Who would have thought that limes would be missing in a Mediterranean country?  We had not really thought about it until a friend was served a drink with a lime.  And we thought, we haven’t had a lime in a long time.  We enjoy them in club soda, gin and tonics and what is a fish taco without a slice of lime.  So we headed to the grocery store to see if we could find them.  Not a lime to be found.  OK, the next step, find the Albanian word and start asking about them.  Luck was on our side, as the host family brought one home from a sister-in-law and we began to understand why you don’t see lime in the markets.

Part of the challenge is the name of a lime which is literally translated “sour lemon”, “tart lemon” or “lemon not ready”.  The later seems to be the preferred translation as we were told by the host family that the lime is just a green lemon.  Yep, limes are lemons that are picked early.  So each trip to the market, we would wander through looking for limes, but not finding them.  And no one really understood why we wanted green lemons.  Wait for them to ripen was the standard response.

But we knew limes existed and once the host family brought one home, Criss began looking for trees. (It is about time he started using that degree!).  As we walked through the older parts of town, no courtyard went unsurveyed, but lime trees were not to be found.  Criss’ theory is that they were cut down as defective lemon trees, producing only green lemons that never ripen.  We contacted other volunteers, but they had just resolved themselves to life without limes.  We searched the European supermarket in Tirane again without success.  The only bright spot was the cooling weather reduced the amount of club soda being drunk, reducing the demand for limes there.  But the stress of this adventure was elevating the consumption of gin and tonic and that upward demand was far exceeding the reduction due to a better climate.

In fact, it was a moment of thirst on the way for a coffee when this story took a turn for the better.  The sun was bright, the birds were singing and Criss was walking to the coffee bar 2 blocks from the house when he spied the lemon tree with green lemons.  Yes things are looking up, the sky bluer, and birds singing louder.  So after many hours with a dictionary and several practice conversations with the mirror, Criss realized this was too important of an event to trust to his language skills and so he grabbed Carol and went to the courtyard gate.  It turned out the owner of the tree is also the woman who sells veggies at the corner.  While she was very confused about why we would want green lemons and thought we should wait a month till they ripened, she gladly gave us several.  So as long as the tree is not cut down for producing lemons that never ripen, we may have our own personal supply.