Since I'm traveling out of the country for Christmas and New Years, we decided to have our sitemate Christmas last night. One day a few weeks ago we were having conversations about food we miss in America, these happen pretty much every other day. Homemade coleslaw, chili, hotdogs and hashbrowns sounded like an amazing Christmas meal.
We started cooking and preparing around 4:00pm, it gets dark around 4:30 so we had to go ahead and jump the gun early. Right after we finished preparing the coleslaw, what do you know the power went out. So there we sat, wreaking of holiday spirit, sitting in the dark. So, like any red blooded American, we decided to partake in one holiday tradition that we all actually shared: watching The Christmas Story. There we sat, in the dark, and started and finished the movie that we all grew up watching every Christmas.
Finally, about 2 hours later, Santa turned the lights back on so that our Chili dog Christmas wasn't ruined.. well not ruined but altered. Endrit came over and we had a wonderful holiday meal. Tasting his first chili dog, we were a little nervous, Albanian's typically don't like spicy food, and it's pretty hard to make chili without a little kick to it, but he loved it! He even asked for seconds! He even liked Garrett's Whiskey Slush, a traditional Teutopolis, Illinois drink that his family makes even Christmas.
We all sat around, telling Christmas jokes, exchanging Christmas traditions from America and Albania and then the circle dancing started. The Vjalle Kuksi is regarded all around Albania as one of the hardest circle dances in the country and Endrit wanted to teach us. We tried to learn haha. After that proved unsuccessful, we tried to teach him the running man. Probably one of the best cultural exchanges I've had since I've been living here. Overall, I think that Chili Dog Christmas was a huge success and will probably become our Christmas tradition, well for next year anyways.
I leave for Durres and then fly out from Tirane to spend Christmas in Budapest and New Years in Sofia, Bulgaria. Kim & I are going to meet up with PCV's in Bulgaria which should be fun and insightful to see what the Peace Corps is like in another European country.
