 hr performance though he did have a solo performance, but still amazing he was recognised. Being a boy amidst a swarm of girl ballerinas (& with blonde curly hair in a Balkan/Mediterranean country) he certainly stands out more. He had all the Albanian 13 yr old ballet girls clucking over him & ruffling his hair, so several mums told me. Just as well he has had nearly 5 years of cheek pinching, hair touching & general staring to get used to the attention. Fortunately he takes it in his stride & it doesn't phase him any more. However, being on TV, AND being recognised , as 'the blonde ballet dancer' just chuffed him to bits. Not enough to make him want to continue though, he tells me he is 'hanging up his ballet shoes' for good now.

After all when you have danced on the stage at the National theatre & been on TV where else is there to go?

U befsh nje qind vjec!

2010-06-07T05:22:00.000-07:00

That's the traditional Albanian salutation on a birthday - May you live to a 100 years old!
I guess, under the despotic dictator, Enver Hoxha, that was indeed an optimistic wish worth bestowing, as he bumped off so many. On the other hand, I imagine many would have considered this similar to the Chinese curse "May you live in interesting times" as life under Hoxha was so hard, & cruel.

Anyway today is my "ditelindjen". Since living abroad my birthdays have been a bit different from the usual day at work. Last year we went to a local gorge swimming, sunbathing, climbing rocks, all complete with picnic birthday cake. I had never spent a birthday like it!

Tara @ Sticky fingers is away this week, so there's no photo gallery, so I decided to do my own personal gallery of a birthday in the life of an ex-pat.
The gorge. I'm the one in the hat & turquoise rash vest. This year my birthday is a Monday, but as we had a visitor staying from the UK (our 3rd one in 3 weeks) we went back to the gorge yesterday, & out for a meal on Saturday. Being an 'ex-pat' birthday meant we ate outside in a roof terrace restaurant, next to this statue in fact, who kindly looked after our things. And I would just like to add, the rest of the restaurant was surprisingly tasteful, if a bit over the top...Today is the first day of my husband's 2 week long external audit, the most important work event for him of the last 2 1/2 yrs. He spent half the w/e (as well as manic hours this last 2 months), working, despite our visitor, so I was especially grateful to receive one of his, now trademark, hand made cards. Albania has few, if any greetings cards & my husband never has time to shop, & wouldn't know what to do in one anyway, so he has taken to making me cards from internet cartoon sites. Here's last year's offerings:

So this year, whilst I took our friend to the airport to fly home, he & my son made cards, blew up balloons & designed 'certificates' for flat presents. Albania doesn't have much to offer in the way of shops & as I said my husband is not the best shopper, or ideas man, at the best of times, & this is not the best of times for him with work. So I was very touched by the time & effort they put in. These were the results of their efforts this year:

My son's card made me laugh & it was, I realise the first time he's written something funny or made a joke. He suddenly seemed very grown up. I even got a 'flat present' (as we call them) from him. Like father, like son. It was a 'certficate' for a massage "Anywhere in Tirana" I thought he meant from him so I said "You can give me a shoulder massage now."
"No from a shop mum."
"But you don't have enough pocket money for that." I said
"No, but Daddy will pay, I expect." So not quite so grown up then, though quite canny.....

This was my husband's card. Very cool & retro don't you think?!

My daughter's card was a picture of us at the gorge, with a shark in the top left hand corner with its 'arms' in the air shouting 'hooray!' evidently. I never got to the bottom of why there was a shark in our gorge.... Also my daughter is defying gravity (right) & sticking horizontally to a rock next to a giant green frog. She & my 10 y-o collected about 50 tadpoles from the river & brought them home. They are feeding them boiled lettuce & my daughter, I am afraid, will 'imprint' them with too much familiarity as she keeps catching them in her fingers & playing with them. I am watching them avidly. The minute they grow legs they are going straight into the lake by our house. I do NOT want a plague of frogs in our flat (they're on our balcony at the moment in washing tubs) Only Available Exits: over the 3rd floor balcony wall, OR through the flat......

She pointed out her card 'doubles as a present', as it is a 'coloured in card' with pictures on 3 sides. She also said, in discussion today about old age, having babies (I said I'm too old to have more babies) & getting wrinkles when you get old, "But you're old Mummy, & you don't have wrinkles...." I think that doubles as a present too. I think....

And here's two of my presents. One to remind me of my roots, from an old, old friend whom I've known longer than I've not known her. (ie we met when we were 19)

And one from a very good, new friend I've made here, to remind me of my adopted home of Albania & some of the good things about it.

The Gallery - Still Life

2010-06-02T23:38:00.000-07:00

It's soft fruit season now. Yum yum yum. The strawberries are over already, cherries came in about 10 days ago & now the peaches & apricots have appeared. I never ate apricots in England. They always seemed to have that 'floury' texture & no taste. The peaches often went from hard to mouldy without passing through 'ripe' at any stage. It's one of the things I love about living here; the fruit & veg is Sooooooooo tasty & fairly organic in the sense of little use of pesticides (I do, however, try not to think about the industrial wastes that may still be in the water table from the communist era. Birth defects round the steel factory in Elbasan, run off from the arsenic factory near Lezhe......)

Eating is very 'seasonal' here. It makes for much more anticipation & appreciation as you wait for the first cherries, but can mean winter is rather bleak & 'cabbage' & 'spinach' focused

The new democrat party that took over from the communist party (with quite a few 'converted' communist party members, who had curiously & suddenly 'seen the light', joined the democrats, & what do you know, stayed in power......) introduced a 'Year Zero'. They wanted to start everything afresh. Sadly this meant throwing the baby out with the bath water & the good went along with the bad. This included cutting down most of the countries fruit trees, because of the hated 'forced labour' . However 18 years post communism, they have re-emerged & yummy soft fruits are back on the menu.

Below is how I do a lot of my shopping. Anything to avoid driving in Tirana. A bag on each handlebar - something you were always taught NEVER to do in cycling proficiency courses because it unbalanced you, & a rucksack which goes everywhere with me in case I spot a grocery item not found elsewhere. I tend to have to cobble my shopping together from different shops & parts of the city. The tennis racquet was because I had been playing tennis & went straight out to shop, not because I am training for a circus act.

The Delights of Being a Trailing Spouse

2010-05-24T04:54:00.000-07:00

I have an intense love-hate relationship with my husband's work. I love the passion & commitment of those who work for the organisation. I love the NGO's values & I love what they do & am very impressed by their work. It is full of professional, intelligent & committed people. I hate the hours he works though. The organisation also has a very hard working work ethic, it even has an unofficial nickname amongst its employees, relating to this ethic. My husband's perfectionist personality also means that, in my view, he works far TOO Hard. I hate the fact that because of an audit, meetings in Georgia & a course in Italy, he can't take a family holiday during the summer holidays at all. It does tend to dominate our life, but then he is a CEO so the buck stops with him.

Last week 28 visitors from my husband's organisation were visiting, so there were meetings before meetings, meetings after the meetings, & meetings over breakfast, coffee, dinner & even more meetings about future meetings. When these people have come from all over the world, for a big regional conference, & when little old Albania has a chance for face to face talks with the 'high ups', as the national director calls them, you grab it.

I had to go along to a few of the dinners too, to meet the new boss etc. Bit of a culture shock after my usual social circle of mums, missionaries, my cleaner & 14 yr old students. By the end of the week, my husband was exhausted & even further behind with work because of all this. His emails have reached a record 200 unread ones, he has missed about 3 important deadlines, & as a result of one meeting, has heard that even though he spent the whole of his 1^st yr undoing the damage of his predecessor, a corrupt local, & getting staff back onside, the accounts in order, recruiting good staff & growing the programme; the 2^nd year involved legal & financial separation from the umbrella NGO, a huge task, which as anyone knows in a developing country is also a time consuming and bureaucratically nightmarish job, & now hoping to have a yr when he could concentrate on consolidation & growth, he has been told Albania is to merge with the Kosovo operation & he needs to plan the strategy for that & then implement it.

Oh & by the way, “neither you nor the CEO in Kosovo will be running it”

So we have also learned that, although they like my husband & will 'find him a job' within the organisation, he can't stay put. He has also been told his boss has 'a role in mind for him' - an advisor job, which, when you have run and managed a company on your own, is not much cop. He was also told that he won't be moved till next summer 2011, as the boss knows what it is like with children. Great, so he grants us 6 mths grace so kids can finish the school year. It still means we will have moved 3 times in 5 ½ years. At one of these dinners, in conversation, I noticed that many of them had spent 6 yrs here, 7 yrs there, 9 yrs there. They didn't seem to move every 2-3 years. Why do we have to, & will it always be like this I wonder? I feel like a pawn. Pretty powerless.

My husband says he wished he hadn't told me because he knows I will worry away at it. I can't help it. I never wanted to be an embassy or military wife. I (naively it turns out) assumed if we lived abroad it would MAINLY be in one place. Always said I just couldn't keep moving countries every few years. But then I 'always said' quite a few things. I keep having to readjust my parameters, or rather extend them to encompass more & more conditions, or so it seems.

It's EXHAUSTING, moving countries, learning the ropes, possibly a language, adapting to a new culture, environment, climate, way of life, settling the kids in school, finding a house, finding a car, getting all those residence permits driving licences etc. again. I think I'm too old for this.

And besides which, normal developing country exigencies notwithstanding, I like it here! The children are happy, the climate is great, we love where we live, I have a job, it's only 3 hrs from the UK etc. I even quite like the chaos & unpredictability. I think I might have been ruined permanently for life in the UK. I might even find it a bit boring now.......

It's also possible that we would move back to the UK, IF my husband took one of these airy fairy nondescript advisor jobs which he really doesn't want. As he says, being an advisor all you can do is 'make suggestions' no one has to take any notice. It's a fairly toothless role. I'm not actually ready to move back to the UK. Am under no illusions about it. The traffic, the expense, the weather, the class sizes (my children are in a tiny family ish school with 10 in a class) My sister has been back 10 yrs now from Canada & still struggles with life in the UK. My brother has been back from New Zealand for 2 yrs, still no permanent job, still utterly miserable. I don't want to be the third sibling to do that!

And as I said love-hate. For all his hard work & long hours, my husband LOVES his job & loves what he does. And I am so pleased he has finally found his niche in micro-finance. It has taken him 20 yrs to get there after a lot of blind alleys & wrong turnings, unemployment, risk taking, lowly jobs & starting again at the bottom in Development. I hope he doesn't lose that.

By plane, car or bike – Any which way you can.

2010-05-12T06:21:00.000-07:00

My sister arrives tomorrow. Volcanic ash cloud willing of course. It seems it is blowing over the Atlantic again & threatening flgiths. Nothing like a bit of tension to add to the thrill of having visitors.

W e have 3 lots of visitors over the next 3 weeks. We are delighted, the children are excited, but in this uncertain time of natural disasters, environmental hazards & a seemingly endless troop of crises, we are also a bit anxious.

Each set of visitors either arrives, or departs on a BA strike day, (not difficult to do as they are striking for 20 days in May) That's quite apart from Volcano Unpronounceabale continuing to erupt. Gatwick is much less militant than Heathrow & often doesn't strike when they do. But don't get me started on the strike. My husband worked for BA (in management, boo hiss) for 12 years & let's say he knows what it's like from the inside & what a great deal BA cabin crew have. BA avers that Gatwick will operate as normal. Let's hope so.

Anyway it made last weekend, in southern Albania & Macedonia, a refreshingly 'other world' experience. My husband & 4 other guys were doing another of their biking adventures. It is a very peaceful, very undeveloped & sparsely inhabited area of lakes, mountains & apple orchards in the valleys. Stunningly beautiful.

I drove down, plus one other family & 2 other cars. We stayed at Lake Ohrid, 4 km from the Macedonian border. Ohrid is a tectonic lake, the deepest in southern Europe. Fortunately it hadn't decided to join in the extended seismic party its other friends round the globe seem to be attending & was calm & tranquil with not a ripple on its surface.

We had fabulous weather & a very relaxing time. Not so the boys... On Saturday they had to slog over a 1600m mtn. It took 3 hrs. On Sunday afternoon, I drove up over this same mountain, to collect my husband so that I could whisk him back to the office before he began having too much fun (no, actually, his choice to work the Bank Hol Monday. It's quiet so he gets lots done.) The others went on & I drove back up the mountain, to go back into Albania & to Lake Ohrid again. At the top my husband said,

'There you go you can experience the 1000m descent'.

My reward for coming to collect him (a 3 hr round trip) and having lent him my bike as his developed a very wobbly back wheel last wk (worn ou tbearings if you mustknow). So I got to do 1000m of descent, clocking 50km/hr with a huge grin on my face the whole way. All the fun & none of the pain. Fantastic!

This, however, was not the whole story. I had had my share of transport anxieties at the border crossing. I left my 2 children with my friend, & 2 of her children & drove the 4km to the border with my friend's daughter who wanted to see her dad who was on the bike ride. At the Albanian /Macedonian border, the border guard was very suspicious of me travelling alone with my friend's 9 yr old daughter who wanted to come along. Aren't you allowed to do this? Clearly I had the look of a hardened & ruthless kidnapper. He said I was causing a problem & he couldn't authorise me. Equally clearly, I was answering the questions all wrong "No she wasn't my daughter","She was the daughter of a friend of mine" "We are just going into Macedonia to fetch my husband who is biking around over there”. "She is just coming along for the ride." etc.

As a prospective kidnapper I obviously hadn't passed the Abduction Training School Exams on 'How to dupe border guards'. Added to all this, my little companion, having never been interrogated by a border guard before, looked like a startled rabbit, was very unnerved, stammering, trying to answer questions, in Albanian (which she speaks) & appeared very frightened. She was frightened, not by me however, by him...........

Eventually when I promised I would be back in 2 hrs, he let me through. Obviously I could be a kidnapper as long as I came back quickly..........

This happens time & again in Albania too. Officials lay down the law & then say 'Oh all right then'. Either it WAS a problem or it wasn't. Maybe they say what they have to say but aren't really that bothered.

Of course trafficking is a very big problem in the Balkans in general, & in Albania in particular, but it's not foreigners who get trafficked, but poor kids or the Roma, who have been sold because of the poverty of the family. Actually I am glad they check & question you, & I am glad they didn't ask for a bribe to let me pass. And I like to think common sense & not lethargy prevailed. I mean if they were employing profiling techniques, (which I'm sure they weren't) I don't think I'd fit the bill of 'would be kidnapper'. I have since discovered from friends in Albania, that they get a notarised letter when travelling with someone else's child anywhere in the Balkans.

Spring Fever

2010-04-28T06:23:00.000-07:00

Spring has finally arrived & the weather feels properly settled in Albania now. I just love, love, love this time of year. Of course temperatures are already like a (good) English summer. It's 'sandals & cotton skirts' weather now. Even the evenings & mornings have warmed up. And everything is vivid green, our reward for SUCH a wet winter. It is a very small window here when the young leaves are bright on the tree & everything is bathed in a literal lime-light. A vivid & verdant citrus green. All too soon, everything will turn a dull grey-green as the dry dusty summer takes hold. For now, the light is dappled, the fields are waist deep in buttercups, strawberries are being sold along the paths, the park is full of Albanians emerging from their hibernation. It is said that Albanians 'exist' for 4 months of the year & 'live' for 8 months, because of the wet winters & miserably cold apartments, power cuts etc.

But just as things seem to warm up, the academic year starts hurtling towards its conclusion. School finishes in only 6 weeks. I always wish this time of year lasted longer. It feels like we spend most of our year here in winter, with 6 weeks of summer before term ends & 6 weeks of Autumn before winter really sets in; and most of the summer in England (partly because there is no one left around here to do things with.)

So events are stepping up. Spring fairs, international dances, more visitors, reports to write, exams to prepare & mark etc. with the net result that blogging has been squeezed out.

Added to this my 2 children have been ill/had a duvet day/thrown sickies (delete as applicable after you hear the story)
My son's day was last week. He loves school & is almost never off sick, & certainly doesn't fake it. At the weekend we had travelled 5 hours south to an outdoor centre my husband was going to use for a team building retreat for his staff. My son, as school council rep, had been with his school that day up to Shkoder to distribute toys & supplies they had collected to help the children of flood victims up there who lost their homes. Shkoder is 2 hrs north. So our son spent 4 hours travelling there & back before getting back at 5p.m, only to hop into our car to be whisked down to the south of Albania that evening. So in one day he went from the north right to the south of Albania, all 600 km of it.

After 2 days back at school, he woke the following morning with a headache, complaining that he felt very tired. He said 'In Maths yesterday I knew the answer was 11, but I couldn't get my mouth to say 11, it just came out with 16, my brain felt so tired' Clearly time for a day off, he reasoned. And I thought it would probably do him good.

So abandoning other plans, I resolved to nurse him & a very sick husband who now had the cold we had all had, except his had strangely morphed into man-flu overnight....9 y-o played happily with lego for a few hours in the morning, then decided to get out the infamous 'Kids in the Kitchen' cook book. After much deliberation, he settled on chicken & vegetable soup, & banana cinnamon muffins (with his special adaptation of- chocolate chips.) Our much sicker, adult invalid was very grateful, it may even have speeded his recovery. And I think it did 9 y-o a lot of good having a quiet day. One on one relaxed time with him. At the end of the day he said, “I really enjoyed today, mum.” And so did I. Chores can always wait........

The same thing happened a few weeks ago with my daughter at a rather busy time. I laboured the point that it would be very boring at home with just Mummy, doing boring jobs & not able to play with her.... She wasn't feeling well with a cold & was right up to normal but not quite a fever, so once we had agreed she could stay at home, she went into 'Full Sick Bed Routine' mode'. This involves, plumping up the pillows, sinking back onto them whilst asking, in special, slightly quavery voice, if she can have breakfast in bed, & then struggling to the end of her bed to play a story tape (the only time she ever listens to them...) before sinking weakly back into her plumped pillows to munch her cornflakes whilst listening to Fantastic Mr Fox.

However, after a few hours she usually tires of this, & on this occasion, she made a remarkable recovery, getting herself dressed & asking if she could come to the shops with me (our cleaner was there so could have watched her) She skipped all the way to the shops, AND back, & then suggested we go for a bike ride in the park as it was 'such a lovely day'. (Probably because she wasn't at school..... ) I was beginning to feel ever so slightly 'had'. She biked up the hill all around the park, we stopped for a coffee & one of the mousse-like hot chocolates they sell here, had a rather loud whispered conversation about why the lady at the next table had 'orange hair'; I explained she had dyed it to cover the grey, whereupon she said, again very loudly that she didn't think the lady had 'done a very good job' as she could still see grey. At times like this I am very glad most Albanians don't speak English.... Saves a lot of embarrassment. Though I couldn't do much about the rather pointed staring at this poor lady's head.

And then she biked all the way home again.

Once home, I said, in what I hoped was a firm, & authoritative tone, “Now I really must get on, I have lots of jobs to do. I did warn you it would be very boring being at home today, didn't I?”

To which she replied. “It's not at all boring for me, Mummy. I just like being with you'

Oh she's good, she's very good. And did I fall for it?

Hook, line & sinker.

Grandparents

2010-04-12T11:31:00.000-07:00

Our children are very lucky. They have 4 fantastic grandparents. I only had three (that I remember) & my husband didn't have any grandfathers in his life. I remember my grandfather particularly fondly, simply because he made me feel special, & seemed interested in me, & in my opinions & ideas. He also seemed to like my humour & to share a joke or pull my leg. That's how I remember him anyway. But all three were an indelible part of my childhood & memories.

The only trouble is we live a long way away from our children's grandparents; one of the hazards of ex-pat life, & becoming increasingly normal for many in our global village world. I know they don't like it & to be honest nor do I, when I consider it very important that our children have close ties with their grandparents. And even though we are doing this now, I find part of myself secretly hoping (hypocritically), that my children don't make the same choices as us, as I would quite like to be 'down the road from my grandchildren'.

However, last week was one of the pluses when one set visited; & going home every summer is another, when we are based with their other grandparents & our children regard it as their home in England & do a thorough check of the house to ensure everything is in its rightful place & unchanged.

A friend, who lived overseas in Asia for 10 years, said she felt the children's relationships with grandparents were stronger as a result of being overseas. I didn't believe it at the time, but more & more I think I agree.

For example, if you didn't live far apart, the children wouldn't have:

The anticipation of grandparent visits here & trips back to England.
The fun of creating annual summer memories in Britain with grandparents
The chance to go through all the familiar routines every summer back in “grandparents' world”.
The chance to stay with grandparents for an extended period of time, rather than just seeing them for the odd w/e, several times a year.
The heightened appreciation of them because they are not around & being seen all the time.
Getting postcards & comics in the post.
Having them visit us here & being able to show them round 'our world'.
The fun of receiving all the goodies brought out.
The chance to do an Easter egg hunt in July at Granny & Grandpa's house & barbecues in the garage at Granny & Grandad's house & other such 'traditions' accidently developed.
The chance to have their undivided attention for a whole week or more at a time.

I'm sure there are lots more...

On this visit re. No 8, we received such thoughtful gifts:

For our son

A saxophone strap, to stop the earth's gravitational pull taking hold every time he lifted the instrument to his lips, causing him to pitch forward with the weight.

A book of easy tunes complete with play-along CD

For our daughter

A pint size apron & a “Kids in The Kitchen” cookbook because I had said she doesn't really 'play much' with toys (true), so she is very difficult to buy for. This was perfect as she loves cooking with me.

For me

REAL Vanilla extract for all my baking – very expensive & very yummy. & totally unavailable here in any guise.

For Hubby.

A DVD of some of the 6 Nations rugby which he so loves & we can't see here.

Then of course there was all the Earl Grey tea, Yorkshire tea, yeast, extra mature cheddar, ebay purchases to stave off the rapid disintegration of my husband's wardrobe, lego from my son's saved up pocket money, Easter eggs, birthday presents & so on.

Apart from our Grand Balkan Tour over Easter, the children wanted to show Granny & Grandad round, to get them up to speed on developments in Albania in the last 2 yrs. So apart from pointing out all the new tarmac, newly opened shops, street lights, newly paved park, finished apartment blocks, we showed them the large lime green toads which croak noisily in the zoo lake next door every spring, hanging in suspended animation, froggy legs trailing motionless in the pond water.

We also showed them the abandoned military vehicles & tunnels up on the hill behind our villa; the shabby little zoo which we live next door to, with its unkempt & bedraggled eagles (proud symbol of Albania. Am sure there's a metaphor in there somewhere), a 'lone' wolf, 2 shy, not sly, foxes, a scaredy cat locked in a cage inside an animal enclosure (domestic cat) & the entertaining brawling bears, as well as the new additions (last week 2 ostriches, this week somewhat bizarrely, a donkey in with the llamas & turkeys next to the lions.) It keeps you on your toes, you never know what will be there next time. We also went into school to meet the teachers & look around (again) All important rituals for the children.

They also enjoyed having stories in bed with Granny & Grandad every morning, & a particular highlight, doing the rocket 'science' experiment Grandad had brought out from a newspaper article complete with all the necessary equipment such as alkaseltzer to make the rocket 'blast off' etc. Great fun.

On the eve of their departure our daughter said “I hope I manage not to miss them too much”.

And so the next day, after they had left, we set to, with distraction tactics, making the gingerbread ladies in the "Kids in the Kitchen" book, complete with 2 piece swimsuits, which so appealed to my 5 y-o. Unfortunately we couldn't find the large cookie cutter, so instead of making 20 large ladies, we made 80 tiny gingerbread girls, & I laboured away icing them with itsy bitsy pink bikinis, whilst 5 y-o lost interest after doing about 3 & ambled off to watch a film. It's at times like this that you need someone with time, experience & patience, who is not in a hurry who could have iced them & engaged 5 y-o with stories & the novelty of 'not being mum', whilst I got on with supper. Someone like a grandmother would do nicely.........

'Paradise on earth' George Bernard Shaw

2010-04-08T13:34:00.001-07:00

More visitors. Grandparents this time. Great excitement. We've been doing a Balkan tour, Monte Negro then into Croatia. Beautiful. Here's a taste.

Dubrovnik was called 'paradise on earth' by Shaw & 'The pearl of the Adriatic' by Lord Byron. The old city is entirely curtained by thick fortified walls which you can walk along the tops of (2km round). Inside, the city is bursting with churches, museums, monuments, the '3rd oldest' pharmacy in Europe in a Franciscan monastery, (selling potions & poultices since 1391) & polished cobbled streets, & uneven staircases. The water beyond is azure blue & sparkles with islands dotted across it.

This lovely city was bombed in 1991 by the Yugoslav army. No strategic point to it, sheer bloody mindedness. 200 military, sailors, police & 100 civilians were killed defending their walled city. It carried on being attacked for over a year. UNESCO & international aid funded the reconstruction & it has been done beautifully. When you look down on the terracotta clay tiled roofs, you fully comprehend the extent of the damage. So many are new, bright & clean. Tragically, it is probably the best it has ever looked, with such sympathetic restoration. Too high a price to pay. We remembered how shocked the international community was by this mindless act.

We also went to Kotor, in Monte Negro, another fortified, walled city on southern Europe's deepest fjord. Yes there are fjords even in the south. This city had walls built all the way up the mountain enclosing the fortifications at the top, a church half way up, as well as the labyrinth of streets down below. I love the way they have lit it at night.

I thought all the hillside terracing in Albania was quite a feat but these walls were something else.

Having grown up on an island, I love the novelty of simply getting into the car & driving over the border into another country, even if the Albanian border guards do seem to devise a new document requirement especially for us every time we attempt a crossing. Albania has borders with Greece, (& more than a passing resemblance to the Greek attitude to paying taxes too....),Macedonia, Monte Negro & Kosovo. And you can get a ferry over to Italy too. We've only driven into Monte Negro & Macedonia so far. But it's nice knowing when the going gets tough we can just jump in the car & drive somewhere a bit more civilised.

The 'antivenom'

2010-03-29T12:55:00.000-07:00

I know this is very unBritish but I have to share a little praise I received about my children. After last week's hospitality debacle, I was gratified to hear that my children are not like this. You are never quite sure what they are like when your beady eye isn't on them. You just hope that the incessant drilling has paid off..

Last week the cleaner at my children's school saw me chatting to two of the teachers & asked one of them to tell me that she loved my children because they were always so polite, well mannered & helpful to her & other children. I was really touched a.) that she had noticed & b.) had asked one of the teachers to translate this & pass it on to me. (My Albanian doesn't cover vocabulary for politeness, good behaviour etc; haven't found much use for it).

Then on Sunday one of the mums, who takes a turn walking the school children to the ballet lesson my 2 partcipate in, told me how grown up our 9 y-o was becoming & what a gentleman he was, because he had offered to carry stuff for her & help her with her bags.

Also on Sunday it was my daughter's turn, in an unlikely area of model behaviour, to be praised. My daughter's Sunday School teacher came up to me & commented on how beautifully our 5 y-o ate the cup cake she had been given. I couldn't hide my astonishment & 1st established she knew which our daughter was, then asked if she was sure she hadn't licked the icing off the cake, discarded the cake uneaten & then licked her fingers one by one (which is what she does at home if she can get away with it.)

Still I couldn't believe it, 3 times in one week. They say, in customer service, that if you have a good experience you tell 5 people, but if you have a bad experience you tell 12. Well, old data, now my husband tells me but the point is clear. I certainly tell more bad experiences on here than good, which is another reason I felt justified in telling this little story. though it has to be said, too, that the bad experiences often make for the better stories.

AND: I also got my own little bit of recognition from someone whose son I teach. She was telling a friend of mine how lucky her son is to have me teaching him, how much he loves IGCSE English, is feeling really stretched by it, loves the lessons & even enjoys the homework. Honestly it made my day. What am I saying, it made my year. As a teacher I can probably count, almost on the fingers of one hand, how many students have thanked me or written me a note to thank me for getting them through GCSES or A Levels in the course of my teaching career. & I am always pathetically grateful for each one. You get precious little feedback as a teacher, especially from the kids & often wonder if you are having any impact, yet one thank you & you feel it's all worthwhile. My hosting might not have been appreciated last week, but my teaching is, by 1 student at least, which is probably more important.

It's also somewhat daunting & not a little disconcerting that, in this small foreigner fish pond we live in, I teach the school director's son, my doctor's son, my dentist's son, & a fellow teacher's son. It also makes for some surreal scenarios where 2 fellow professionals keep 'swapping places' depending on whether flossing, Fitzgerald or flat feet is the issue at stake.

I remember all too well, growing up in a similar small community situation, more goldfish bowl than fish pond, as my father was vicar of a small country parish with similar professionals in the congregation (one was even my bank manager-horrors!) & relishing the anonymity of going away to uni in a big city. Now here I am back in that scenario again. Oh well, at least I had good practie at it 1st time round.

So all that more than made up for my experience of ingratitude last week.

And finally my picture for Week 5 of The Gallery from Tara@stickyfingers has to be a picture of "Outside your front door" or the immediate environment where you live.

That was easy. This picture epitomises winter at our place in Tirana, Albania. Mud & water. This 'lake' is a semi-permanent feature of life in our road in the wet winters we get here. The drains are blocked, the landlord's bodge job didn't quite work, &, because he couldn't be bothered to dig down, he replaced the sewage pipes above ground, & concreted over them, thus creating a 'dam' effect in our road. Hence the lake. It gets much deeper than this, usually comes a third of the way up my bike wheel, to the point where my foot is in the water on the 'down' pedal. Of course when I say water I mean sewage water...

House Guest Harangue

2010-03-24T06:43:00.000-07:00

Well,'it's official, I feel really old. Funny what triggers such feelings. I've been out of circulation because we've had a house guest staying for 9 days. This was the sort of house guest friends of ours in the foreign office in Tanzania had; i.e “a friend's 2^nd cousin's girlfriend's boss” type guest. i.e. Never met them before, don't know them from Adam, but 'you live in a great holiday destination & staying with you would give us free accommodation' type guest. Same scenario (except for the 'great holiday destination' bit).

Actually not quite, but we had an American staying with us for 2 wks in Jan who was coming as an intern to work for my husband, & this unknown house guest was a friend of his, whom he asked if we could put up. We said 'Of course'.

I loved having this intern to stay, though again it made us feel so old. He was very young, born 2 years after I left university, 2 yrs before we got married; a graduate fresh out of college, full of life & enthusiasm, whose favourite word is 'awesome', all of which just made me feel very staid, & rather jaded. So much of our frame of reference was of a time or things before he was even born or had heard of.

The children loved him. Of course they did, he was FUN. He used to have cushion fights with them before school in the mornings, challenge them to matches on the Wii etc. Although he did manage to break our sofa, a candle holder, & knock one of the speakers on the floor during one of the sword fights. He is just a big kid really. No, that's not fair, but he has a lot more 'kid' left in him than I do! That's why I felt old. I own stuff, I know what things cost, I mind (not a lot, but a bit) about mess & breakages, I like to know how many people I am feeding of an evening, I like a bit of order. I realise it's decades since I had a cushion fight, & to be honest I don't really miss it...

The children would throw themselves on him like bouncy puppies greeting their master when he got back from work. He was, though, full of gratitude to us, appreciated my cooking & brought gifts for the children & treated us to a meal out (with complementary babysitting thrown in) A model guest (apart from over exuberant sword fights) & great fun to have around. His friend, however, was not.

I think what got to me was what I will call the “thoguhtless selfishness” of youth. I felt like a hotel, I felt wholly unappreciated & I felt drained from looking after everybody else (whilst running on empty at the moment). In the end I asked her to let me know 'that morning' if I would be feeding 1 or even 2 extra people or not. Her response was “I guess we'll grab dinner with you every day except Tuesday & Wednesday” - Nice expression.

One day I came back from work in the afternoon to find all the breakfast stuff, including milk & butter still out on the table. She hadn't even bothered to clear up before going out. She used my laptop all the time, sometimes asking, sometimes not. She rarely offered to help & did nothing spontaneously to help. Yet she was very sweet & friendly. Just thoughtless. Does thoughtfulness come with age then, I wonder?

I must admit I found it hard to be gracious (inside). To start with, she didn't know us at all, complete strangers offering her food an accommodation for a week. We saved her a ton of money by not staying in a hotel, yet she didn't bring a gift or anything. There were no flowers, no thank you note. Zip. (which wd be fine if she was family, I wouldn't expect it.) I took her on a day trip, I changed arrangements to fit in with her, I fed them lunch some days, when they decided to just hang out at our place. I drove her to the airport. At the airport I said I would take my son off for a drink & told them where we would be. 20 minutes later our American friend came to find us without our house guest. I asked where she was & he said, "Oh she's gone through to departures".

What??

She had left without saying goodbye, without thanking us. She hasn't even emailed since to say thank you.

I couldn't believe it, I was gob-smacked.

Yet somehow I couldn't shake off this feeling that maybe I was just being middle-aged, old fashioned & pernickety. After all we had obviously been happy to have her to stay as we had offered, non? That's why I feel old, young people have a (probably unconscious) knack of making you feel that it's just you, who is out of touch with the way of the world, things have moved on, you are stuck in old habits & being too boring & reactionary about 'stuff'.

Still it's good preparation for the teenage years..... In the meantime though, I am going to continue to drill 5 & 9 y-o in the 'Ps & Qs'. I would hate to have anyone say the same of my children, however old fashioned it might seem.

Paradise Regained A Little

2010-03-15T04:24:00.001-07:00

Well, turns out the sun DID come out. Gorgeous wall to wall cloudless blue.
And I have numbered things below which I shall call blessings,because that's what they felt like, small things but the sum of their parts added up to making me feel a bit less fragile.

We went for a walk on Saturday & I took deep draughts of Vitamin D. It felt good. Warm sun on the face, muscles unclenched, bones thawed. Wonderful.

Our P.E teacher friend, who has made our place his second home, asked us to supper on Friday. I was touched. We have people for meals a lot, to make friends, be hospitable. We rarely get asked back.

Then on Saturday the children came into our bed for stories. They started doing this a few wks ago, but before that they hadn't done it for months & months. We thought that little 'season' had passed too. My husband has been reading 'Wind in the Willows' to our daughter & our (now 9 yr old) son comes along because he can never resist a story, whatever it is. We read from an edition illustrated by Inga Moore. My husband's granny's cousin (does that make it his great cousin??) was Ernest Shephard who illustrated the original "Wind in the Willows", so we felt rather guilty betraying the family connection, but Moore's illustrations are just gorgeous.

So there we all were four in bed, husband reading in his soothing narrator voice, stopping every so often to explain what was going on, as the language is complex & the sentences long; passing over to me to explain the longer words, (not his forte & you'd be surprised at the words in the text), our son saying 'come on read the next bit' & our daughter busy playing with my hair & stroking my cheek. For her, stories are about cuddles, she usually tunes out, especially with the difficult language in it. She tries, but she hasn't got the world's greatets attention span.
When we finally finished Dad says, "So what did you think of that 5 y-o?"
She said "It made my brain go all twirly." Oh well, that great classic confined to family posterity as the book that makes children's brains go 'twirly'.

Sunday was "Summer Day" in Albania - a really big holiday & the sunniest day of the year so far. A friend who has lived here over 10 yrs said it is ALWAYS sunny on Summer Day. The 1st day of summer (in theory).
It was also Mother's Day in England. I am always so thankful that 10 yrs on I now AM a mother twice over & can celebrate the fact. My daughter made me a huge cardboard banner saying "I 'heart' u mummy" & my son made me a cross stitch book mark which said "I 'heart u, M". He didn't have time to write more, he said.

His class do cross stitch whilst listening to their class reader which seems quite a soothing idea & gives them something to do. Of course I had to feign amnesia (let's face it, not a trick I find difficult) as only the day before I had had to iron, for my daughter, a random selection of Hamma bead letters an "I", a heart, a 2 "Us" 3 "Ms" , & a "Y" , whilst under strict instructions not to look at what I was doing.

My husband took us all out to lunch. Always a treat.

My sister booked her ticket to come out & visit in May- the 1st member of my family in 4 yrs abroad to come & visit. I realise I don't live in very appealing places so I don't blame them.

My tennis friend phoned & asked if I wd like to play tennis this morning before she goes back to Italy on Wed for more test following her surgery a month ago. It is also good I have time on my hands as it meant I could go out for coffee with her afew wks ago - for 3 hours, after her surgery to talk to her. That to me is a good use of time. She needed a listening ear, I had the time to spend with her.

Paradise feels lost

2010-03-12T02:23:00.000-08:00

Sometimes it's hard to pinpoint why one is feeling so depressed, though I do always look for logical explanations. Maybe it's the incessant rain we've had this winter; for days on end it rains. I bike everywhere because parking is a nightmare, so when it rains I don't go out. Or maybe it's that like last yr at almost exactly the same time, we have, again, had a rash of friends falling seriously ill. One good friend has discovered he has an AVM, (after a routine MRI before an ear op), a cerebral arteriovenous malformation (an abnormal mass of veins in the left side of his brain) which could cause a stroke at any time, or could continue having no effect as it has done for the last 46 yrs. Surgery is too risky, radiation treatment takes 5 yrs & is also risky. But now he lives with the Leontes syndrome ("I have drunk & seen the spider"- Winter's Tale) He knows it's there.

Another friend's father was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer & a month later he was dead.

The 31 yr old Albanian who tries faithfully to improve my tennis, has got thyroid cancer & is awaiting further tests & prognosis.

All this has the knock on effect of making me once again (though I hardly ever seem to forget it) mindful of the fragility of life; it also makes me feel that here I am alive yet doing so little with my life. I constantly feel I should be 'doing more' I want to be doing more, but what? Especially with the children at school all day now, particularly living amongst so many needs, being more useful would probbaly make me feel better. People alway say, but look at what you're doing, where you live, your life etc, but actually what they mean is my husband. look at what he's doing. I'm just tagging alone behind, being the (not very) supportive wife.

I teach 2 mornings a week. The card project (Mangava), largely runs itself on a weekly basis. I'm more of a non-executive director; the women's group I organise hardly ever meets, because everyone (except me) is too busy. My Albanian teacher is at college this year & has home life complications, so we hardly ever meet either, & my tennis partner is out of action with her health.

Sudddenly it seems the few pegs that I hang the tapestry of my week on, are snapping off one by one (& let's face it there aren't many holding it up in the 1st place) - 2 weekly fixtures & 1 fortnightly fixture disappear & suddenly I have these yawning spaces in my week. And the community I know are all working or are much older than me & leading a 'ladies who lunch' life style which is just not me. Sure I can go running, to the gym, fiddle around sewing, like this I made for my niece, do the washing, shopping, I bake a lot; but all those things are on my own. God seems to have made me gregarious, a people person yet I spend 70% of my time alone I reckon. I STILL have days when I speak to no one till my children get home. And my husband gets home late & is too tired to talk much. Of course my closest friend here is away this wk, which doesn't help, but is a foretaste of what it will be like when she leaves in June.

This feeling of listlessness, & lack of direction or purpose, is exacerbated by the fact that my husband is SO busy & preoccupied & is doing such a worthwhile job, whilst I twiddle my thumbs. I love the job he does & so believe in what he is doing & what his organisation is about, but I stil find it hard, even 4 years on, being the trailing spouse, dealing with loneliness, lack of things to do, people to do them with etc. I want a role! Then there's the compounding effect that when I get really down, I lose motivation & just want to retreat into my shell & not go anywhere or make an effort. I am SO glad for an acquaintance who is a clinical pyschologist who tells me that I'm normal & that being told to 'snap out of it' & just 'get out there & join in' is a.) not that easy & b.) not helpful or necessarily a solution.

The other compounding effect is the sense that my children have really moved into a much more independent phase &, even when they come home from school, are quite happy doing their own thing, not being with me. So I don't even feel as needed by them & that's not my role in the same way anymore either.

Maybe I'm just having 'one of those "Bad Ex-pat Days", or maybe it's my "early menopause" hormones, which are wreaking havoc, or my thyroid. I wish there was a simple answer to why I burst into tears for absolutely no reason, why I feel so lacking in motivation & feel so useless most of the time.

Well, maybe the sun will come out tomorrow.