Manga har hort av sig...men det var som sagt INTE jag!
Aftonbladet
Publicerad: 2006-07-30
Militär tog topless svenska på bar gärning
En svensk turist vållade nyligen stor uppståndelse när hon besökte en strand i södra Albanien. Kvinnan ingick i en turistgrupp som stannade till för att njuta av sommarvädret. De albanska kvinnorna trodde inte sina ögon då de såg kvinnan ta av sig sin bikinitopp. De larmade polisen och flydde med sina barn, skriver Corriere della Sera. Militär skickades till platsen, men väl där valde de att inte ingripa. Den officiella förklaringen till det är att militärerna inte kunde kommunicera med den lättklädda svenskan. Efter två timmars solande lämnade turistgruppen stranden och albanerna kunde återvända utan kvinnliga bröstvårtor i sikte.
Monday, July 31, 2006
Friday, July 28, 2006
And then the justification...
Heated discussions this week because of the article below here in Tirana, at least among my non-Albanian friends.
Words like BAD JOURNALISM...RACISM....STEREOTYPES...were frequently used. To my surprise - all of my Albanian friends seemed to think it was a quite all right article - that is was fair! Today I got this official reply / explanation from the chief editor of Sunday Times sent to me by a friend (see below). This came right after I had read the latest postings on Ed's blog (see link list to the right here on my blog) from his travels to Chisinau in Moldova and to Tiraspol in Transdnistria - let's put it like this: While Ed's travel journals are the most amusing and interesting writings, Mr. Gill's article is the exact opposite. To bad sensational guys like Gill get so much attention and space instead of writers like Ed.
Robin Morgan wrote:
Thank you for your correspondence in reply to AA Gill's article on his visit to Albania, which appeared in The Sunday Times Magazine on 23 July. Yours was not the only response and we will be publishing a representative sample of readers' letters in the newspaper this Sunday. In the meantime let me put the article in context.
The author AA Gill is widely recognised for his brand of provocative journalism and irreverent humour which he applies to a wide range of subjects; as a critic and as a commentator. He writes fearlessly impressionistic articles and although most readers recognise and are entertained by his perspective it can and does cause occasional offence to some who may not be familiar with his tone.
I can assure you that Albanians are not alone. Recently he wrote scathingly about the English: "I don't like the English; the lumpen and louty, coarse, unsubtle, beady-eyed, beefy-bummed herd. I find England and the English embarrassing." We published that too.
It wasn't the worst - he went on to describe the English in much more disparaging terms and you can imagine some people were not amused. But most were. Our readers understand in the British, a trait for critical and self-deprecating humour and enjoy it enormously. It is a part of the British identity that Gill himself summed up as "Most people share a joke, the English aim them. The English constantly use their humour as an indiscriminate bludgeon. The English teeter on the edge of not being able to take anything seriously; the ability to be solemn, appropriate, reflective. I do it myself."
It is in this spirit that Gill visited and wrote about Albania, as he has, in the past written about Wales, Germany, Scotland and other countries. What most of our readers regard as broad-brushstroke British wit some see as offensive - it is not intended as offence or indictment. Our readers are far too sensible to assume one man's view is either the truth or the reality and the reaction of the large majority is to feel encouraged to find out for themselves. It provokes awareness, investigation and appreciation.
Naturally, one cannot visit a country and write about it and not address its image or stereotypes. And since you raised concerns about Gill's references to Albania's image abroad let me put that in context too. Albania's emerging democracy and economy requires tourism. Last year 16,000 British tourists visited Albania. More will do so this year with British Airways launching scheduled flights from London and the hotel infrastructure growing. Albania's government seeks to encourage this growth.
In writing about Albania it is impossible for any writer to ignore the facts - and those facts, sadly, include many negatives of which Albania and its citizens and nationals working abroad, must be too well aware and it is not this newspaper's practise to ignore unpalatable truths. Albania is "Europe's poorest country and faces a daunting range of challenges" says the British Department for International Development which has distributed over £35million in overseas aid to the country.
Those challenges include corruption at all levels, crime, gun and drug smuggling, the trafficking of immigrants, 'sex slaves' and children. None of these are Gill's assumptions but the result of investigation and research by internationally recognised bodies including concerned Albanian citizens.
Unicef says "trafficking, forced labour and commercial sexual exploitation are daily perils.*" Amnesty International reports that 40% of Albanian women are subjected to domestic violence and no specific legislation exists to protect them. The British Foreign Office advises against travel to many areas of Albania because of widespread gun ownership and crime. The US State Dept advises travellers to Albania "organised criminal gangs operate in all regions and corruption is pervasive. In most cases police assistance or protection is limited. It lists carjacking, gun crime, serious assault as serious enough to advise travellers to exercise extreme caution.
A senior Albanian academic who worked in government in Tirana has researched and referenced "the political class in Albania is generally of low quality and often involved in corruption and crime". The Centre For European Migration and Ethnic Studies has reported "the Albanian Mafia is considered the most powerful [criminal] organisation operating in Italy and that Albanians were responsible for all heroin smuggling into Switzerland and for drug trafficking into Austria, Germany, Hungary, Poland and Belgium.
Even Mjaft, an Albanian organisation that seeks to promote and foster international appreciation of the country, listed the following information on its website; 9,000 Albanian children trafficked for prostitution (Save The Children, 2001); 250,000 weapons in circulation (UN 2003).
That Albania is working with the international community to change this climate and the perceptions it enforces does not negate the very serious issues that confront the country and those that would seek to use it as a hub for international crime, money laundering, people smuggling.
In this climate it is understandable that hard-working, educated, God-fearing and responsible Albanians are acutely sensitive to any criticism of their country and fear being stigmatised and stereotyped. I can only apologise if you are one of those who felt that The Sunday Times Magazine was attempting to discredit a nation. It was not.
Perhaps attempting to contextualise and illustrate a country and the challenges it faces while emerging from decades of oppression, by employing a writer renowned for his acerbic wit and his observations, is a useful step in increasing international appreciation of Albania's problems.
Yours sincerely
Robin Morgan
Editor
The Sunday Times Magazine
Words like BAD JOURNALISM...RACISM....STEREOTYPES...were frequently used. To my surprise - all of my Albanian friends seemed to think it was a quite all right article - that is was fair! Today I got this official reply / explanation from the chief editor of Sunday Times sent to me by a friend (see below). This came right after I had read the latest postings on Ed's blog (see link list to the right here on my blog) from his travels to Chisinau in Moldova and to Tiraspol in Transdnistria - let's put it like this: While Ed's travel journals are the most amusing and interesting writings, Mr. Gill's article is the exact opposite. To bad sensational guys like Gill get so much attention and space instead of writers like Ed.
Robin Morgan wrote:
Thank you for your correspondence in reply to AA Gill's article on his visit to Albania, which appeared in The Sunday Times Magazine on 23 July. Yours was not the only response and we will be publishing a representative sample of readers' letters in the newspaper this Sunday. In the meantime let me put the article in context.
The author AA Gill is widely recognised for his brand of provocative journalism and irreverent humour which he applies to a wide range of subjects; as a critic and as a commentator. He writes fearlessly impressionistic articles and although most readers recognise and are entertained by his perspective it can and does cause occasional offence to some who may not be familiar with his tone.
I can assure you that Albanians are not alone. Recently he wrote scathingly about the English: "I don't like the English; the lumpen and louty, coarse, unsubtle, beady-eyed, beefy-bummed herd. I find England and the English embarrassing." We published that too.
It wasn't the worst - he went on to describe the English in much more disparaging terms and you can imagine some people were not amused. But most were. Our readers understand in the British, a trait for critical and self-deprecating humour and enjoy it enormously. It is a part of the British identity that Gill himself summed up as "Most people share a joke, the English aim them. The English constantly use their humour as an indiscriminate bludgeon. The English teeter on the edge of not being able to take anything seriously; the ability to be solemn, appropriate, reflective. I do it myself."
It is in this spirit that Gill visited and wrote about Albania, as he has, in the past written about Wales, Germany, Scotland and other countries. What most of our readers regard as broad-brushstroke British wit some see as offensive - it is not intended as offence or indictment. Our readers are far too sensible to assume one man's view is either the truth or the reality and the reaction of the large majority is to feel encouraged to find out for themselves. It provokes awareness, investigation and appreciation.
Naturally, one cannot visit a country and write about it and not address its image or stereotypes. And since you raised concerns about Gill's references to Albania's image abroad let me put that in context too. Albania's emerging democracy and economy requires tourism. Last year 16,000 British tourists visited Albania. More will do so this year with British Airways launching scheduled flights from London and the hotel infrastructure growing. Albania's government seeks to encourage this growth.
In writing about Albania it is impossible for any writer to ignore the facts - and those facts, sadly, include many negatives of which Albania and its citizens and nationals working abroad, must be too well aware and it is not this newspaper's practise to ignore unpalatable truths. Albania is "Europe's poorest country and faces a daunting range of challenges" says the British Department for International Development which has distributed over £35million in overseas aid to the country.
Those challenges include corruption at all levels, crime, gun and drug smuggling, the trafficking of immigrants, 'sex slaves' and children. None of these are Gill's assumptions but the result of investigation and research by internationally recognised bodies including concerned Albanian citizens.
Unicef says "trafficking, forced labour and commercial sexual exploitation are daily perils.*" Amnesty International reports that 40% of Albanian women are subjected to domestic violence and no specific legislation exists to protect them. The British Foreign Office advises against travel to many areas of Albania because of widespread gun ownership and crime. The US State Dept advises travellers to Albania "organised criminal gangs operate in all regions and corruption is pervasive. In most cases police assistance or protection is limited. It lists carjacking, gun crime, serious assault as serious enough to advise travellers to exercise extreme caution.
A senior Albanian academic who worked in government in Tirana has researched and referenced "the political class in Albania is generally of low quality and often involved in corruption and crime". The Centre For European Migration and Ethnic Studies has reported "the Albanian Mafia is considered the most powerful [criminal] organisation operating in Italy and that Albanians were responsible for all heroin smuggling into Switzerland and for drug trafficking into Austria, Germany, Hungary, Poland and Belgium.
Even Mjaft, an Albanian organisation that seeks to promote and foster international appreciation of the country, listed the following information on its website; 9,000 Albanian children trafficked for prostitution (Save The Children, 2001); 250,000 weapons in circulation (UN 2003).
That Albania is working with the international community to change this climate and the perceptions it enforces does not negate the very serious issues that confront the country and those that would seek to use it as a hub for international crime, money laundering, people smuggling.
In this climate it is understandable that hard-working, educated, God-fearing and responsible Albanians are acutely sensitive to any criticism of their country and fear being stigmatised and stereotyped. I can only apologise if you are one of those who felt that The Sunday Times Magazine was attempting to discredit a nation. It was not.
Perhaps attempting to contextualise and illustrate a country and the challenges it faces while emerging from decades of oppression, by employing a writer renowned for his acerbic wit and his observations, is a useful step in increasing international appreciation of Albania's problems.
Yours sincerely
Robin Morgan
Editor
The Sunday Times Magazine
An article about Albania was published
in the Sunday Times Magazine on 23 July, 2006:
The land that time forgot
Author: AA Gill
It was a communist state for nearly half a a century. Now it has organised crime and the worst-dressed teenagers in Europe. Will the world ever take Albania seriously?
In the unlikely event of your ever needing to know, Tirana’s international airport is called Mother Teresa. It is grimly typical that the Albanians named their runway to the world after a woman who devoted herself to helping people die; and after a Catholic from a country that’s 70% Muslim. Mother Teresa is the only internationally famous Albanian; all the rest are infamous.
As you walk across the tarmac, you might notice a couple of planes from Albatros Airways – there is, again, an Albanian inevitability in naming your planes after the only bird that is an international synonym for bad luck, and which doesn’t fly anywhere near the Adriatic anyway.
Any sentence with Albania in it is likely to get a laugh. Albania is funny. It’s a punchline, a Gilbert and Sullivan country, a Ruritania of brigands and vendettas and pantomime royalty.
It is a tragic place. But just at the point in the story where you should be sobbing, you can barely restrain the sniggers. After all, Albania’s favourite comedian is Norman Wisdom, and that’s the place all over. It’s funny because it’s not funny. The capital, Tirana, is a rare place, blessed with both fascist and communist architecture. The competing totalitarian buildings strut cheek by cheek down the potholed roads, like an authoritarian tango in marble and concrete.
The Italians, who had the most sympathetic fascist architecture, built the futuristically classical university art school and government buildings, while the communists made the thudding celebrations of workers’ triumph and the grim warrens of piss-stained grey boxes for housing the triumphant workers in.
Parts of Tirana look like small southern Italian industrial towns, tree-dappled, lots of cafes, while other bits look like Gaza, ripped up and smashed stretches of urban exhaustion and collapse.
But none of that is what you notice first. The thing that catches your eye and holds it in a sticky grasp, like a child with a humbug, is the colour. The grim apartments and public housing projects have been painted with broad swathes of livid decoration. They look like a giant installation of West Indian scatter cushions.
The multicoloured building was the very, very bright idea of Tirana’s mayor. A man who the locals seem to think is suicidal and inspired in equal measure. When Albania’s peculiar version of hermetic communism finally collapsed, in 1992, the new man said that, though there was no money to change anything, seeing as they’d been living in monotone grindstone misery for 50 years, they might brighten the place up with a lick of paint. Apparently, they got a job lot of all the colours Homebase couldn’t sell in Cheshire and sploshed away. The result is both inspired and ridiculous, and very Albanian. Like a clown’s make-up, it draws attention to the crumbling, gritty face underneath.
In the span of one long lifetime, Albania has been dealt a full house of political, social and economic experiments. It started the 20th century as a subservient state of the Ottoman empire, then it became a playground for every Balkan and Adriatic neighbour. At one time or another, Albania had seven competing armies trying to grab lumps of it. Briefly it was an imposed German monarchy, then an ineffective Austrian protectorate. In 1913 the Treaty of London drew its borders to suit the conflicting demands of Serbia, Greece, Italy, Austria and Russia, which left over half of all Albanians living outside their own country, principally in Kosovo.
At the Treaty of Versailles, the Albanian throne was absurdly offered to C B Fry, an English cricketer who was supposed to be such a paragon of masculinity that he was photographed naked and flexing at Oxford, and ended up running a naval prep school of exemplary cruelty with a dykey, sadistic wife. And then they got King Zog.
You really couldn’t make up Albania’s history. Zog was Europe’s last self-made monarch, and a man who made Charlie Chaplin look serious. He favoured light operetta, white hussars’ uniforms and waxed moustaches, and cut a mean tango; he encouraged the Italians to come and build things like roads and cafes. The bad news was, the Italians were Mussolini, so Zog had to make a dash for it and ruled in the Palm Court at the Ritz.
Then the Italians lost the war and the partisans took over; which might have been a good thing, except they turned out to be run by Enver Hoxha, the weirdest of all cold-war communist dictators, a man of stern cruelty and fathomless paranoia, who decided that the only two allies he could trust should be at the opposite ends of the world. Albania’s only mates were China and Cuba, and it became proudly the only Maoist state in Europe.
Finally, long after everyone else had got a credit card and a mobile phone, Hoxha got cancer and died, and his unique chronic communism died with him. So Albania was welcomed out of the cold into the warm embrace of the free market. That should have been the good news, but of course it wasn’t.
There’s a park in the centre of Tirana that was built by the workers for themselves. They dug a great lake, built an amphitheatre, made a little zoo with a mad bear. You get in by walking through a homeless incontinent’s toilet, past the busts of madly furrowed Albanian heroes and the small, neat British war cemetery.
In shady meadows, men cut grass for hay and young men sit on tree stumps staring at nothing. Around the lake, men fish without anticipation; behind them, other men squat and watch. Fishermen-stalking is a feature of former communist countries. As a displacement activity, it’s about as complete a waste of a day as you can come up with. Old men sit in the sun and play dominoes. Their peanut-butter-tanned bodies are wrinkled and polished like old brogues. They sit on cardboard boxes in those distressingly skimpy second scrotums that the communist world still clings to as attractive swimwear; they grin through bomb-damaged teeth.
These are the flotsam and detritus of the train wreck of a command economy, their jobs and pensions just another cracking Albanian joke. A man who was once a history professor looks out across the water at the speculative illegal palaces being built in the people’s park and tells me how the good news of capitalism came to Albania. “We didn’t know anything about markets or money. Suddenly it was all new, all opportunity, all confusion. And then there comes pyramid scheme. You’ve heard of this ‘pyramid’? We put money in. They give you back many times more. You put that money back and much more comes. It was brilliant, this capitalism. Magic. Everyone did it. Maybe 70-80% of the country. People gave up their work to live on marvellous pyramid money. This was best two years of Albania’s life. Drink and food and laughing; everyone is happy. Everyone has cash and hope.” He stops and looks at the fishermen. “But it’s fraud. Everyone loses everything, not just their savings but their homes and farms, and they borrow and there’s no state to help. We have less than nothing; I lose my savings and my job. I don’t understand.
“You laugh. We were fools, yes, but what do we know of capitalism? It was a fairy story. And when it’s gone, people kill themselves, go mad, fight, scream and cry and want revenge. You understand Albanians have very, very… ” (he searches for the words) “… strong emotion.”
Albania was a nation of dupes waiting to be taken and they didn’t take it well. Everything you understand or think you know about Albania and Albanians needs to be seen in relation to how they got the way they are. After the pyramid scam, Albania sold the only thing it had left: its people. They handed out passports and waited. There are 4m Albanian citizens in the world – fewer than there are Scots. Three million of them live at home, the fourth quarter work abroad, and what they do is mostly illegal. Albania is the hub of the European sex trade, smuggling and pimping girls from Moldova and the Ukraine into the West.
It’s said they also run most of the illegal arms trade, the cheapest Kalashnikovs you can buy. They’re the Asda of mayhem. After years of being bullied, invaded, ripped off and lied to, the Albanians have grown very good at being frightening. They’re not subtle, they don’t deal in proportionate responses, controlled aggression or veiled threats. Albanians, I’m told, have taken over the crime in Milan – exporting organised crime to Italy beats selling fridges to Eskimos or sand to Arabs.
In the centre of Tirana there’s an area known as the Block. Under Hoxha this was the closed, salubrious preserve of party members, patrolled by soldiers, forbidden to all ordinary Albanians. Now it’s grown into the all-night trendy reserve of the young: cafes, bars and clubs have sprouted back to back along the crowded streets.
In parts it looks like sunny-holiday Europe, but then you turn a corner into grim, hunkered, crumbling commie squalor, with kids kicking balls and toothless ancients sitting like lonely loonies on benches, staring at the angry graffiti.
The number and proportion of young people in Tirana is a shock, compared with northern Europe. This is a young person’s country; they have large families here who all continue to live at home, so they need to get out.
The cafes on the Block are thick with teenagers, collectively called “students”, though this is a title rather than a vocation – there’s precious little work for them to study for. The streets are a slow crawl of large cars: BMWs, Porsche Cayennes, blacked-out Range Rovers, Humvees and the ubiquitous tribe of Benzes – all stolen, of course, from Germany and Italy.
The young lounge and practise their impenetrably tough looks; the boys play-fight. The difference between these kids and their neighbours in Italy and Greece is how they look. With effortless élan, Albanian students are without peer the worst-dressed kids in the western world. They are obsessed with labels and designers, but all they can afford are the chronically laughable rip-offs and fakes in the markets. Shops here are full of absurdly repellent, tatty clobber with oversized logos stencilled on, and the kids wear this stuff with a flashy insouciance, all looking like characters in search of a comic-sketch show.
Albanians are naturally quite modest people. You still see old women in peasant headdresses and men wearing traditional white fezzes, but the youth are desperate to be European, and that means sexy. There are girls with bad peroxide jobs, and minute skirts, and tits-out-for-the-boys tops. They play at being gangster bitches, but it all looks much more like a drama-school production of Guys and Dolls.
The men have a strange – and, it must be said, deeply unattractive – habit of rolling up their T-shirts so that they look like bikini tops. The Albanians are short and ferret-faced, with the unisex stumpy, slightly bowed legs of shetland ponies. My favourite fashion moment was a middle-aged man with a Village People moustache and a Hobbit’s swagger in a T-shirt that declared in huge letters: Big Balls.
Albanian is one of those languages that have no known relative, just an extra half a dozen letters. They say it’s impossible to learn after the age of two. They say it with very thick accents. The fact that nobody else can speak it makes it a ready-made code for criminals, but in a typically unintentional way it’s also pathetically, phonetically funny. The word for “for sale”, for instance, is shitet; carp, the national fish, is krap.
I went to a tiny basement bar that specialised in death-metal music. This, finally, is a look that even Albanians can get right. I found a seat next to the drummer’s mother, a beamingly proud peasant woman watching her son epileptically thrash our eardrums with his group Clockwork Psycho Sodomy Gore.
Groovy Tirana troops into a nightclub with a self-conscious bravado and sips cocktails politely, while the naffest barman in the free world goes through his Tom Cruise bottle-juggling routine, shaking passé drinks and presenting the bill stuffed into the top of his stonewashed hipsters to groups of giggling top-heavy girls.
All this imitation, this desperate wannabe youth culture, is being paid for by cash sent home from abroad. Albania’s economy runs courtesy of Western Union and wads of red-light cash stuffed under the seats of hot-wired Audis. Much of it is criminal, but there is also a lot that is the bitter fruit of lonely, uncertain, menial jobs in rich Europe done by invisibly despised immigrants on the black economy. However it’s gleaned, this is the hardest-earned money in Europe.
I was constantly told to be careful of pickpockets and muggers in rough areas. Over the years, I’ve developed a bat-eared coward’s sixth sense for the merest whisper of trouble, but Tirana felt like a very safe place playing tough. There is very little drunkenness on the street, though they drink copiously. The only drugs seem to be a bit of home-grown grass and, given that this is the vice-export capital of the West, there were no lap-dancing clubs or pornography shops. You can’t even find a prostitute on the street in Tirana. It’s like trying to find lobsters in Scotland: they’ve all gone for export.
Albania has by far and away the worst traffic record of any western country, and no Albanian would conceivably wear a seatbelt, considering it the first symptom of passive homosexuality. Driving north out of Tirana along the pitted roads, you see an insatiable orgy of construction with barely a nod to need, purpose or planning permission. The outskirts are being covered in country bars and restaurants without customers, and capacious country houses without sewerage, water, electricity or inhabitants. The biggest single industry in Albania is money-laundering, and construction is the easiest and quickest way to turn vice into virtue. There are thousands of buildings without roofs or windows flying an ironic Albanian flag, which, appropriately, is the double-headed eagle looking both ways at once.
The mountains are a landscape of terraces and forests sparsely populated by peasants who still cut hay with scythes, where men turn rotated strips with wooden ploughs behind bony mares as their wives sow seeds from baskets, looking like the posters for a Bertolt Brecht revival.
Tiny villages lurk in high valleys; extended families live on the first floor of stone-and-mud-plaster houses. On the ground floor live the cattle and plough horses. Vines climb the walls; chickens and infants scratch in the dirt; dogs are chained in wicker kennels; hens nest under the sweet hayricks; women bake bread in wood ovens. We’re given a lunch of grilled lamb, fizzing sheep’s cheese, tomatoes and cherries fresh from the tree. The fields all around are choked with wild flowers; songbirds and turtledoves clamour for attention; tortoises shuffle in the stubble; donkeys moan operatically to each other.
It is as close as any of us will get to seeing what life across Europe was like in the 16th century, but living a 16th-century life in the 21st century is not a smart option. Even 16th-century people know that. So the country is emptying, and the peasants trudge to the city to try and lay their hands on a little second-hand vice money.
All across Albania there are decrepit concrete bunkers, thick beehive constructions that smell of mould and foxes. They run in little redoubts up hills, along coverts and through gardens. There are millions of them. Hoxha started building bunkers at the end of the war, and they became a lifelong paranoid obsession that cost a hubristic amount of Albania’s wealth. The bunkers follow no coherent battle plan. There would never have been enough soldiers to man them; they are simply the solid pustules of mistrust and fear. Albania has always been surrounded by enemies, but it has also been divided against itself.
There is no trust in this landscape: it is the place of vendetta and vengeance. There are still families here where the fearful men never leave their windowless homes, where male babies are born to die. The rules of being “in blood” were laid down in the 15th century in the Canon of Lekë, an ancient murderer’s handbook. That is one of the reasons Albanians are so good at organised crime. The distinctions of religion are nothing compared with the ancient honour of families; everything is secondary to family honour and to making money. Everything is excusable to sustain those.
There is also a divide between north and south Albania. The north is called Gheg, the south Tosk. Gheg is tough, uncouth, aggressive; the south, educated, civilised, Italianate. It’s a bit like England.
On the Adriatic coast, in Durres, which was once a seaside capital, the beach is a muddy grey, a coarse sand of cigarette ends, bottle tops and those blue plastic bags that are the world’s tumbleweed. The smelly, tideless Adriatic limply washes nameless slurry onto the shore, and children build sand villas while their parents roast. Albanians have surprisingly fair skins and they cook to a lovely livid puce. A man calls me over. He’s angry. “American?” No, English. “Tell them, tell Europe, we don’t have tails. You see, we are not apes. We’re not another species. Durres is going to be the new Croatia.” There’s a thought.
“Norman Wisdom – what do you think of him?” I asked. “He’s very ’90s. Now top best comic is definitely Mr Bean.”
Sitting in Tirana’s main square, where the moneychangers stand in the shade with their wads, and men sell dodgy mobile phones and repair petrol lighters, I watch the Albanians come and go, and there’s something odd. It takes me an hour to work out what it is – hardly anyone wears a watch. Well, why would they? They haven’t got anywhere to be
The land that time forgot
Author: AA Gill
It was a communist state for nearly half a a century. Now it has organised crime and the worst-dressed teenagers in Europe. Will the world ever take Albania seriously?
In the unlikely event of your ever needing to know, Tirana’s international airport is called Mother Teresa. It is grimly typical that the Albanians named their runway to the world after a woman who devoted herself to helping people die; and after a Catholic from a country that’s 70% Muslim. Mother Teresa is the only internationally famous Albanian; all the rest are infamous.
As you walk across the tarmac, you might notice a couple of planes from Albatros Airways – there is, again, an Albanian inevitability in naming your planes after the only bird that is an international synonym for bad luck, and which doesn’t fly anywhere near the Adriatic anyway.
Any sentence with Albania in it is likely to get a laugh. Albania is funny. It’s a punchline, a Gilbert and Sullivan country, a Ruritania of brigands and vendettas and pantomime royalty.
It is a tragic place. But just at the point in the story where you should be sobbing, you can barely restrain the sniggers. After all, Albania’s favourite comedian is Norman Wisdom, and that’s the place all over. It’s funny because it’s not funny. The capital, Tirana, is a rare place, blessed with both fascist and communist architecture. The competing totalitarian buildings strut cheek by cheek down the potholed roads, like an authoritarian tango in marble and concrete.
The Italians, who had the most sympathetic fascist architecture, built the futuristically classical university art school and government buildings, while the communists made the thudding celebrations of workers’ triumph and the grim warrens of piss-stained grey boxes for housing the triumphant workers in.
Parts of Tirana look like small southern Italian industrial towns, tree-dappled, lots of cafes, while other bits look like Gaza, ripped up and smashed stretches of urban exhaustion and collapse.
But none of that is what you notice first. The thing that catches your eye and holds it in a sticky grasp, like a child with a humbug, is the colour. The grim apartments and public housing projects have been painted with broad swathes of livid decoration. They look like a giant installation of West Indian scatter cushions.
The multicoloured building was the very, very bright idea of Tirana’s mayor. A man who the locals seem to think is suicidal and inspired in equal measure. When Albania’s peculiar version of hermetic communism finally collapsed, in 1992, the new man said that, though there was no money to change anything, seeing as they’d been living in monotone grindstone misery for 50 years, they might brighten the place up with a lick of paint. Apparently, they got a job lot of all the colours Homebase couldn’t sell in Cheshire and sploshed away. The result is both inspired and ridiculous, and very Albanian. Like a clown’s make-up, it draws attention to the crumbling, gritty face underneath.
In the span of one long lifetime, Albania has been dealt a full house of political, social and economic experiments. It started the 20th century as a subservient state of the Ottoman empire, then it became a playground for every Balkan and Adriatic neighbour. At one time or another, Albania had seven competing armies trying to grab lumps of it. Briefly it was an imposed German monarchy, then an ineffective Austrian protectorate. In 1913 the Treaty of London drew its borders to suit the conflicting demands of Serbia, Greece, Italy, Austria and Russia, which left over half of all Albanians living outside their own country, principally in Kosovo.
At the Treaty of Versailles, the Albanian throne was absurdly offered to C B Fry, an English cricketer who was supposed to be such a paragon of masculinity that he was photographed naked and flexing at Oxford, and ended up running a naval prep school of exemplary cruelty with a dykey, sadistic wife. And then they got King Zog.
You really couldn’t make up Albania’s history. Zog was Europe’s last self-made monarch, and a man who made Charlie Chaplin look serious. He favoured light operetta, white hussars’ uniforms and waxed moustaches, and cut a mean tango; he encouraged the Italians to come and build things like roads and cafes. The bad news was, the Italians were Mussolini, so Zog had to make a dash for it and ruled in the Palm Court at the Ritz.
Then the Italians lost the war and the partisans took over; which might have been a good thing, except they turned out to be run by Enver Hoxha, the weirdest of all cold-war communist dictators, a man of stern cruelty and fathomless paranoia, who decided that the only two allies he could trust should be at the opposite ends of the world. Albania’s only mates were China and Cuba, and it became proudly the only Maoist state in Europe.
Finally, long after everyone else had got a credit card and a mobile phone, Hoxha got cancer and died, and his unique chronic communism died with him. So Albania was welcomed out of the cold into the warm embrace of the free market. That should have been the good news, but of course it wasn’t.
There’s a park in the centre of Tirana that was built by the workers for themselves. They dug a great lake, built an amphitheatre, made a little zoo with a mad bear. You get in by walking through a homeless incontinent’s toilet, past the busts of madly furrowed Albanian heroes and the small, neat British war cemetery.
In shady meadows, men cut grass for hay and young men sit on tree stumps staring at nothing. Around the lake, men fish without anticipation; behind them, other men squat and watch. Fishermen-stalking is a feature of former communist countries. As a displacement activity, it’s about as complete a waste of a day as you can come up with. Old men sit in the sun and play dominoes. Their peanut-butter-tanned bodies are wrinkled and polished like old brogues. They sit on cardboard boxes in those distressingly skimpy second scrotums that the communist world still clings to as attractive swimwear; they grin through bomb-damaged teeth.
These are the flotsam and detritus of the train wreck of a command economy, their jobs and pensions just another cracking Albanian joke. A man who was once a history professor looks out across the water at the speculative illegal palaces being built in the people’s park and tells me how the good news of capitalism came to Albania. “We didn’t know anything about markets or money. Suddenly it was all new, all opportunity, all confusion. And then there comes pyramid scheme. You’ve heard of this ‘pyramid’? We put money in. They give you back many times more. You put that money back and much more comes. It was brilliant, this capitalism. Magic. Everyone did it. Maybe 70-80% of the country. People gave up their work to live on marvellous pyramid money. This was best two years of Albania’s life. Drink and food and laughing; everyone is happy. Everyone has cash and hope.” He stops and looks at the fishermen. “But it’s fraud. Everyone loses everything, not just their savings but their homes and farms, and they borrow and there’s no state to help. We have less than nothing; I lose my savings and my job. I don’t understand.
“You laugh. We were fools, yes, but what do we know of capitalism? It was a fairy story. And when it’s gone, people kill themselves, go mad, fight, scream and cry and want revenge. You understand Albanians have very, very… ” (he searches for the words) “… strong emotion.”
Albania was a nation of dupes waiting to be taken and they didn’t take it well. Everything you understand or think you know about Albania and Albanians needs to be seen in relation to how they got the way they are. After the pyramid scam, Albania sold the only thing it had left: its people. They handed out passports and waited. There are 4m Albanian citizens in the world – fewer than there are Scots. Three million of them live at home, the fourth quarter work abroad, and what they do is mostly illegal. Albania is the hub of the European sex trade, smuggling and pimping girls from Moldova and the Ukraine into the West.
It’s said they also run most of the illegal arms trade, the cheapest Kalashnikovs you can buy. They’re the Asda of mayhem. After years of being bullied, invaded, ripped off and lied to, the Albanians have grown very good at being frightening. They’re not subtle, they don’t deal in proportionate responses, controlled aggression or veiled threats. Albanians, I’m told, have taken over the crime in Milan – exporting organised crime to Italy beats selling fridges to Eskimos or sand to Arabs.
In the centre of Tirana there’s an area known as the Block. Under Hoxha this was the closed, salubrious preserve of party members, patrolled by soldiers, forbidden to all ordinary Albanians. Now it’s grown into the all-night trendy reserve of the young: cafes, bars and clubs have sprouted back to back along the crowded streets.
In parts it looks like sunny-holiday Europe, but then you turn a corner into grim, hunkered, crumbling commie squalor, with kids kicking balls and toothless ancients sitting like lonely loonies on benches, staring at the angry graffiti.
The number and proportion of young people in Tirana is a shock, compared with northern Europe. This is a young person’s country; they have large families here who all continue to live at home, so they need to get out.
The cafes on the Block are thick with teenagers, collectively called “students”, though this is a title rather than a vocation – there’s precious little work for them to study for. The streets are a slow crawl of large cars: BMWs, Porsche Cayennes, blacked-out Range Rovers, Humvees and the ubiquitous tribe of Benzes – all stolen, of course, from Germany and Italy.
The young lounge and practise their impenetrably tough looks; the boys play-fight. The difference between these kids and their neighbours in Italy and Greece is how they look. With effortless élan, Albanian students are without peer the worst-dressed kids in the western world. They are obsessed with labels and designers, but all they can afford are the chronically laughable rip-offs and fakes in the markets. Shops here are full of absurdly repellent, tatty clobber with oversized logos stencilled on, and the kids wear this stuff with a flashy insouciance, all looking like characters in search of a comic-sketch show.
Albanians are naturally quite modest people. You still see old women in peasant headdresses and men wearing traditional white fezzes, but the youth are desperate to be European, and that means sexy. There are girls with bad peroxide jobs, and minute skirts, and tits-out-for-the-boys tops. They play at being gangster bitches, but it all looks much more like a drama-school production of Guys and Dolls.
The men have a strange – and, it must be said, deeply unattractive – habit of rolling up their T-shirts so that they look like bikini tops. The Albanians are short and ferret-faced, with the unisex stumpy, slightly bowed legs of shetland ponies. My favourite fashion moment was a middle-aged man with a Village People moustache and a Hobbit’s swagger in a T-shirt that declared in huge letters: Big Balls.
Albanian is one of those languages that have no known relative, just an extra half a dozen letters. They say it’s impossible to learn after the age of two. They say it with very thick accents. The fact that nobody else can speak it makes it a ready-made code for criminals, but in a typically unintentional way it’s also pathetically, phonetically funny. The word for “for sale”, for instance, is shitet; carp, the national fish, is krap.
I went to a tiny basement bar that specialised in death-metal music. This, finally, is a look that even Albanians can get right. I found a seat next to the drummer’s mother, a beamingly proud peasant woman watching her son epileptically thrash our eardrums with his group Clockwork Psycho Sodomy Gore.
Groovy Tirana troops into a nightclub with a self-conscious bravado and sips cocktails politely, while the naffest barman in the free world goes through his Tom Cruise bottle-juggling routine, shaking passé drinks and presenting the bill stuffed into the top of his stonewashed hipsters to groups of giggling top-heavy girls.
All this imitation, this desperate wannabe youth culture, is being paid for by cash sent home from abroad. Albania’s economy runs courtesy of Western Union and wads of red-light cash stuffed under the seats of hot-wired Audis. Much of it is criminal, but there is also a lot that is the bitter fruit of lonely, uncertain, menial jobs in rich Europe done by invisibly despised immigrants on the black economy. However it’s gleaned, this is the hardest-earned money in Europe.
I was constantly told to be careful of pickpockets and muggers in rough areas. Over the years, I’ve developed a bat-eared coward’s sixth sense for the merest whisper of trouble, but Tirana felt like a very safe place playing tough. There is very little drunkenness on the street, though they drink copiously. The only drugs seem to be a bit of home-grown grass and, given that this is the vice-export capital of the West, there were no lap-dancing clubs or pornography shops. You can’t even find a prostitute on the street in Tirana. It’s like trying to find lobsters in Scotland: they’ve all gone for export.
Albania has by far and away the worst traffic record of any western country, and no Albanian would conceivably wear a seatbelt, considering it the first symptom of passive homosexuality. Driving north out of Tirana along the pitted roads, you see an insatiable orgy of construction with barely a nod to need, purpose or planning permission. The outskirts are being covered in country bars and restaurants without customers, and capacious country houses without sewerage, water, electricity or inhabitants. The biggest single industry in Albania is money-laundering, and construction is the easiest and quickest way to turn vice into virtue. There are thousands of buildings without roofs or windows flying an ironic Albanian flag, which, appropriately, is the double-headed eagle looking both ways at once.
The mountains are a landscape of terraces and forests sparsely populated by peasants who still cut hay with scythes, where men turn rotated strips with wooden ploughs behind bony mares as their wives sow seeds from baskets, looking like the posters for a Bertolt Brecht revival.
Tiny villages lurk in high valleys; extended families live on the first floor of stone-and-mud-plaster houses. On the ground floor live the cattle and plough horses. Vines climb the walls; chickens and infants scratch in the dirt; dogs are chained in wicker kennels; hens nest under the sweet hayricks; women bake bread in wood ovens. We’re given a lunch of grilled lamb, fizzing sheep’s cheese, tomatoes and cherries fresh from the tree. The fields all around are choked with wild flowers; songbirds and turtledoves clamour for attention; tortoises shuffle in the stubble; donkeys moan operatically to each other.
It is as close as any of us will get to seeing what life across Europe was like in the 16th century, but living a 16th-century life in the 21st century is not a smart option. Even 16th-century people know that. So the country is emptying, and the peasants trudge to the city to try and lay their hands on a little second-hand vice money.
All across Albania there are decrepit concrete bunkers, thick beehive constructions that smell of mould and foxes. They run in little redoubts up hills, along coverts and through gardens. There are millions of them. Hoxha started building bunkers at the end of the war, and they became a lifelong paranoid obsession that cost a hubristic amount of Albania’s wealth. The bunkers follow no coherent battle plan. There would never have been enough soldiers to man them; they are simply the solid pustules of mistrust and fear. Albania has always been surrounded by enemies, but it has also been divided against itself.
There is no trust in this landscape: it is the place of vendetta and vengeance. There are still families here where the fearful men never leave their windowless homes, where male babies are born to die. The rules of being “in blood” were laid down in the 15th century in the Canon of Lekë, an ancient murderer’s handbook. That is one of the reasons Albanians are so good at organised crime. The distinctions of religion are nothing compared with the ancient honour of families; everything is secondary to family honour and to making money. Everything is excusable to sustain those.
There is also a divide between north and south Albania. The north is called Gheg, the south Tosk. Gheg is tough, uncouth, aggressive; the south, educated, civilised, Italianate. It’s a bit like England.
On the Adriatic coast, in Durres, which was once a seaside capital, the beach is a muddy grey, a coarse sand of cigarette ends, bottle tops and those blue plastic bags that are the world’s tumbleweed. The smelly, tideless Adriatic limply washes nameless slurry onto the shore, and children build sand villas while their parents roast. Albanians have surprisingly fair skins and they cook to a lovely livid puce. A man calls me over. He’s angry. “American?” No, English. “Tell them, tell Europe, we don’t have tails. You see, we are not apes. We’re not another species. Durres is going to be the new Croatia.” There’s a thought.
“Norman Wisdom – what do you think of him?” I asked. “He’s very ’90s. Now top best comic is definitely Mr Bean.”
Sitting in Tirana’s main square, where the moneychangers stand in the shade with their wads, and men sell dodgy mobile phones and repair petrol lighters, I watch the Albanians come and go, and there’s something odd. It takes me an hour to work out what it is – hardly anyone wears a watch. Well, why would they? They haven’t got anywhere to be
Thursday, July 27, 2006
Last time in Budva and Sveti Stefan
Last week end we went to Montenegro and stayed at Sveti Stefan next to Budva. We started from Tirana at 17 o'clock and made it to the border in ca 1,5 hours - amazing how smooth and quick - BUT ran into the enormous long line of cars along the coast stretch leading to Budva around 20 o'clock - we were in this line for 1,5 hours moving slowly slowly forward. Not the ideal start, but something you have to take into your calculations when approaching Budva from the South or from Southeast on a week end. Most charter tourists from Sweden and Germany for example, arrive at Tivat airport north of Budva and don't have to deal with this mess....It takes the fun and relaxing part out of the whole experience kind of - but when we arrived in our hotel it was worth the trip, cause we stayed on the little island of Sveti Stefan that has this great view over the whole bay, and where it's sooo quiet - and where they don't even play loud music at the beach.
The little harbour of Budva - really nice, full of fish restaurants and a funny mix of poeple fishing, tourists all dressed up for the evening stroll, and a couple of big yachts and sailing boats with young guys hanging around them.
Me with a Nic
This system / machine allows you to learn how to water-ski! It takes you round and round in circles. Another tourist attraction is the "flying boat" which takes you on a ride over the mountains and the ocean (look carfully below).
Oh yes - I forgot to mention that for the return back to Albania we started as early as 15 o'clock from Budva not to be stuck in the enormous line at the border in the evening - we actually only had to wait for an hour all in all. Would probably have been an extra 30 minutes - but the driver (private car) bribed the border police guys on both sides with two BIG bottles of cold beer (PIVO!) that he brought with him back and simply handed over to them while we were waiting in the line...and which allowed us to pass the cars in front of us just like that! I hate to say this - but it's the second time this happens to me at the border getting into Albania from Montenegto in the summer.
The little harbour of Budva - really nice, full of fish restaurants and a funny mix of poeple fishing, tourists all dressed up for the evening stroll, and a couple of big yachts and sailing boats with young guys hanging around them.
Me with a Nic
This system / machine allows you to learn how to water-ski! It takes you round and round in circles. Another tourist attraction is the "flying boat" which takes you on a ride over the mountains and the ocean (look carfully below).
Oh yes - I forgot to mention that for the return back to Albania we started as early as 15 o'clock from Budva not to be stuck in the enormous line at the border in the evening - we actually only had to wait for an hour all in all. Would probably have been an extra 30 minutes - but the driver (private car) bribed the border police guys on both sides with two BIG bottles of cold beer (PIVO!) that he brought with him back and simply handed over to them while we were waiting in the line...and which allowed us to pass the cars in front of us just like that! I hate to say this - but it's the second time this happens to me at the border getting into Albania from Montenegto in the summer.
Tuesday, July 25, 2006
Going back to Vancouver... and Albania
Took the ferry back from Victoria to Vancouver. Nice ride. Nice clam chowder.
Met Joe's friend Ian and his super cute poppy Caper, who was chasing his own tail round and round in circles. We went for dinner at the Keg (again! yummy!) and had a fully normal taxi drive back to Ians' parents house..
Met Joe's friend Ian and his super cute poppy Caper, who was chasing his own tail round and round in circles. We went for dinner at the Keg (again! yummy!) and had a fully normal taxi drive back to Ians' parents house..
The River
We went down to the River
And into the river we dive - forgot to bring swim suits, but we were the only ones there!
This water fall may look tiny on this picture - but it is huge. Joe's old playground - and I understand why he broke all those bones in his body.
And into the river we dive - forgot to bring swim suits, but we were the only ones there!
This water fall may look tiny on this picture - but it is huge. Joe's old playground - and I understand why he broke all those bones in his body.
D & K's wedding
We were invited to Katie's and Dwayne's wedding - they are the cutest couple - they did not stop smiling during the whole day, of course. The ceremony was held in the green beautiful garden of her parents, and instead of rice or confetti - we got bubbles!!
Joe with his old friends, that he has not seen in a couple of years. Great to meet them finally. They used to share the same student house, so quite a lot of stories came out during the dinner after.
I cought it!
Joe with his old friends, that he has not seen in a couple of years. Great to meet them finally. They used to share the same student house, so quite a lot of stories came out during the dinner after.
I cought it!
Salmon and sea food
Afternoon trip with Joe's mum, to Salmon point (?) for a delicious dinner and fantastic view over the water and the mountains. Wish we could see Ginni more often!
We picked up prawns at "Portoguese Joe" for another dinner (think I put on 5 kilos that week...)
Our little rental car. Needed it to transfer all Joe's old stuff from one storage to another.
The Canadian flag made of coca cola cans....made a deep deep impression on me.
We picked up prawns at "Portoguese Joe" for another dinner (think I put on 5 kilos that week...)
Our little rental car. Needed it to transfer all Joe's old stuff from one storage to another.
The Canadian flag made of coca cola cans....made a deep deep impression on me.
Monday, July 24, 2006
Seal Bay in Comox
After Victoria we spent some days with Joe's mum : D in Courtney (South on Vancouver Island) who has recently moved back from China where she was working as a nurse for a year. Joe grew up in this area, and had so many great little places he wanted to show me. Like Seal Bay for example:
Thanks to the tide, this whole area was full of crabs and star fishes waiting for the water to come back. While I was walking I felt like someone was spraying water on me from below, like a fontain - and it made my legs all wet: That was my first encounter with the so-called "gooey ducks"! They are apparently giant clams with a very long 'neck' (see below) and you never actually see them, because they are buried in the sand, but you can locate them because they expel water by 'spitting' it up into the air, sometimes a couple of feet! It made me jump each time.
These are called "sand dollars" and skeletons of marine animals...amazing what beautiful patterns they have, like little leaves!
Thanks to the tide, this whole area was full of crabs and star fishes waiting for the water to come back. While I was walking I felt like someone was spraying water on me from below, like a fontain - and it made my legs all wet: That was my first encounter with the so-called "gooey ducks"! They are apparently giant clams with a very long 'neck' (see below) and you never actually see them, because they are buried in the sand, but you can locate them because they expel water by 'spitting' it up into the air, sometimes a couple of feet! It made me jump each time.
These are called "sand dollars" and skeletons of marine animals...amazing what beautiful patterns they have, like little leaves!
Friday, July 21, 2006
Other things to do on the Canadian West Coast...
Include...
...eating delicious big Crabs... (I found it a bit tricky)
And pose with every big animal along the streets of Victoria, together with other Japanese tourists...
...and of course the trees!
...eating delicious big Crabs... (I found it a bit tricky)
And pose with every big animal along the streets of Victoria, together with other Japanese tourists...
...and of course the trees!
Wednesday, July 19, 2006
Days in Victoria
It was my second time in Victoria - I was there last year in June. This visit was very different though as we planned to see as many of Joe's friends and family as possible during our stay - instead of enormous trees (Cathedral Grove)and instead of going whale watching to spot orcha wales. I posted photos from last year's trip earlier on my blog if you are interested.
Victoria itself is very very different from Vancouver - it has this garden feeling to it with flowers arranged everywhere, the downtown area has colorful facades and the city's British colonial heritage is still evident (for example the Queen normally comes for "high tea" in Victoria once every year!) but there is also a more contemporarily Pacific northwest feel to it, at least if you go outside of Victoria towards Tofino for example, more hippie...love your forest kind of feeling - again very laid back and - and of course great outdoor life...and a fair amount of big trucks and hicks to!
I've mostly seen the South of Vancouver Island - for example Long Beach in Tofino and Saltspring Islands, but so far it is definitely one of my favorite places in the world - maybe not to live there permanently - but for vacation and visiting and for outdoor things like trekking, kayaking etc. The coast is gorgeous: rugged coast line, cut deeply by fjords lined between high mountains with shores and protected bays. I've heard it's raining a lot there...but anyway - the mild climate is nice and also the reason why they have these amazing temperated rainforests there, and why the trees grow so biiiiig!
Totem poles - you see them everywhere - and the area is full of artists and gorgeous craft made in this tradition: Victoria was built on the ancestral lands of the Songhees and Esquimalt First Nations, and neighbouring T'souke and Saanich First Nations. Victoria as today started in the reign of Queen Victoria, but before the Europeans first set foot in what is now known as British Columbia, First Nations people had called Vancouver Island home for over 11,000 years! Today there are over 600 occupied reserves in Canada for the First Nations, most of them quite small in area, and the location isolated and remote areas. In Canada there were 2407 reserves in 1996, and the bad social conditions that is the reality today in most reserves, reflect the historical and political neglect that Canada has shown towards them Source: http://www.royalbcmuseum.bc.ca/exhibits/journeys/english/city_2_2a.html
http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.com/index.cfm?PgNm=TCE&Params=A1SEC822335
British Columbia's residents are mostly of British and German origin - but people of Chinese origin are the longest-residing ethnic immigrant groups, and they form about 10 per cent of today's population. Here's some history: Trade first brought Chinese shipwrights to Nootka in 1788. In 1858 many more Chinese came to British Columbia to mine for gold, and between 1881 and 1884 Chinese contract labourers came to work on building the Canadian Pacific Railway - they played a great role in the building of the railroad (Source: Same as above). Victoria therefor has the West Coast's olders China town which known for its opium and gambling houses - but today it's only a small one - especially compared to Vancouver - but still with Chinese commerce and culture with a beautiful red and golden hand-carves gate as the entrance to the shops and restaurants.
Me having bubble tea in China town...It is made by pouring hot tea over cooked and cooled tapioca pearls. Any hot tea can be used.It's originally from Taiwan. I am totally ADDICTED to this! I just found out that there used to be a place in Stockholm called "Bubble Tea and Friends" - but the owners moved to Hong Kong and had to close it down.
And we got to meet Devin, who must be the youngest dinosaur expert in the world - we had steak at the Kegs with Joe's brother Josh and his family - and a late birthday cake..!
And Kira who was only 5 weeks by the time we met her for the first time.
Lots of beer with Petra at Swan's Brewery...she is wearing her Albanian gifts, including socks on her hands...I like that Canadians order beer not by bottle - but by jugs!
Victoria itself is very very different from Vancouver - it has this garden feeling to it with flowers arranged everywhere, the downtown area has colorful facades and the city's British colonial heritage is still evident (for example the Queen normally comes for "high tea" in Victoria once every year!) but there is also a more contemporarily Pacific northwest feel to it, at least if you go outside of Victoria towards Tofino for example, more hippie...love your forest kind of feeling - again very laid back and - and of course great outdoor life...and a fair amount of big trucks and hicks to!
I've mostly seen the South of Vancouver Island - for example Long Beach in Tofino and Saltspring Islands, but so far it is definitely one of my favorite places in the world - maybe not to live there permanently - but for vacation and visiting and for outdoor things like trekking, kayaking etc. The coast is gorgeous: rugged coast line, cut deeply by fjords lined between high mountains with shores and protected bays. I've heard it's raining a lot there...but anyway - the mild climate is nice and also the reason why they have these amazing temperated rainforests there, and why the trees grow so biiiiig!
Totem poles - you see them everywhere - and the area is full of artists and gorgeous craft made in this tradition: Victoria was built on the ancestral lands of the Songhees and Esquimalt First Nations, and neighbouring T'souke and Saanich First Nations. Victoria as today started in the reign of Queen Victoria, but before the Europeans first set foot in what is now known as British Columbia, First Nations people had called Vancouver Island home for over 11,000 years! Today there are over 600 occupied reserves in Canada for the First Nations, most of them quite small in area, and the location isolated and remote areas. In Canada there were 2407 reserves in 1996, and the bad social conditions that is the reality today in most reserves, reflect the historical and political neglect that Canada has shown towards them Source: http://www.royalbcmuseum.bc.ca/exhibits/journeys/english/city_2_2a.html
http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.com/index.cfm?PgNm=TCE&Params=A1SEC822335
British Columbia's residents are mostly of British and German origin - but people of Chinese origin are the longest-residing ethnic immigrant groups, and they form about 10 per cent of today's population. Here's some history: Trade first brought Chinese shipwrights to Nootka in 1788. In 1858 many more Chinese came to British Columbia to mine for gold, and between 1881 and 1884 Chinese contract labourers came to work on building the Canadian Pacific Railway - they played a great role in the building of the railroad (Source: Same as above). Victoria therefor has the West Coast's olders China town which known for its opium and gambling houses - but today it's only a small one - especially compared to Vancouver - but still with Chinese commerce and culture with a beautiful red and golden hand-carves gate as the entrance to the shops and restaurants.
Me having bubble tea in China town...It is made by pouring hot tea over cooked and cooled tapioca pearls. Any hot tea can be used.It's originally from Taiwan. I am totally ADDICTED to this! I just found out that there used to be a place in Stockholm called "Bubble Tea and Friends" - but the owners moved to Hong Kong and had to close it down.
And we got to meet Devin, who must be the youngest dinosaur expert in the world - we had steak at the Kegs with Joe's brother Josh and his family - and a late birthday cake..!
And Kira who was only 5 weeks by the time we met her for the first time.
Lots of beer with Petra at Swan's Brewery...she is wearing her Albanian gifts, including socks on her hands...I like that Canadians order beer not by bottle - but by jugs!
Tuesday, July 18, 2006
Sea plane to Victoria
After a couple of days in Vancouver we took a sea plane over to Vancouver Island and the capital of British Columbia: Victoria - the town where Joe's old university UVIC is. The smallest plane I've ever been on - and it takes off from- and lands on the water, it flies low over the archipelago so you have a really spectacular view!
I was excited about these logs floating in the water cause it looked so Canadian...
Kontinentalsockeln....The Continental Shelf...
Landing in Victoria - with a completely different sky line than Vancouver!
I was excited about these logs floating in the water cause it looked so Canadian...
Kontinentalsockeln....The Continental Shelf...
Landing in Victoria - with a completely different sky line than Vancouver!
The day with T
Happy to hear that our friend T who was previously working in Albania and there after in Ginuea now lives in ta-ta-ta Vancouver!
The four of us spend some time throwing a fresbee on each other down at the beach under the trees
Is it, is it a flying saucer..?
T just started up a private law firm with her best friend - he is also a jurist and they share a gorgeous house together in Kitsilano (see below)
A lot of flags everywhere for Canada Day (this is not T's house....or her truck for that matter)
The four of us spend some time throwing a fresbee on each other down at the beach under the trees
Is it, is it a flying saucer..?
T just started up a private law firm with her best friend - he is also a jurist and they share a gorgeous house together in Kitsilano (see below)
A lot of flags everywhere for Canada Day (this is not T's house....or her truck for that matter)
Monday, July 17, 2006
Vancouver one day after Canada Day
Vancouver is really growing on me...I like it more and more...I can see why it is frequently ranked as one of the "best cities to live in": incredibly beautifully located nestled between the coastal mountains and the Pacific ocean - a perfect spot for outdoor activities - and that affects a lot the life style: most people are so laidback and friendly...really a nice spot for vacation!
On our first and sunny day we went down to Granville Island. Some short history for you: While Vancouver is a comparatively young city, at just over 100 years, its history begins long before. The indigenous peoples (First Nations) - have lived in the area for thousands of years, and Vancouver's namesake Captain George Vancouver sailed through the First Narrows in 1792. The first settlement on the downtown peninsula was Granville, located on the spot of today's Gastown. In the year of Canada's confederation a saloon was built on this site and a small shantytown of bars developed and stores adjacent to the original mill on the south shore of what is now the city's harbour.
We stayed with Joe's old friends Mike and Jocelyn, they are expecting a baby any day now! Great to meet them finally - here hugging in front of one of the many stages on Granville Island that were set up fot the Annual Jazz Festival.
The thing is, Vancouver is not really an exciting city: You can get fantastic meals, good drinks, find the coolest music, but it feels a bit sleepy - in a good way! What gives Vancouver a truely 'metropolitan' feel instead, is the fact that it's home to the second largest Chinatown in the world and that 30 percent of the population is Asian; Chinese Canadians formed 16 percent of the regional population in 2001, which vastly exceeds the percentages in New York, San Francisco, Toronto, and Los Angeles (Source: http://www.straight.com/content.cfm?id=12024). I imagine that in spirit Vancouver is a lot closer to Tokyo than let's say Toronto (where most Albanians live by the way).
A couple of business-men started to redevelop the area of Granville in the beginnings of the 70s and with the help of the federal government, they tuned the old industy buildings into spaces for artisans' work-shops, theatres, restaurants and a great market - all located in a very picturesque spot, False Creek downtown Vancouver. It seems like it is a favourite hang out for both locals and visitors with a relaxed atmoshphere, street theatre and green areas.
...You can also get a tour in the Granville Island Brewery (see below) - a lot of micro-breweries on the West Coast I tell you!
I also met Joe's friend Ron who used to work in Kosovo (with some visits to Albanian) a couple of years ago - that's how they met - here caressing an Albanian bottle of water "Tepelene - Suffle how it gush" that Joe brought back to him - nostalgia! Ron took me and Joe on a tour in his car to see different parts of the city which is the fastest growing part of Canada and the third largest city (over 2,000,000 residents) - and the host for the 2010 Winter Olympics. Apparently it is also the third largest film production centre for US-based productions in North America after Hollywood and New York...
Vancouver does have an ugly side too: Intravenous drug use. Prostitution. Child prostitution. Alcoholism. There are quite a lot of them walking around in certain parts of the city on the streets begging for coins.
Around false Creek - I've fallen in love with the architecture and housing style - each building different from the others and playing with light, water and wood. Less manicured that Scandinavian houses and more innovative.
Richmond has a higher proportion of Chinese Canadian residents, with 36 percent compared to 27 percent in Vancouver. Richmond also have a fantastic night market with delicious Asian food - everything you could possibly want, to ridiciously low prices. We spent a couple of hours there just eating from different stands - highly recommend!
On our first and sunny day we went down to Granville Island. Some short history for you: While Vancouver is a comparatively young city, at just over 100 years, its history begins long before. The indigenous peoples (First Nations) - have lived in the area for thousands of years, and Vancouver's namesake Captain George Vancouver sailed through the First Narrows in 1792. The first settlement on the downtown peninsula was Granville, located on the spot of today's Gastown. In the year of Canada's confederation a saloon was built on this site and a small shantytown of bars developed and stores adjacent to the original mill on the south shore of what is now the city's harbour.
We stayed with Joe's old friends Mike and Jocelyn, they are expecting a baby any day now! Great to meet them finally - here hugging in front of one of the many stages on Granville Island that were set up fot the Annual Jazz Festival.
The thing is, Vancouver is not really an exciting city: You can get fantastic meals, good drinks, find the coolest music, but it feels a bit sleepy - in a good way! What gives Vancouver a truely 'metropolitan' feel instead, is the fact that it's home to the second largest Chinatown in the world and that 30 percent of the population is Asian; Chinese Canadians formed 16 percent of the regional population in 2001, which vastly exceeds the percentages in New York, San Francisco, Toronto, and Los Angeles (Source: http://www.straight.com/content.cfm?id=12024). I imagine that in spirit Vancouver is a lot closer to Tokyo than let's say Toronto (where most Albanians live by the way).
A couple of business-men started to redevelop the area of Granville in the beginnings of the 70s and with the help of the federal government, they tuned the old industy buildings into spaces for artisans' work-shops, theatres, restaurants and a great market - all located in a very picturesque spot, False Creek downtown Vancouver. It seems like it is a favourite hang out for both locals and visitors with a relaxed atmoshphere, street theatre and green areas.
...You can also get a tour in the Granville Island Brewery (see below) - a lot of micro-breweries on the West Coast I tell you!
I also met Joe's friend Ron who used to work in Kosovo (with some visits to Albanian) a couple of years ago - that's how they met - here caressing an Albanian bottle of water "Tepelene - Suffle how it gush" that Joe brought back to him - nostalgia! Ron took me and Joe on a tour in his car to see different parts of the city which is the fastest growing part of Canada and the third largest city (over 2,000,000 residents) - and the host for the 2010 Winter Olympics. Apparently it is also the third largest film production centre for US-based productions in North America after Hollywood and New York...
Vancouver does have an ugly side too: Intravenous drug use. Prostitution. Child prostitution. Alcoholism. There are quite a lot of them walking around in certain parts of the city on the streets begging for coins.
Around false Creek - I've fallen in love with the architecture and housing style - each building different from the others and playing with light, water and wood. Less manicured that Scandinavian houses and more innovative.
Richmond has a higher proportion of Chinese Canadian residents, with 36 percent compared to 27 percent in Vancouver. Richmond also have a fantastic night market with delicious Asian food - everything you could possibly want, to ridiciously low prices. We spent a couple of hours there just eating from different stands - highly recommend!
Tuesday, July 04, 2006
BIG NEWS
Sitting in Vancouver, sunny and blue sky, beach not far away and a glass of Canadian champagne (yes it exists!) in my hand I have a great announcement:
I AM GOING TO NAIROBI!!!!! I passed the interview for UNFPA and got a UNV for one year with possibility to extention! Leaving Tirana by the end of this month!
Safari anyone?
I AM GOING TO NAIROBI!!!!! I passed the interview for UNFPA and got a UNV for one year with possibility to extention! Leaving Tirana by the end of this month!
Safari anyone?
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