Tuesday

The view from my bedroom...


Home sweet home for the next two years. I've settled in to Bajram Curri and have started meeting some of the locals. Today we were involved with an anti-smoking campaign with the health center, had coffee with the cheif of police and met with the local NGO of Tropoja. I'll have the address for the Bashkia soon so everyone can send me care packages :)


My turkish toliet.

Mastering the turkish toliet is still an ongoing process. If anyone has any helpful tips I would love to hear them.

My apartment complex..

Swearing-In in Elbasan!

Me and my furture sitemates!
I'm going to miss these two!
From North Carolina to Northern Albania
Last group picture of Pajove and Bishqem
One big happy family!
Albanian Pose
The American Ambassador being interviewed after Swearing-In

Congrats to everyone! We move to site this weekend all across Albania to start our two year term as Peace Corps Volunteers!

Cooking for Ian's Birthday at Bar Saliu

Mac & Cheese brought to Albania

Thursday

American or American't?

Tomorrow I have my language assessment, which is basically like an interview all in Shqip to check what we’ve learned, if we can conjugate verbs correctly and all the fun stuff I don’t miss from Spanish class in college. Unlike Spanish class in college this is actually applicable to our day-to-day lives here and without a basic knowledge of the language we would be lost and incapable to be able to communicate with anyone who didn’t speak English, which is not why we’re here.


Tomorrow marks the one-week count down for when I leave my host families home. There’s a since of security that I’ve gotten in my home here in Bishqem and I think it will be hard at first to live on my own in BC without the family atmosphere since I’ve been here in Albania. It’s amazing to think that exactly 9 weeks ago we were dropped off from America without any knowledge of Albania except what you can find on the internet (which isn’t that much) and now we have enough Shqip to get by in daily life and have enough knowledge of the culture to understand things like the head-bob (which I’m beginning to master), what to say and not say on a furgon and when to expect everyone to stare at you because they’ve only seen Americans on the tv (most of the time).

He cooked fusole just for us!
Group picture with our favorite Italian in Pajove

I’ve also built somewhat of a family with my PST group of 8 trainees in Bishqem and Pajove, which is going to be hard to not have everyday. Even though we drive each other nuts most of the time it’s almost like they’ve become my own little dysfunctional family in Pajove. Boston, Arizona, somewhere in Maine, Washington DC, College Station Texas and little Ol’ North Carolina have been learning just as much about Albanian culture as we have American culture and how it varies throughout the country; and in less than a week, the little clump of American’s that have been my only insight into normalcy before Albania will be spread through out the entire country of Albania. I’m obviously going the furthest north (there isn’t anywhere more north) and will be the furthest away from any other PCV’s besides my two site mates.

Kids in Pajove fshat...

At Gramelies..

Saturday

Lule e kuqe

Bishqem dhe Pajove.


My house from the top.

Hiking to an unknown destination...

Ask him who's taller.
Just for you Shell!
Albanian pose at the top of a hill.
Corey, the turkey-whisperer.
Lucky ladybug.

Myrtle the Turtle

Hike to the 500-year-old-tree

View from the other side of the hills..
Inside one of the abandoned homes we found
Outside of one of the homes we found.


Yeah, so we’re pretty convinced after two hikes around the hills behind Bishqem that the 500-year-old-tree is a myth, or we saw it and it wasn’t that impressive… either way, we got some good hiking out of it. We had a group of little boys lead us to what they thought was the 500-year-old-tree and it looked like it was only a few years old. We continued up the hills and instead of finding this tree we ended up finding a fhstat i vogel or a small village in the hills of Bishqem. We past a pretty large and beautiful graveyard at the top of one hill and it is amazing to think that the people that were buried there probably lived their entire lives on that hill.

Monday

Duke qesh me familjen.

Gëzuar


My host dad just got back from Germany with a car, a plasma 50" flat screen TV, Italian beer and a carpet steamer. It was defiantly a bountiful week for my family and so we celebrated a lot. This picture was taken at the more or less welcome home lunch for my host dad were most of the extended family (about 20ish people) came over for lunch. We defiantly had a lot to celebrate and a lot to be thankful for.

Vëllai im i vogël.

He's just one of those kids you have to meet to understand.