Life is back to normal here in Bajram Curri. I feel like the winter has let up just a little, enough so we can stand it. In December I couldn't even sit in my house comfortably without being under 4 blankets, with a hot water bottle and my fire; now, I'm leaving my door open during the day because it's been so nice outside this week. The power outages are still common and annoying, but you take what you get.Today is Super Bowl Sunday and I'm not planning on watching the game. We didn't have power yesterday and I don't know why it's so exhausting but there's no way I could stay up until 4am tonight. Being in a country that doesn't celebrate something that your culture does is kind of weird. In America right now I'm sure TVs have been litered with Super Bowl commercials for weeks, stores have food packages and t-shirts of the teams playing have been showing up in Walmart. Kind of like when I was in a Muslim country (Morocco) for Christmas. It's almost nice because it gives you the freedom to celebrate how you want to and you don't get sucked into all of the commercialism that goes along with most holidays in the States. Today, I chose to go to sleep instead of staying up to watch the game.
To think that I've only got 16-18 weeks left here is ridiculous In some ways I feel like I just got here but most of the time I feel like I've been here forever. Work is pretty slow currently but I've been keeping busy updating my resume, applying for schools and making more Barazia Gjinore videos. Garrett, Eric and I have actually been spending more time together, if that's possible, I think to cope with the lack of all other activities going on. We've got a pretty constant basketball open gym happening every week with about 11 boys from the high school, playing and running drills that me and Garrett make up. Lack of after school activities is one of the biggest issues through out Albania and everyday I can tell how much it means to them that we've invested in doing this every week.
I'm not planning on leaving BC until our Close of Service conference in mid February which is in about 2 weeks. Valentine's Day is coming up, we'll see if we choose to partake in any activities for it.
