Today we just hung out in Tirana. We spent the morning at the hostel, chilling out - playing chess, checking e-mail, watching frogs, getting our stuff in order, etc.
The picture above is a pretty typical site - a street vendor, in this case selling cheap toys for kids, an old woman knitting to pass the time while she waits for customers.
This is Mami Nadir, Genci's mother. She is starting to trust me more. She let me take her place her in some decent light and take her photo. She looks pretty good for 71. I think she must have been quite beautiful when she was younger.
The posters are politcal ads. There are elections quickly approaching and there are large, professional posters for all of the candidates.
This woman let me take her photo (I told her I would bring her a copy in a few days). At first she looked pretty stern in the photos. Then I explained to her that before I had taken her photo, she looked so sweet & happy, but in the photos she looked like she was a little bit afraid of me. We tried again. We did better. Then I showed her the last photo I took & she started to smile & laugh. Then I got the photo I was hoping for.
This is the road I photograph so often in my trips - but usually it's full of people, goods & life. This is what it looks like after the market shuts down. Not much. Quite a transformation.
Nathan has his feet in warm/hot water. This is a very Albanian thing to do. It's fun to see my kids submit to these Albanian rituals. In this country, having warm feet means everything, just as having cold feet is like being on a quick path to sickness and death. They spend so much time worrying about whether everyone has enough layers on (usually 2-3 times as much as what Americans are used to), and having some sort of shoes between you and the floor or ground is an absolute necessity. I think Nathan had taken off his shoes, which had really worried his grandmother. But that was all fixed with a long (perhaps 20-30 minute) soak in hottish water.
I ran into these eggs while walking past an Orthodox church. Today is palm sunday. There were a bunch of things for sale, Easter trinkets I assume.
The next few pictures I took at the hostel this morning. I always seem to forget to document the place where we're staying. But it's really nice here.
The kids play chess a lot. Today they played backgammon.
This is my hot potato!
There is a woman who lives/works at the hostel who is super creative. She has many different mediums that she works in & she's always creating art around her. I think she's 21 years old, perhaps 24. The amount of creative work that comes out of her is amazing, as is her perspective on life. One of the benefits of staying at a hostel is that you meet a lot of interesting people. I need to remember to get a photo of her. I forget her name. It starts with an "M".
This is another example of a street vendor. This guys is selling suitcases and sunglasses. People often sell strange mixtures of things - perhaps whatever they have found a way to obtain easily or cheapily. I don't know how they choose their items. Perhaps by what their connections are.
Oh yes, I forgot to mention something that Luke said this morning on the walk from the hostel to Gjushja's house. He seemed a little down. I asked how he was doing. He said he was sad, but he didn't know why. A couple of minutes later, he started talking about how there are a lot of poor people in Albania and that that made him sad. He also said that people that come from countries that are rich might feel guilty about how poor some of these people are. (I'm guessing that he might have been feeling a bit of that himself.) He worries about the beggar children that sit in the park waiting for handouts at all times of day and night. He wonders where their parents are (They do have parents, by the way. The kids' job is to sit there and look pitiful.) A couple of minutes after talking about the poor, Luke said "I think Albania might be too tough for me.", which I took to meant that it might be too hard for his tender hard to take the sight of this hardship. He is so tenderhearted. It's quite beautiful. And this is the kid who is really in love with Albania. The first couple of days he kept remarking about how this is the best country in the world. He was very happy to be here. I think he still is happy to be here, but this morning (noon, really) he was hungry and tired and perhaps a bit raw - the hardness of the income differences here got to him. Besides encountering the Roma (gypsies) begging in the park, the kids are aware of income differences because we have had many conversations about being careful not to display our comparative wealth here. Some people make $7-10 a day (e.g. maids, low-skilled workers). To buy a toy that is on the expensive end in the middle of the marketplace can be inconsiderate, as it shows others how easily we could throw around money. A construction or furniture builder worker might make $500 a month. Unemployment or welfare is about $50 a month. There are also very wealthy Albanian driving around too. They're not all poor. Genci knows the value of cars & sees plenty of very expensive ones, like Hummers & high end Mercedes or BMWs. He even saw a Bentley the other day. There is a huge range of incomes here, but most people are on the lower end, and we are very conscious of it. I think it's sad for everyone to realize that life isn't fair for everyone. But it's especially hard for a tenderhearted seven-year-old.
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