In September, Criss’ sister came to Albania for a 5-day visit before she spent a week in London. We were a bit concerned about being able to fill the time. As we planned activities, it seemed we could have a very full 4 days,
Criss spends a lot of time at an internet café talking about ways to improve the service to the clients, how to run the café with less expense, such as replacing the pc that are only performing routing services
One of the real joys of working in Albania is the time we spend with the Albanian staff. Other than the country director and the country program manager, the rest of the staff at Peace Corps are locals. The other day the English program manger was in town to talk with the new volunteer and
Today was the day of natural events. The first rain since June and it was quite a strong thunderstorm. It had more wind and lightening than rain, but we will take it. Then this morning, our first serious earthquake. Summary: Magnitude M 4.8 Region ALBANIA Date time 2007-09-05 at 05:08:15.2 UTC Location 41.41 N ;… Continue reading Earthquake
Living in a post-communist country where rule of law is not well entrenched is one of the most enlightening and frustrating part of this assignment in Albania. You expect party politics
It is a type of pie – that is how it is described to us. And yes if you think of the pastry on top and bottom as pie crust, this analogy works. But it is not a pie as we know pie. We wonder if this is some from of British corruption of our… Continue reading Byrek
It was unavoidable. Criss had to go to Tiranë for a meeting at the Peace Corps office. It was a 2 day meeting so he was there 2 nights. Normally, a chance to see other parts of Albania are welcomed, but in July,
A couple of weeks ago, Criss had to be in Tiranë and so he scheduled his mid-service dental cleaning and thankfully there is not much to write about on this.
Here charcoal is called carbon and we are finding it is not as plentiful as in the states. Many of the restaurants cook with charcoal and people roast corn over charcoal on the streets, so we never thought that finding it would be difficult. And it is not, just ask anyone
When we came back from our trip in June, the intention was to post a blog entry at least every other week, if not weekly. Just how hard can it be to take an hour a week and tell about Albania. Well, let us try to explain how difficult things can be sometimes.