Weekend Hiking Trip

This past weekend, my sitemate and I took a couple of kids from our Outdoor Ambassadors youth group camping. The area was absolutely beautiful and no one got injured, so it is going into the books as a great success. Camping is not very common at all in Albania, and since our youth group is environmentally focused, it made sense to take them camping, and it was a novelty for them.

We had to travel through Korce, which is a larger city, on the way to our hike/ camping site. As I was walking through the market in Korce, I saw a man casually leading a bear on a leash down the street. It was weird. Welcome to Albania. We then continued from Korce via public transportation (minibuses) to the village of Voskapoja. Voskapoja is a tiny village with a population of only around 200 people, but is known for its beautiful old churches.

From Voskapoja we headed out on a two hour hike into the wilderness and eventually found a good place to camp for the night. Most of you are probably wondering how I was able to manage to take a bunch of high school kids camping. I am not known for my practical skills, and my outdoor skills are essentially nonexistent. I am fairly certain that this was the first night of my life that had ever been spent in a tent that wasn't located in a backyard. Luckily, my sitemate, Mark, is well versed in camping and did all of the hard stuff (ie setting up the tent, starting the fire, cooking the food, and figuring out where the hell we were going.) Here we are hiking out to our campsite. The area of Albania where we went hiking is full of pine trees, which is not very common in Albania. The country is really small area- wise but has a lot of different looking physical landscapes. It makes for very interesting travel, and I'm lucky to have the opportunity to explore the different landscapes that Albania has to offer.

The end of summertime (means an attempt to get into blogging)

So I know. I have been terrible about updating this blog. It's been many months. But I am attempting to get into a schedule (for many things in my life,) which I hope will spur me to update this blog more regularly.

So here is a brief outline on what I have been doing.

I live in Pogradec, Albania. It is a medium sized town (pop approx 38,000), located in Southeastern Albania. The distinguishing features of Pogradec include it's location on the shore of Lake Ohrid, as well as it's proximity to Macedonia. The national border between Albania and Macedonia actually stretches across the lake. Here is a view of Pogradec from a hill overlooking the city.

In terms of my living conditions, I definitely have it better than I ever thought I would in Peace Corps. I have wireless internet and a fully furnished apartment. I live alone and generally feel comfortable and secure. Here is a view from the window of my apartment. It looks into a courtyard in which four apartment building face and essentially surround a private house, which they were apparently built around. I find the arrangement pretty amusing.

Domestic tourism is a huge part of the economy of Pogradec in the summer, and the entire town is buzzing with tourists throughout the months June, July, and August. This makes for a fun and entertaining atmosphere in the town during the summer months. It also means that during the summer I was mistaken for a German tourist almost daily. Above is a photo of some chairs for rent on the beach in front of the town.

After a fairly intense training period in which I lived with a host family and was scheduled for almost every moment of the day, it was a nice relief to be able to move into my own space and set my own schedule. This was compounded by the fact that work in this part of the world slows down considerably during the summer. This allowed me extra time to travel around the country of Albania, which is absolutely beautiful, and enjoy myself. I have heard some grumbling that my photos don't look particularly like what anyone would expect from the peace corps, but so be it! The above photo is of me jumping into a spring called Blue Eye, or Syre I Kalter. The water flows from an underwater spring and is overwhelmingly cold.

My summer was punctuated with a visit from my mother, Monica, and my brother, Joe, in late July. We had a great time, but if you consult them they can attest that not everything here is as easy as it might seem. Special recognition to Monica for navigating the absolutely insane roads here in a stick shift rental car!

I won't go into many work related things in this post, but I'll just give a brief outline. My primary work assignment here is with the bashkia, or the municipal government. I work in the department of tourism and economic development. I also work with a branch of a nationwide youth group here in the city, called Outdoor Ambassadors. Hopefully I will get the chance to also work with some local NGOs. Here is a photo of my counterpart, Majlinda, (my Albanian colleague that I work most closely with,) and I in front of the lake. The bashkia is situated very close to the lake, and I can see the lake from most of the office windows, which is very refreshing.

Things have been picking up in terms of work in the last few weeks and my schedule is a lot more normal, so I am going to make a concerted effort to update this blog. I also think that I have allowed my mind to settle and have adjusted to Albania enough to be able to voice my thoughts in a more coherent manner. I'll finish the post with a photo of myself and my PCV friends Liila and Sara standing on a crazy stone bridge stretching over a river in Liila's site of Permet.

I promise I will update again soon!

update

Sorry about the long wait for an update! I do not have internet in the home where I'm staying so my internet time is limited.

So far I think things are going well! I moved in with my host family almost a week ago. They live in a small village called Thane, which is not too far from Elbasan. I will be staying with my host family for the duration of pre- service training, which lasts 10 weeks. There are 6 other peace corps volunteers (pcvs) staying in Thane with me, and we each stay with a different family. I have two host sisters (20 and 18) and a host brother (17), who I live with along with their parents. They are very friendly and welcoming, and they even threw me a party when they found out it was my birthday.

Pre service training is really intensive and I am honestly working my ass off. We have around 5 hours of language class every day, and we go into Elbasan two or three days a week for technical training. I do technical training with the other COD (community and organization development) trainees. There are three sectors in Albania for peace corps, COD, which is my sector, Health education, and teaching english as a foreign language.

The language is not easy and we are learning at a fairly fast pace, but I think I am doing ok so far. The language barrier was really hard at first with my host family because I spoke essentially no Shqip (Albanian) when I was dropped off at their house, but it gets better every day.

Yesterday we had a hub day in Elbasan, where all of the trainees come together for the day. The trainees got me a cake/ card for my birthday, which was really sweet. Afterwards we went out for some much- needed beers before heading back home. I will be really busy with language and technical trainings over the next few weeks. Next weekend I am going on a site visit to stay with a current volunteer and get a feel for life as an actual volunteer. I don't know where I am going yet, but I am definitely excited for the trip.

I hope everyone at home is doing well and hopefully I will be able to post again soon!

arrival

I am safe and sound in Elbasan, Albania! We got into Tirana yesterday, March 15, around 2:30 PM. We were all fairly exhausted from our flight/ 4 hr layover in Vienna, but we still had a two hour bus ride from Tirana to Elbasan, where we are staying in a hotel until Sunday. I struggled to stay awake during the bus ride, but it was kind of a losing battle.

The peace corps training staff has been very helpful and well organized so far, and I am ready for our first full day of actual pre-service training. There are 43 other trainees in my training group who all seem very smart, motivated, and interesting. Anyways, I just wanted to put up a quick post to let everyone know I am here in Albania and everything is going well, I will take the time to write a longer post later on this week!

getting ready

Hello everyone! So I'm going to give blogging a try as a way to keep family and friends informed while I am serving in the Peace Corps.

Here is my timeline for the next week: On Monday March 12th I am heading to Boston and spending the night there, and I am catching a flight to DC the next morning. We have to be at a hotel in Georgetown for an orientation/ registration session by 12:30 on Tuesday, March 13th. I will spend the night in DC with my fellow trainees and the following evening we will fly to Tirana, the capital of Albania, by way of Vienna.

What all of this means is that I really should be all packed by Sunday. For anyone who knows me well, you will know that organization is not one of my strongest assets. I quit work about a week and a half ago so that I could "really concentrate on getting ready to leave." Last week that translated into re-watching episodes of arrested development, downloading music, and hanging out with my cats while thinking about all of the things I had to do.This week has been better in terms of productivity, mostly because my little sister is on spring break so she is forcing me to be proactive (thank you anna!). I am essentially taking it for granted that I will forget something important, because that is the way I function, so I just trying to minimize the impact.

I was able to say goodbye to a lot of my friends over the past two weekends, which was really fun, albeit bittersweet, and is definitely making this whole thing more real. I am finally getting a bit nervous, but mostly feeling excited.