Brittany Spears and Albanian conversations
Trip Start
May 06, 2007
1
96
166
Trip End
Jul 24, 2008
Berat,
Albania
Saturday, December 15, 2007
Then the questions began to get personal. How old was I? Was I married? How old was Steve (the Australian guy I had met in Ulcinj and was still traveling with who she presumed to be my boyfriend)? "He's 22 and you're 27 - that can't be right!" It took some prodding to convince translator-man to tell me what that line had meant. When he finally translated it, he quickly followed it up saying that he told her he didn't think we were that kind of friends.
She then told me that it's good that I'm not married. She got married at 18 and had four babies and it was too young. She never had a chance to live a life. She repeatedly said that I should wait until I'm 40 to get married. But, she does have an unmarried brother she could introduce me to - he's a good man and I should meet him. Obviously I responded no thank you. When she continued to press on about me meeting her brother, I told her that I have a boyfriend in the US and he wouldn't like me meeting other men like that. Thankfully that seemed to stop all talk of her brother.
Once the woman seemed to have had enough talking to me, I had an interesting conversation with translator-man. He learned English while studying on international programs in Finland and Switzerland. I didn't quite understand what he was studying in either place. He said there are many problems in Albania with the government and people are not happy here. The power outages are too regular and are getting worse. He said that the government is spending too much money that it doesn't have on power and it will eventually run out, but they don't really have any viable alternatives. His questions to me mostly centered around Brittany Spears - where does she live? Have I seen her house? Do I know how big it is? Where is she from? Does she have a house there too? I tried explaining to him that I really don't know anything (or care at all) about Brittany Spears, but he kept asking until I turned around and ended the conversation.
Throughout the entire bus ride there was a guy in his late teens or early twenties sitting a row in front of me across the aisle who turned around and stared directly at me. I didn't see him face forward once. It was a bit creepy, but didn't feel dangerous. I had read in the guidebook that staring was practically a sport in Albania, but I didn't expect it to go to such extremes as an entire 4-hr bus ride.
Once in Berat, we spent the afternoon walking around the castle/fortress and the old town area on a hill above town. We also visited the Onufri museum. Onufri, Albania's most famous artist, mostly painted icons and other religious paintings. Many of his paintings were originally displayed in churches throughout Berat. They were really beautiful works of art.
That evening we walked around town for a bit. We went into the only internet cafe where I discovered that the connection was so slow that I could see my list of messages in gmail but couldn't open any of them. While we were on the internet, there was another power outage.
Back in the hotel that evening, we gathered blankets from all the different rooms to help deal with the cold. After a bit of Albanian idol (or something very similar to it), with all of the singing in English with thick Albanian accents and all of the commentary in Albanian, I fell asleep.
In the morning after visiting the ethnography museum, I took a few pictures around town and then attempted to board a bus heading south to Sarande. I had been told the previous day that a Sarande-bound bus left around 10am every morning, so I figured that 9:30am was early enough to show up at the bus "station". Wrong. (Cue quiz-show style buzzer.) The bus had already left by then and there weren't any more until the next day. Instead I got on a bus heading west to Vlore, where I was told I'd be able to catch a bus to Sarande that afternoon.
