More voice work

Recently, a local language instruction company sent a notice to the Embassy requesting two native English speakers - a man and a woman - to record dialogues for its English language course. Abby and I signed up, and today we went to make the recordings. We arrived at the studio and received the scripts; and as we flipped through the pages, we immediately realized that these truly were English scripts in that they included lines like "How do you like London?", "Crikey, was anyone hurt?" and "I'm leaving tomorrow from the nearest tube station." Moreover, despite the fact that the company had advertised for one male speaker and one female speaker only, some of the dialogues included three or more speakers, sometimes all of a single gender.

After exchanging a few worried glances with one another, we asked the project team how they wanted to handle these issues, and they told us to just go ahead; so, being good actors, we took their direction and read all of our parts. (Abby was quite good at changing her voice to fit the different characters, whereas the best I could do was make it sound like my trousers were tighter or looser depending on the role.) Our delivery was stilted since we had to speak so slowly and carefully, and the dialogues themselves were pretty useless - chatting about whether we liked roller coasters instead of presenting situations in which students of English might actually find themselves - but none of this was for us to decide; we just did our best, and Berlitz has nothing to fear from us.

Munich photos

We spent a long Thanksgiving weekend with Swantje and Thomas. Abby cooked an amazing meal and we toured the city, which was lovely.

Marienplatz by night; the Neue Rathaus (New Town Hall) and its famous glockenspiel; inside the Frauenkirche (Church of Our Lady); Ricky, the Munich walking tour guide from Canada, Pope Benedict XVI, and Abby.
Produce at the Viktualenmarkt; people standing by a fountain in the market; the interior staircase of the Alte Pinokethek art museum.
Views from the top of the Pieterkirchen (St. Peter's Church), including the Alte Rathaus; the Neue Rathaus; the Frauenkirche; and the sunset. While taking the second picture, I knocked my rangefinder camera against the protective grate surrounding the observation deck and the filter and lens cap popped off and flew over the side. Fortunately, it lodged in an overhang at the base of the tower so no one was hurt.

Those Darn Albanians

I've titled this posting gently, instead of calling it "Those F-----g Albanians" as I would have liked to have done. The reason for this is that my nieces or nephews might see this blog entry, and I don't want them to get the right impression of how I deal with annoying people. The subject of this entry is, of course (and possibly again), traffic in Albania. Albanians are the warmest, friendliest people when they in the open air. Even around cars, they're helpful, for example, guiding you into a parking space. But put them into automobiles themselves, and they become nihilistic, egotistical bastards whose only concern is to get in front of you, no matter what it takes to cut you off.

Last night I was driving through town to pick up Abby from work. It was rush hour, and bad weather, so the roads were more congested than normal. Unpleasant, but not unexpected, so I inched my way up the boulevard without too much impatience. However, when I was waiting at the intersection of one of the side streets - two lanes in each direction - I saw how a fleet of oncoming cars had lined up on the opposite side of the road, i.e., in my lane, to turn left rather than wait behind the cars that were continuing straight. Worse, there was a traffic cop standing on the corner, and he didn't see anything wrong with this. When the light changed, I naturally charged in, horn blaring, and I yelled to the cop "Janë në rradhën time!" (they're in my lane), with the hope that he might actually control the traffic and force the drivers back into their own lanes; instead, he just told me "Avash, avash" (relax, take it easy), and let them all through the intersection - except that he made a token show of yelling at the last guy in the line for talking on his cell phone as he drove. I was tempted to risk arrest by simply parking my car in the intersection and picking a fight over his traffic direction skills, but I couldn't imagine the embassy brass, not to mention my wife, having much sympathy for me if I had gone ahead and done it.

Surprisingly, traffic was not tied up by the factory fire that we saw on the highway as we came back from the airport after our Munich vacation, about which I'll write more later. A hidrosanitaire factory, whatever that is, caught fire just before we landed; we reached it about half an hour later. People pulled to the side of the road to watch the action, but they didn't just slow to a crawl and block traffic while they viewed the disaster, as rubberneckers would have done in the States. Go figure.

Fire at Henry Hidrosanitaire; smoke billows into the sky as spectators watch; a lone firetruck parked to the right had made it to the scene after half an hour; people watching from the pedestrian bridge.

I tried to contact a news service through an acquaintance at Reuters so I could sell these to the local papers, but he was unable to find anyone to take my photos. Still, it was great fun to run up and down capturing news in the making.

Getting back to blogging (warning: this is mainly about photography)

It has been a while since I've written more than a single line of text. No one's said anything - which may be an indication of larger problems - but I suppose there's a lot to catch up on.

Ten days after the election, most Albanians are still cheering Obama's victory. He's clearly a powerful symbol here, and it's interesting to see that even though Albania joined the Coalition of the Willing, the Albanians I've spoken to think the Iraq war was a bad idea. Today I had coffee with three guys who were selling live turkeys door-to-door (no joke); they offered to let me take their pictures if I paid them, and when I refused on principle, they said they'd do it for a coffee, which was more agreeably adventurous to me. The communication was a little clumsy - their Albanian is pretty rustic - but we agreed that the Obama win was a good thing since he, like many Albanians, knows what it's like to grow up poor.

I've given up on trying to find worthwhile employment and am focusing wholly on photography. I've completed my darkroom course and am now developing my own film, with all the pitfalls that involves. For example, I essentially "erased" a roll of film by washing it in developer that had gone bad, and I've underdeveloped a few other rolls; and going 100% manual from the outset by using a rangefinder camera has resulted in some pretty poor photos.* However, I'm starting to get the type of photos that I've wanted with my Nikon F4. Granted, I had them professionally developed, but I think they came out well. At some point, I'd like to do an exhibition/exposé on the Tirana Zoo, it is so depressing.

Photos from Tirana's Zoological Park.

Even digitized, these film photos are superior to what I'm getting out of my Nikon D300. However, for my unpaid work with Mapo magazine (I've now been published twice, with two more stories on the way) or for my friend's play (I've been photographing the rehearsals for a young Albanian film director who's putting on his first stage work), there's no substitute for being able to take 400 photos in a day with a DSLR, look at them immediately, and then erase 350 of them. Here are some shots I took of a miners' strike. I gave these to Mapo as well, but I probably should have tried to sell them directly to Reuters. Oh well, next time.


*Also, with the closer involvement of printing my own photos I've also realized that my eyes are failing; I cannot get a sharp 4 x 6 print on the enlarger because, with or without my glasses, my eyes just can't focus well enough for fine detail.

Election Night

It's 4 AM here; we've been up since 2 AM watching the results. Very exciting.

(The dog thinks we're nuts and he stayed in bed.)

Tuborg Beer television ad

You can watch my Tuborg ad by clicking here.

Brussels

Just a few photos here.

I Want My MAPO*

* If you are younger than 40, ask your parents or an older sibling.

The photography has been coming fast and furious, with this past Friday being my first photo shoot for Mapo magazine, Albania's answer to Time. My friend, the photographer Roland Tasho, had asked me if I was interested in working for the magazine; I wouldn't be paid, but of course I jumped at the opportunity, so he introduced me to the assistant editor, Beni, and we arranged for my first trip out with the magazine.

Naimi, an older man with 35 years' experience as a professional driver, picked me up at 7.30 (being 20 minutes late). I hopped in the backseat of his Mercedes Benz station wagon and realized there were no working seatbelts in the back. The driver and his daughter, who was along for the ride, did have seatbelts up front, but - true to the Albanian style - weren't using them. This, I decided, was not a good start.

We drove southward, stopping in Lushnje for some excellent byrek at one of these types of places that all the professional drivers know, and then arrived in Berat. Our first story was to write about the houses of Gorica, one of Berat's three neighborhoods, and the problems that the residents had in maintaining them. Berat is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, so people cannot make any external repairs without getting a clearance from the museum. The museum pays half the cost, but since the people are quite poor, it's not clear where they get the money, and many of them simply cannot afford the repairs at all.

The houses of Gorica; one of the neighborhood streets - note the exposed lathing on the alcove;a roof in need of repair.

I took scores of photos, some of which I'll use for my own artistic purposes, for example (these are unedited):


We finished the interviews and then returned to our driver, who introduced us to a close friend of his; this second driver, Dhurimi, offered to drive Beni and me to our next site, with Naimi and his daughter following in their car. Since we had to taking a winding road through the mountains, and Dhurimi's car was a comfortable new Mercedes sedan with all its seatbelts in place, I was happy to switch cars.

We drove about an hour until we reached Bogova, where we were going to research an article about water. Bogova is the source of drinking water for the area, with a mountain spring of cold clear water, but it gets polluted as it hits the river. We parked our drivers at a taverna at 2.30 and went out in search of the head of the commune for an interview. He was welcoming but at the same time combative; Beni told me later that the guy had a lot to hide.

The water looks nice until you look more closely upstream; water breaking over a rock.

Beni and I returned to the table at 3.30 and ate our lunch. I had a delicious serving of kid goat meat; Beni had pork chops; there were cheeses, salad and bread, and the others kept eating and talking and drinking wine (Naimi) and raki (Dhurimi) as we finished our meals. Dhurimi - who I discovered was acting as our host - then ordered another plate of meat, this time some sausages on skewers. Beni and Naimi's daughter explained they were intestines, and suggested that I not even try to figure out what was inside the casing. I cut open one of the skewers that Beni deposited on my plate, and - well - if intestines themselves had intestines, that might approximate what I saw. It didn't taste unlike liver or kidney, but I can't say I was sufficiently intrigued to continue past the first mouthful.

I was struggling to follow the conversation and starting to worry as the sun began to escape behind the mountains. Eager to follow its example, at 5.00 I suggested that since we still had a three-hour drive back to Tirana, perhaps we should leave. "In five minutes" they said as Dhurimi poured himself a second and then a third glass of raki and lit another cigarette. Finally at 6.00, after waiting for the taverna owner to return with a package for Naimi, we got up from the table, only to then try to jump-start the owner's car, the battery of which had died.

Thus it was 6.30 when we left, with (and perhaps my mother should stop reading here) both drivers sufficiently fortified by alcohol. Granted, I was in the car with seatbelts, and the driver was saying something in Albanian to Beni about how much raki he could drink, but curiously I didn't feel reassured; no doubt, each dead driver for whom we saw a roadside memorial was equally confident that he drove better with a few slugs under his belt. So I was deeply glad when we got back to Berat and I switched back to the other car, seatbelt-less but at least on better roads. Still, we didn't get away before Dhurimi insisted we have a coffee at his café; and when I first declined to drink anything, Beni made it clear that I was committing a grave offense by refusing Dhurimi's hospitality. I had had more than enough of his hospitality already and just wanted to get home, but in response to the stricken faces around the table I took a Coke.

Naimi, now sober, drove at a terrific speed to get us back to Tirana before it became too late - again, a mixed blessing, given the lack of seatbelts - but I did make it home in one piece. I subsequently told Beni that when we go out again, I have to get a seatbelt or I'm not going. Meanwhile, if all goes well, the articles will be printed in editions next week and then two weeks after that.

Bring me the head of John the Baptist!

More photos and travelogue here. Note that you can see the text by clicking on each photo, or by starting the slideshow and under options choosing "Show title and description."

Photos

This past Wednesday I began learning how to use a darkroom, and I made my first print. Very cool, and certainly a more physical activity than sitting in front of the computer. It's also a much more time-consuming activity, since each print takes about 20 minutes - if you get it right the first time. But damn, it's fun.

Click here for a selection of photographs from Paris.

Back from Paris, Brussels and London

I'm back from London. I did have a root canal after all, but it was fairly painless. The night before, I saw "The Mousetrap", which also was fairly painless, but that's not the adjective you usually want to use when describing theater. "The Mousetrap" has been running for 56 years -my visit was performance #23,264 and it felt like it. It's hard to believe that even the audiences of the 1950s were willing to sit through such a contrived plot. Another first-hand example of the difference between the world view of Americans vs. Europeans was when I held a conversation with a woman who decided she was "sympathetic to Chavez" after seeing a documentary.

I saw a lot of art while we were away. In addition to seeing the brilliant Musee d'Orsay and the Orangerie (Monet's Water Lilies) in Paris, we visited the Pompideau Center, and I shall rant a bit about the Pompideau Center. While there is a lot of 1950s-1960s modern painting that I find lovely and thought-provoking, there's also a huge amount of self-indulgent pretentious crap being churned out as well. I can't even quote some of the descriptions - "obliviating the boundaries between representation and abstraction", "turning directly to the unconscious to guide the painter's hand over the canvas", "refusing to be bound by a profound lack of talent", that kind of thing - without gagging. Look at, for example, Cy Twombly's Achilles Mourning the Death of Patroclus from 1962:

What the hell is this? Yet the actual canvas is about six feet by six feet, so I think the secret of modern painting is: if it's really big, people will think it has to be good. Hence you can paint a canvas white, paint a blue square on the edge, and as long as the whole thing requires five men to mount it on the wall, it's art. There are also the installation pieces - big chairs, stacks of pots under a table, etc. At one point my eye was drawn to a cannister with a collection of pipes and hoses suspended from a wall, but it proved to just be fire-fighting equipment in the hallway. But all it needed was better lighting and a label.

There wasn't much to see in Brussels - not surprisingly, a lot of the work there was influenced by the French, and the collection of moderns works was bad (except for the guy who works in mussel shells), but London's Tate Modern added to my outrage and bafflement against contemporary art. Again, I'm not knocking the whole collection - there are many modern painters and sculptors whose abstract or crudely-shaped images are weirdly brilliant - but one of the pieces on exhibit is a large, irregularly-shaped paper octagon that is pasted onto a white wall. The artist, Richard Tuttle, has created a whole series of large irregularly-shaped octagons cut out of paper and stuck onto walls, sometimes even when the wall is nearly the same color as the octagon (for added artistic value). Take that, Alex Calder.

So I am baffled by the art world. Yet there are aspects of classical art that also mystify me, albeit for different reasons. Take this piece of information on display in the Victoria & Albert Museum about painting on ivory:

Since it is more difficult to work on ivory than on vellum, miniature painters learned to prepare their watercolours differently. They used more gum arabic to make it stickier. They also discovered that adding ox-gall, the liquid from the gall bladder of a cow or bull, made the watercolour flow more easily. This allowed them greater freedom when using the brush.

How does someone think to look in a cow's gall bladder for the solution to making paint stick to ivory?

Meanwhile, in the art world here at home, the National Gallery is under renovation. They had an exhibition while we were away in which the creators of Socialist Realist masterpieces reinterpreted their paintings directly onto the walls of the gallery hall where they hung; the Gallery then painted the reinterpretations over, to literally immure them in the gallery walls while at the same time symbolizing the end of Socialist Realist art. Also, Playboy magazine is finally for sale in Albania, thus creating a whole new market for nudes heretofore unrealized.

I'll post the trip photos eventually, but this is one of my favorites:

Wrest & relaxation

It's Saturday the 27th; Abby's been back from our R&R trip to Paris and Brussels for six days, while I continued on to London. I was supposed to return home tonight, but I've had to extend my trip four more days so I can complete my dental treatment - part of my trip being a visit to the U.S. Embassy-recommended dentist here to fix the problems that have baffled the Albanian dentists. It turns out that I have a fractured tooth. The fracture is not actually visible in the x-rays, but the dentist figured it out based on my description of the symptoms and some judicious (but painful) prodding. When I bite on something - a nut, say, or a dental tool - the various pieces of tooth shift and put pressure on the pulp.

The dentist has put a band around the tooth to hold it together and to see what happens: if the band alone resolves the symptoms, he'll measure my tooth for a crown on Monday and fit the crown on Wednesday. If it doesn't, however, then I'll need to have a root canal on Tuesday. More about the whole trip, including photographs and gory dental details, when I return to Tirana.

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A few days before we left for the R&R, I found out that I had been chosen to be the voice of Tuborg beer in Albania. It turns out that I'd been pronouncing the name as "Teuborg" - or, in the Albanian spelling, "Tyborg", since the y in Albanian is pronounced as "ieux" in French. Appropriately corrected, I recorded the final version for "Tooborg" on Thursday the 18th, in exchange for which I received a 12-pack of Tuborg and six mugs with the product's logo. I asked if I would be paid, but the account exec tautologically explained that he wasn't going to pay me since I'm not a professional voice-over actor. Neat trick, isn't it?

A few things

Last week, I received a call from one of my American friends who in turn is a friend of an advertising executive here in Tirana. The advertisers needed an American voice to record a tagline for a Tuborg beer commercial: "Tuborg - open for fun!" My friend - who has a great bass voice - was out of town, so he gave me the phone number for the audition.

I went down to the agency, met the account executive's assistant, and sat down in a make-shift recording studio to do some demos. "Tuborg - open for fun!"; "Tuborg - open for fun!"; "Tuborg - open for fun!"; perhaps even "Tuborg - open for fun!"; and so on. It wasn't clear to me whether I was meant to be giving listeners advice ("open this bottle of Tuborg now so you can have some fun") or whether I was describing the beer as ready for listeners to enjoy (as in, "Tuborg is open for business - the business in question being that of your having fun"). The engineer offered a few suggestions, but all I could think was "Americans don't talk like that." My confusion must have showed; a few times, I sounded like I was reading a stock ticker. Still, some of takes genuinely sounded like I thought Tuborg beer was fun.

That was Wednesday, and the executive was going to listen to the tape in the afternoon. I haven't heard back, so I have to believe I'm not going to be the voice of Tuborg beer in Albania.

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I was taking photos on Thursday when an older man stopped me and asked me something about my camera. After I asked him "Me falni?" ("Excuse me?"), he asked whether I was German or English. I said American, at which point he shook my hand, then raised it to his lips and kissed it. He began praising the U.S. or something - I was still taking in what had just happened and so wasn't following a word - and then asked me to take his picture. As I lifted the camera to my eye, he lifted his hands in a victory sign and shouted "Sa-li Be-ri-sha!" (the name of Albania's prime minister) before shaking and kissing my hand again.

This country gets more weird every day.

Cooper in the park

Despite Cooper's fierce expression, he's just playing with a dog we call Arthur (because he has what looks like a dent in his head).

Soka Gakkai in Tirana

Yesterday, I hosted the first-ever Buddhist meeting held in Tirana. There were eight of us - two Albanian Buddhists who learned about Buddhism from friends or relatives in Italy, an Italian man and his wife who live in Macedonia, a Japanese woman studying in Montenegro, the sister of one of the Albanians, an Albanian guy whom we're teaching about the practice, and myself. We discussed our experiences in encountering Buddhism, and it was actually affecting to hear the two Albanians talk about how long they'd waited for this day. One of them has practiced alone, in a small village outside the city of Vlorë, for 11 years. Coincidentally, 24 August is the anniversary that the President of the SGI, Daisaku Ikeda, began to practice Buddhism, so the day had a particular significance.

Trip photos - Albania, Montenegro, Croatia

I have no idea when, if ever, I'm going to get my Croatia trip photos back from Clark Color Lab, so - drawing on the few that I had developed here and Abby's photos, here's the first set.

Encounters and updates

First off, I promise to have the photos from our Croatia trip up in the next week or so - assuming I don't fly off to London for a "dental evacuation." We get one such trip out of country for dental problems that cannot be fixed in-country, and the dentists I've seen here still haven't been able to solve the tooth sensitivity I've been having since April. In particular, one of my teeth hurts whenever I put pressure on it. I've had an old filling replaced twice, but the problem won't go away; the next step may be to seek help from what is presumably a better-trained, better-equipped dentist someplace else.

In general, I have to wonder about dental care in Albania. There seems to be a dental clinic on every other corner; and while some of them are shiny and full of clean equipment, a few look to be little more than a barber's chair and a drill. Moreover, tooth care among the aged is not good; I've had a few conversations with old men who are nearly unintelligible since they have all of three teeth in their heads (or they're a bit drunk, or both).

Today Abby and I walked Cooper in the park, and as we made our way we began seeing dogs that we knew, and they began to follow us; and after Abby left, some other dogs recognized Cooper and me, and joined the pack. At one point, Cooper and I were in the woods, surrounded by 13 relatively large dogs. It was thrilling, and not necessarily in a good way - I'd seen how they can turn on one another without apparent notice - so I kept my eyes open.

The photography continues. I've begun taking photos of rehearsals for a young film director whom I met; he's staging his first play and wants to document the process. I borrowed a friend's digital camera for the first session, and as much as I love film, I have to say that for high-volume shooting, digital is fantastic, so I've ordered my own (a Nikon D300). Still, I'm trying to master film, and to learn to shoot according to the "sunny 16" rule without looking at the light meter, so I'm going to be burning through a lot of rolls over the next few months.

A hell of a way to end (or start) a new year

Last night, Abby and I celebrated our second anniversary, and the end of our first year in Tirana, with our British friends Sam and Phil whose wedding anniversary was the day before. (That's Samantha and Philip, in case you were wondering.) We had a nice dinner and then returned to their house, where we'd left our car. We'd parked in their driveway, which runs off a narrow and heavily-trafficked street, so Phil stood in the street to block cars while I backed out. Unfortunately, I assumed that since he was watching my back, all was clear, and I did not see the low, dark BMW parked behind me ...

The owner, a young Albanian guy who owned the bar across the street, came rushing out yelling. The damage to his car was minor - a scratch and a small dent, better than the cracked bumper we suffered. We called in our embassy patrol who in turn called the police; and at first the owner raged that he was not going to move his car until I fixed it, which made no sense, but I apologized and assured him that everything would be fixed. He continued venting but eventually calmed down, and by the end of the evening we were all sitting at his bar having a drink together, to show no hard feelings. Of course, I accepted the liability, and today I paid a 500 lekë fine (about $6) and the insurance company will sort out the repairs.

Still, this is not as bad as the situation faced by the new embassy family we are sponsoring, a nice couple with four children aged 1-8. They were supposed to arrive Friday mid-day from Rome on an Alitalia flight, but while we were waiting for them at the airport Abby got a call that they weren't on the flight. They'd arrived in Rome and gone to the Alitalia check-in desk to board the second and final leg of their trip, and the clerk sent them to the other end of the airport for their boarding passes; but when they arrived, the clerk at that desk told them "Sorry, we've sold your tickets." Moreover, there was no flight that could accommodate six people until 1 August, and Alitalia wasn't going to do anything else to help them.

Abby began making phone calls to the U.S. embassy in Rome as well as to the management officer in Tirana; and eventually we worked it out that they would take a train to Bari the next day, and then take the late-night ferry that would arrive in Durres at 1 AM. All of this with four kids in tow. Amazingly - and fortunately, all things considered - their luggage still had been put on the original flight, and it arrived in Tirana as scheduled (usually with Alitalia, it's the other way around), so Abby and I collected it and brought it to their house. We then went to Durres with an embassy driver on Sunday morning at 1 AM to pick them up.

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I've finally posted a selection of Abby's and my photos from my parents' visit in May. You can see them
here.

Crazy stuff

New York Times' article on Albanian blood feuds.

100% expansion of gastronomic opportunities

Tirana now has a Japanese restaurant. The menu isn't huge, but the food is fairly good and reasonably priced. Abby tried the sushi, and given that she didn't subsequently spend the night in the bathroom, we can be assured that they keep the fish properly refrigerated.

New blog

I've been trying to improve my photography, and since I'm working with film, I'm also trying (a) to find someone who can teach me to use a darkroom so I can have more control over what I produce and (b) to decide whether to go digital instead of scanning my film negatives. There are billions of pixels devoted to the debate between film and digital photography - which one is "better" - and although I'm a Luddite at heart, I'll probably cave and buy a digital SLR this fall, and it will be obsolete by the time I get it out of the box.

But as I ponder these crucial questions, I also have to decide what to do with the photos that I already have. Since I can't think of any other venue for them, I've started an anonymous (and open to anyone) blog for my "artistic" shots: www.virtualwall.blogspot.com.

We're Number Two!

From the International Herald Tribune, "U.S. high court accepts gun rights", Friday, June 27, 2008, p. 1:

The United States has a higher rate of gun-related deaths than any other country but Albania, according to World Health Organization data.

Good to know.

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We're back from Croatia. I'll blog more about both parental visits when I get the photos back.

Simon, Paula, Randy - meet Abby.

Last Wednesday, Abby (and I) were on Albanian television, for the semi-finals of Albania's answer to American Idol, "Academy of Stars". In this program, 24 students are selected and divided into two teams, and they go head to head in a variety of dance performances or songs, depending on each student's discipline. At the end of each program, viewers text in their favorites for each match-up, and the loser is eliminated. The quality of the performances varies - some of the kids actually could give David Archuleta a run for his money, while others will probably never get further than a karaoke bar.

The theme of last week's show was "American night" - songs sung by Aretha Franklin, Anastacia, Alicia Keys, Christina Aguilera, Tina Turner, and Evanescence (as it happened). The show's producers asked the Embassy's Public Affairs Office to provide someone for the judges' panel - the judges are generally instructors or professional critics, with one guest brought in each week - and the office director in turn suggested Abby.

We had enough time to watch the show the week before, so we had a vague idea of how it worked. Even despite it being a low-budget and somewhat silly show (during our night, for example, they performed a 10-minute version of "High School Musical", complete with canned musical and video backup), we enjoyed it, and we came in with our favorites already in mind. After the singing part of the competition, Abby gave her comments - in Albanian, which impressed everyone - and then after the show, she gave some very diplomatic interviews about how the show compares to the American version. We're even going to the finals tonight, to see how "our" contestants fare.

Dental drama

I've been having sensitivity in my teeth for about six weeks: the root is exposed on tooth #30 (lower right) from overeager brushing, a filling in tooth #3 (upper right) had gone bad after 24 years, and a cavity was forming where teeth #2 and 3 met. Four weeks ago I started going to a dentist who was recommended by a friend from the British embassy.* The office was very clean, the equipment very high-tech, etc., but after four visits the dentist still hadn't been able to resolve the problems, and in some respects had made them worse; so I got a dentist recommendation from our own medical unit and visited there today. The new dentist poked at the lower tooth and found a spot where nothing had been treated - the torture scene from Marathon Man obviously came to mind - so he undid the work the first dentist had done on my lower tooth to remove an amalgam that had been placed at the root, in order to put down a coating of some kind, and he then restored the amalgam. There's still some work that needs to be done on it, so it actually feels a bit worse than it had, but he'll finish up on Wednesday and then work on the top teeth.

The worst of it, however, was that he injected me with a lot of novocaine, and it made my lip swell a bit after I left the dentist's office even as the numbing effect grew stronger. I sat down for lunch with a swollen inner lip and no sensation in the right side of my jaw, and thus began consuming the inside of my lower lip along with my doner sandwich. It has not been a good day.

*My friend actually has nice teeth, but the irony is not lost on me.

More on the dog project

Our group had its second meeting last night. We discussed some strategy and next steps, and - based on a conversation that I and my Albanian counterpart, Mimi, had had with a local attorney - I explained how to incorporate: that we needed to name a board of directors and an executive director, and draft and file the necessary papers (and pay the attorney for her services). I was the only one to volunteer then and there to serve either as one of the directors or as the executive. This was strange, considering that I'm not even the most ardent of the advocates for stray dogs. (The German woman, Edith, who'd had the same idea to start a movement that I did is kind of nuts about the cause, but not even she raised her hand.)

Granted, this is not a light undertaking; and some people have concern about possible unintended legal obligations; and we have to make sure we find the right people for the various jobs, and not just find people who are more enthusiastic than capable; still, I'd expected a fight for leadership positions, not a backing-away. I remember going to a swimming pool when I was around 12 years old and being very excited to jump off the 10-foot board, until I climbed up the ladder and stood on the suddenly very narrow, very flimsy plank. I ended up climbing back down the ladder; but that was then, and I didn't expect a tableful of committed adults to do the same thing now.

Edith also told us that the city had culled dogs in the Park. Abby and I had noticed that one of the dozen or so dogs that we "know" had what looked like a bullet wound in her leg, and Edith, who regularly feeds the dogs, said that many of them no longer came around for food. She and I talked about the different dogs that we both know, and I realized that half of Cooper's "friends" could have been shot, since I hadn't seen them for a few days either. It was a very painful night, but fortunately, four of them turned up this morning, and the other two may be around somewhere. Yet even if it was a false alarm after all, it's clear we have a lot of work to do, so anyone who can help us fund-raise is more than welcome to do so.

Dog projects

I'm home from work this fine Wednesday afternoon, partly because there is not much to do until we receive the draft reports from our national teams on Community Social Responsibility in their respective countries; but mostly because my shoulder hurts from working, to the point that I'm starting some physical therapy with a local American. I'd had a desk and computer at the office until our program assistant returned; after that, I typed on my laptop; but then we moved into a new, cramped office with lousy desk space. Bottom line: bad ergonomics = shoulder and hand problems. I'm only giving this post about 10 minutes, and then I take a break.

Cooper has become a much more affectionate dog after a period of ignoring us. He had been food-obsessed, even stealing food off the counter. He was at his worst during his walks in the park: once off the leash, he'd run in search of picnickers' bones or poo*. He ignored other dogs, and he wouldn't come when called; all he wanted to do was eat. Finally, about two weeks ago, he stole a piece of chicken from my plate at dinner, and when I tried to wrestle it out of his mouth (not to eat it myself, but for principle's sake), he tried so hard to gobble it down before I could take it from him that he bit me through the finger nail, drawing blood. I smacked him hard and banished him to another room, and wouldn't let him back in for about an hour. The next day, Abby and I let him off the leash at the park as always, and then proceeded with our walk, and after three minutes we realized that Cooper was gone. We called, we searched, and finally some passers-by told us they'd seen him running back the way we came, out of the park; Abby climbed a hill and sure enough, she saw him standing in the traffic square outside the park. I can only guess he'd decided to find a piece of byrek or shishqebab at one of the eateries on the border of the park and had became confused; but our hearts stopped to see him standing in the middle of the street. Fortunately, rush hour hadn't quite picked up yet, so I was able to get him out of traffic unharmed.

Since then, he's been more attentive to us, and he has started playing with the park dogs again; and we've also started using food rewards to get him to come every time we call, as Abby's pet guru, Victoria Schade, has recommended. (Abby met Victoria online by writing to Gene Weingarten of the Washington Post after he'd written about his dog and dog training in his live chat; we were considering flying her out to Albania at one point, when Cooper was in his biting phase.) This may be one of the reasons he's more playful, but it beats having a jerk around the house.

Meanwhile, the dog of one of Abby's colleagues was fatally poisoned in the park about a week ago. We still don't know if he happened upon rat poison, or if cyanide-laced food had been left out by the lake as part of the city's dog culling efforts. Abby and I spread the warning to other dog owners we know whom we see in the park, and many of us are worried about this. Last night, however, I held the first meeting with a group of people whom I hope will form the nucleus of a stray dog population control program. (The dog poisoning wasn't the cause of this effort - I'd spoken to an Albanian friend about this weeks ago - but it was certainly a reminder of how important this project is.) We have three Albanians, including the director of the veterinary research institute, two Americans, and a German couple, with other Albanians and expatriates interested in joining on. Our goal is to create a trap-neuter/vaccinate-release program, an educational program about dog care, and a puppy adoption program. This will take a lot of research and fundraising, of course, but we already have a commitment from the Institute to use its facilities for the operations; and all of us are sickened by the current population control methods and realize that something needs to be done. My job with UNDP ends in mid-June, and so while it's possible that the USAID position will come through, I'm now not sure whether I want it or whether I want to devote myself to the dog project full time.

*Do I mean animal poo or picnickers' poo? Po-ta-to, po-tah-to ...

Goats

Last week, I spent three days in Shkodër, north of Tirana, with a local dairy owner and an Italian dairy consultant. Our goal was to see whether we could develop the goat milk market for the production of goat cheese for export. Goat cheese is a high-value item in Europe; Albania has a lot of goats, but farmers mostly raise goats for meat, so much of the milk is wasted. Our initial investigation was to understand how the goats are kept, to see to what extent the milking procedures meet the necessary hygiene standards to produce raw milk of sufficient quality, to begin the value chain.

The first two days were spent tromping around goat farms. The farmers were friendly, and receptive to the consultant's advice, and they kept offering us raki that we had to keep refusing until the second day when the farmer had the glasses and bottle in hand, thank goodness - but they didn't have a lot of interest in producing milk for cheese-making. They noted (rightly) that they don't have the infrastructure to keep the milk from spoiling; there's little available veterinarian care to combat diseases such as mastitis, an inflammation of the udders - as you can imagine, I learned a bit about goat milk in three days; there is no centralized cooling center to store the milk until it's collected; and the roads are so bad that it takes an hour to make what should be a 20-minute trip. We held a training on the last day which was reasonably well attended, but it seems pretty clear that without significant infrastructural investment, goat cheese-making is not a strong option at the moment.

The trip itself was a lot of fun, however. The hills outside Shkodër are beautiful, and goats are good-looking animals. The kids in particular are really cute, especially when there are about 40 of them running in a herd. But there's a reason that when people say "You smell like a goat," they don't mean it as a compliment.

Hills in the village of Kalmët; kid goats running; an arty shot of abandoned farm machinery at one of the farms.

This week was part two of the project, where we went to Kukes and Has, two of the northern-most provinces of Albania, to investigate the goat situation there. I didn't bring the digital camera, so I can only describe the scenery as Alpine and fantastic: green mountains, vibrant fields, and clear lakes. The town of Kukes is a fairly quiet place with nothing to do at night, but it is great for sight-seeing in the surrounding area during the day. The drive to Kukes, however, is not for those prone to motion sickness. The road winds up and through the mountains, at elevations ranging from roughly 1200 to 3400 feet. I can't get a picture of the roads from Google Earth, so just imagine that you are effectively reversing direction every 20 minutes for the last three hours of the drive; I've followed a straighter trajectory on a Tilt-a-Whirl.

As an aside, I'll note that the ride home was even worse, at least for the first hour, because the staffer who had the front seat tuned the radio to a Kosovo station that was playing modern traditional music (as opposed to pop). Traditional Albanian music is heavily but monotonously percussive, and usually features some combination of concertina, horn, and whining clarinet. It's still popular today; in fact, many of the pop songs essentially feature a Christina Aguilera-type singer backed by traditional instruments and rhythms. At its best - after a few glasses of raki and a plate of grilled lamb - it is festive dance music. However, at its worst, it sounds like the product of a methamphetamine-addicted klezmer musician playing a bagpipe stuffed with accordians and cats.

Back to the subject at hand: the trip a success for the most part. The officials in Kukes were helpful, and the farmers in Has were very interested in developing a goat cheese production facility. They even are interested in working cooperatively - a pleasant surprise given that the word "cooperative" can raise unwelcome connotations of collectivization. Has is even more remote than Kukes, but the farmers were sure they could find a market since they sell goat meat in the south of the country. (I can't imagine how the meat stays refrigerated for the 6-8 hour trip down, and it probably doesn't.)

Still, the Has farmers too complained about the lack of the necessary infrastructure, so the basic obstacles remain. In fact, the meeting put me in the difficult position of trying to be encouraging and agree that we needed to develop a concrete plan, while not being able to promise anything more than a conversation with my boss, since I command zero resources at UNDP. I do want to see something happen up here since there is a lot of potential for development, but I don't think the prospects are good. The state continues to neglect the area apart from a significant road construction project - albeit one that appears to have been tendered corruptly - while the rest of the work is being done by aid agencies like UNDP, and I doubt that my boss will be able to change the approved work plan that is currently underway, or that she will be able to broker any private investment in the two months she has left under her contract. (UNDP does everything by annual contract, which makes continuity and personal investment difficult.)

Actually, overall, I've been disappointed with my work experience, since we don't seem to get very much done. We seem to be taking a scattershot approach at a real problem of underinvestment in small business, nor are we doing much to promote the Global Compact. I think we face some combination of poor program design and management from HQ, a lack of focused local management interest, and my boss's inability to create sustained value in the face of these other obstacles (to put it kindly). I don't know if the USAID job will come through, but if it's anything like my current project, I might be better off focusing on photography and the Gallery.

Bratislava (Part 2)

Next to the Old Town Hall was the Primate's Palace, built between 1778 and 1781, which has a Hall of Mirrors and some beautiful 17th century English tapestries, as well as period furnishings. The Hall of Mirrors was underwhelming, but the rest was beautiful enough for me to take a photo despite it's being verboten. After the palace, we dashed up to a photography exhibition which was more pretentious than it was anything else, but it gave me the idea for a photo series of my own, "The secret lives of bridal gown mannequins", the first of which is reproduced below.

Even with all of this touring, it still was only 3.30 in the afternoon, so I went to the Bratislava City Gallery, which Abby had seen the day before, while she went window-shopping. The Bratislava City Gallery was, in a minor way, spectacular. The Slovak modernists, such as Peter Palffy, did some amazing work. There was also a painting of Orpheus and Eurydice that was truly brilliant and haunting. (I'm kicking myself because I did not write down the name of the artist - it was no one I'd ever heard of, but I had to go back and look at it three times. Truly outstanding.) There was also an installation of books in which you walked through a narrow passage with books stacked to the sides, and mirrors were positioned on the ceilings, the floors, and the walls in front of and behind the books (from your direction) to reflect them so that it looked as though you were walking through an endless hallway of books. Here is a photo of it from the gallery.

From there, I went to have a beer in a comfortable pub across the street from the U.S. Embassy while I waited for Abby, and I realized that the nice thing about the bars and cafes in Bratislava is that they have women in them and aren't just full of 20-to-60-year-old unemployed men who are drinking coffee all day long.

Dinner that night was a strange experience - we couldn't get into the restaurant we wanted, and we couldn't find anything else that looked appealing, so we finally chose one near the main square. We thought there were other people in the restaurant, but it turned out just to be a hen party in the back room, and the only other couple in the main dining room were eating from a McDonald's bag and chatting (loudly) with the waitstaff. For some reason, we ordered anyway, trying to make the best of the situation, but the restaurant had almost none of the bottles on its wine list. At this point we were resigned to a disappointing experience, when the male of the couple unfolded himself from table, sat down at the piano in the front of the room, and began to play lovely dinner music. The food, when it came, wasn't bad; and more diners entered the restaurant about halfway through our meal, so the place livened up some.

On Sunday, we met our guide, Roman, and piled into his car for a trip out to the Small Carpathians. He was an interesting enough guy, happy to talk about Slovakia and the effects of the Communist regime, so the conversation was lively. Červený Kameň castle was worth seeing, although the tour was conducted in Slovakian with Roman doing some translation (but he'd also given us an English-language flyer describing the castle rooms). The castle cellars are the deepest in Europe, for those of you who are impressed by such things. We then stopped in at a pottery shop, saw how traditional pottery is made (just the same way it is made everywhere else), and bought a plate.

Then it was on to the wine tasting. Basically, we were let loose for 45 minutes in a room full of about 70 open bottles for however much we wanted to taste.* We had a great time and tasted some pretty wonderful wines (and also some pretty awful ones). The wine is fairly inexpensive, so we bought five bottles before heading back to town, ate an early dinner, and took the bus back to Vienna.

Here are some other photos from the trip:

A view of the castle from an alley; me being grumpy a gargoyle; Abby atop St. Michael's Gate; Communist-era Bratislava across the river.

And my first bridal series photo:

*Abby noted that this was not unlike the dinner we had at Cafe Bouley in New York City, where I met Abby's parents for the first time over a paired tasting dinner at which the waiter left the bottles on the table, until he saw how much I was enjoying the wine in various bottles. I asked him why he had left the bottles on the table during the earlier courses if he hadn't wanted us to drink our fill from them and he said, "Because some of the customers like to read the label" - as if they were cereal boxes or something. This time, I only sipped.