Family Photos Budapest

Budapest

We are back from Budapest.  Cindy had a meeting there Wednesday - Friday, an ingathering of all the DOJ lawyers in the Balkans, and the Foreign Service Nationals (FSNs in State Department lingo), so there were four attendees from Albania.  Taylor and I flew up Thursday afternoon.  Friday morning I went for a followup appointment with a Hungarian ophthalmologist, who said I was doing well.  

The top picture is from the Buda side of the Danube looking across the Chain Bridge over Pest.  The large building at the end of the Chain Bridge is the Gresham Four Seasons Hotel.  It was built at the turn of the century (20th) by the Gresham Insurance Company of London.  But in honor of my cousin Anna, I wanted to point out the Four Seasons.

The next picture is from the castle hill looking across the river toward Parliament.

Next is a walkway under the Chain Bridge.  I have limited experience studying graffiti, but Budapest has far and away more seemingly aimless writing than any place I've been.

We took an evening cruise down the Danube, and the fourth picture is Parliament from the river.  

Last picture is at the end of the cruise and is castle hill/cathedral on the Buda side.

The weekend was very hot, too hot to enjoy all the walking we did.  The city is interesting architecturally in the sense that it's all been rebuilt.  All the bridges were destroyed in WWII, as were many of the buildings along the river, but they've been rebuilt as they were before.  

This coming weekend we're going to Dubrovnik, which is about 180 miles north of us, slightly northwest.  I'll post more pictures.

Back On Line

One Dollar = 77.58 lek; .50 pounds; .63 Euro

We've got our internet connection back, after a week without.  And we are safely back from Budapest, Taylor is in the States, and Cindy and I are planning our summer.  A little late maybe to be starting to plan, but we'll see what turns up.

It has been hot here, and the coming week highs are all in the mid-90s.  I am going to buy 50 kilos of tomatoes tomorrow morning.  Servet, my driver, got a price of 65 lek/kilo, which works out to about 84 cents/kilo, or 38 cents/pound.  I'm not sure what variety they are, but they look like San Marzano, and Albanians call them "heart" tomatoes because they're shaped, if one has an imagination, like a heart.  I think they look like an upside-down pear, but I have no imagination.  I gave away most of my canning jars before we left Mississippi, but I saved and brought with me about three dozen quarts and four dozen pints, so I may not have to order any.

Adnand, my first driver, got a job with a local company that imports Tuborg and Carlsberg beer.  If he had to take another job, this one was fortuitous.  Servet speaks very little English, so we're teaching each other.  He has an ice cream factory in his house.  He lives on the first floor of his apartment building, and sells to the public through a storefront store out of his apartment.  He also sells to restaurants and stores in town.  It is really good.  So far I've had chocolate, vanilla, strawberry, wild berry, and hazlenut.  So far he won't let me pay for them.

Between the beer and the ice cream, if I can't grow up, I certainly can grow out.  

Servet has a degree in music from Tirana University.  His two daughters are in grad school, one to be a dentist and one a lawyer.  I think he is fairly typical of underemployed people here.  Jobs are hard to come by.  Adnand was really excited to be getting a full time job, and Servet was really glad to be my driver.

I wrote in a post a couple of weeks ago about the U.S. economy and how neither candidate seemed to be addressing it.  In this morning's NY Times Tom Friedman has an editorial along similar lines, and since he agrees with me, it is ipso facto a brilliant article and I recommend it to you. 

Home-Style News

Taylor wanted to show off her new haircut.  All three of these pictures were taken at the castle at Petrela.  

Tomorrow is Taylor's last day of school for this school year.  She and I leave for Budapest Thursday afternoon; Cindy left today and just texted me that she's arrived.  We'll all come back Monday, then Wednesday Taylor leaves for her unaccompanied trip from Tirana to Munich and Munich to Washington, DC.  She'll spend a few days in DC with some friends, and then head to Mississippi to spend the summer with her Dad and Cindy's mom and various cousins and brothers and sisters and nephews and friends and such.  I know the kids on our street will miss her -- they'll be ringing the bell for her to come out and play here shortly.  I've told Taylor that before she leaves she must tell them she won't be back until August 26th -- or else I'll be telling them five times a day for two months that Taylor is not here.

Thursday the 26th we're having our first dinner guests.  I can't even remember where I put things in the kitchen, so it should be interesting.  I have to plan a menu and a shopping trip.  Tirana has a lot of small specialty shops that sell spices, produce, lots of bakeries.   You can get everything you need from the little grocery stores, but not necessarily everything you want.

A friend took me to a cheese factory a few days ago.  I bought some fresh butter and some ricotta that was still warm.  I brought it home and let it drain and then made cannelloni.  It was pretty good.  Milk here is pasteurized using a different method than the US, so it can stay in the carton unrefrigerated until opened.  They say for up to three months.  I assume the ricotta was pasteurized in the process of making it, since you just heat up the milk without letting it boil and dump some lemon juice in it and it curdles.  But I "pasteurized" the ricotta when I baked it. Someone told me that brucellosis is not unknown here, but I think this cheese place has been here a while and seemed pretty well-run.  I wanted to make a ricotta pie, but I don't know where to find whipping cream yet.  I've been told now, so I might try that if I find some.

So much for the mundane news from Albania.

Money

One of the interesting things we deal with here involves money, as in the different currencies.  Albania is mostly a cash economy.  A few of the larger newer stores and hotels are equipped to take credit cards, but most are not.  So we buy leke at the embassy.  As a service they will exchange up to a maximum of $1000 per day into leke or leke to dollars at the previous day's exchange rate.  The rate was 82 leke per dollar when we got here, and it's now about 77.  A year ago it was 97.  Which means, obviously, in rough numbers, that expenses for embassy personnel have gone up roughly 20 percent in the last year, just in purchasing leke, and not counting the rise in cost of living here.  

While the Euro is used in continental western Europe, other currencies are in use in eastern Europe/Balkans, and the UK still uses the Pound.  So I have envelopes with dollars, pounds, euros, leke (Albanian) and soon forints (Hungarian).  Some countries like Hungary use their own currency but also a lot of people take Euros.    They don't want dollars, though.   

The exchange rates provide a little mini-course in economics and monetary policy -- a course I wish GW Bush had taken.   The Bushies' combination of big tax decreases and huge spending increases equals a huge and snowballing national debt, which as you know we finance by borrowing money from China and Saudi Arabia and printing more money to pay the interest  with.  The more we print the less each dollar is worth, and since the dollar is still used to price commodities, like oil, when the dollar falls the price goes up to compensate.    A big component in the increase of oil prices is the drop in the dollar.  Even if there were no geopolitical issues, or supply/demand issues, or speculation issues, oil would be going up as the dollar falls.  Whatever one's opinion may be about the wisdom of the Iraq war, it remains true that this is the first time in our nation's history that we have borrowed 100% of the huge cost of a war and made no provision whatever to pay the debt.  How odd it is that in a war that's billed as a contest for our very survival that the country has not only not been asked to tighten its belt and somehow pay for it, but also to continue spending money and go about our lives like nothing is happening.  And lest one think I'm blaming only the Bushies, I haven't heard much of anything from the Democrats about the lack of financial responsibility of it all, and unfortunately, even now,  neither candidate for president is talking about this issue.  The creation of this $9 trillion national debt is the most bipartisan political activity over the last 60 years.  

American history students eventually have to read Tocqueville's On Democracy In America.  He was sent here in the 1820s to study our prison system, of all things, and after returning to France and writing his report for the government, he published the book for which he is justifiably famous.  Among his many observations, and the one that is germane to this post, is his observations that democracies will last until the people discover they can vote themselves largesse out of the public treasury.  He didn't mean the recurring crookedness we endure from some of our politicians, but I think he meant the replacement of sound financial management  with satisfying the public's demand for what we might today call "programs," somewhat akin to parents buying their spoiled children everything they want and charging it on a credit card.  I honestly wonder sometimes how a politician, with the knowledge of a $9 trillion debt, can propose Gas Tax Holidays, or Tax Rebates (I still haven't got mine, so thus have had no chance to spend it and save the economy). 

Sorry to inflict this tendentious outburst on you, but now I feel better.

 

Time Differences

I notice the date/time on the Milestones entry.  It is actually 8:17 on June 6 here in Tirana.  I guess the Blogspot server is in a city nine hours behind us, like in Seattle or California.  And the time get stamped on the post when I first begin to write, not when I post.  

Milestones

A Happy Birthday to my younger brother!  Dan is now 58.  He and Maggie are moving into a new place in Maple Valley, WA.  My older brother (64!) is looking for a house in So. California.  But I, being the middle brother and thus more stable and grounded, have been in Albania for two months, counting the month in London.  I can only hope my brothers can settle down soon.

I am home waiting on a man from the embassy to come and install an AFN decoder box for our TV.  I can't wait to see what sort of programming Armed Forces Network provides.  He is also going to hook up the antenna for our cable TV.  I bought it from Digitalb, and now I need a UHF antenna.  The cable is broadcast from the top of Mt. Dajti and we catch it and run a cable to the box.  I have been to every Digitalb store I know of in Tirana.  One had an antenna, but none had the mounting hardware.  The Albanians seem to be learning the American style of capitalism -- that it's cheaper to tell the customer to come back next week than it is to stock a full complement of parts.  

It could be that since the company owner was killed a couple of weeks ago that things are not running smoothly in his company.  He lost control of his Ferrari at about 110 MPH in the early morning hours and crashed into a tree on the main street in town.  He and his girlfriend were killed.  Digitalb was closed for about four days.   I haven't been out on the street at two in the morning, but I'm reasonably certain it is pretty devoid of auto traffic.  One couldn't possibly get up to that kind of speed during the day time.  40 seems fast.  There are very few traffic lights, and most of them seem advisory.  The way to turn left across oncoming traffic is to wait until there's a little space, pull into it, at which time the oncoming car will slow, and you can try the next lane until you force that oncoming lane to stop, and so on until you make your turn.  No one gets angry about it, it's just the way the system works.  There is a lot of honking, but little of it seems to be angry.  It is more a messaging system:  I'm passing you on the left, don't pull over.  It is sort of a merge and be merged system.  I've only seen one little fender-bender so far.  Cindy describes herself as an aggressive defensive driver, which if you can wrap your mind around that idea, you understand the system.  She asked me what kind of vehicle I would feel safe riding with her in, and I pointed out a Mercedes 10-wheel dumptruck.  She sees so little humor in some of my observations.

 

Who knew there was such an Albania/Mississippi connection?

Since my husband has not posted since last Tuesday, I thought I would post something. I'll have to admit, it has been quite hectic in the past week, including the arrival of our HHE (that's government-speak for household effects, including my newly-arrived SUV). It's difficult to know where to begin - so, here goes.

First, the plants. I have not yet made it through a single day without thinking of Becky Crook, our friend who died last August. For those of you who don't know her, she and Robert had a yard which some have called the "Crook State Park." It is just lovely, and she loved all sorts of plants. Some of the plants here in Albania which remind me of Mississippi (and Becky) are: magnolia, nandina, verigated periwinkle, Sweet William (dianthus), roses (lots of roses), canna lillies, among others. Seeing these plants, alongside palm trees and citrus trees of all varieties is quite amazing.

I also learned that Michael Galaty, a professor of Anthropology at Millsaps College, has been coming to Albania for a number of years (10 or more, I think) for a project known as the Shala Valley Project, which is a study of an area of northern Albania. If you Google "Shala Valley Project," you can read all about it and the work he has done here. Last year, one of my former law school friends, Harvey Fiser, came over here with Professor Galaty and a group of students for his first trip to Albania. Harvey teaches business law at Millsaps, practices law in Jackson, and I don't know what else - he's a busy guy. Anyway, Harvey was one of Valena's professors at Millsaps, and we reconnected before we came to Albania. Harvey, Professor Galaty and a group of students are arriving in Albania this weekend for a 3-week inter-disciplinary study involving Albanian law, archeology and anthropology - I think I have that right. We're very excited that we will have some Mississippi folks visiting here this summer. We also recently learned that Chelsi West, who just graduated from Millsaps and came to Albania with Professor Galaty last year has just gotten a Fullbright fellowship to study here in Tirana at New York University of Tirana. She will be arriving this fall, and in the small world category, she and Valena worked together during a portion of their time at Millsaps.

Our DCM (Deputy Chief of Mission) here at the embassy is Steve Cristina, who is from New Orleans. He used to live in the Bywater and has actually been to the Friendly Bar - knows exactly where it is. Marti - I told him to come and look you up when he is on home leave. We are going to his house for dinner on Saturday - he and his wife Lea have friends from New Orleans coming to visit, so I'm sure we will all know some people in common within 5 minutes.

On the personal front, there is never a dull moment here in Tirana. Just before I left to go visit Dave in London, we finally got an internet connection. Unfortunately, the internet guys did not ask our neighbors if they could string a line directly across the neighbor's yard. While it was not touching their property, it did go right across their line of sight. Anyway, there was much yelling, all in Albanian and none of which I could understand. It was clear, however, that our neighbors were totally and completely angry about this line. So, the internet guys agreed to come and move it in 10 days. Fast forward to Dave getting home, we find out our stuff has finally arrived, we wake up this past Friday morning (May 30 - 14 days at least past the 10 day promised deadline) and lo and behold, someone had simply cut through the internet line. So, we had a couple of days without phone or internet - again - and then the internet guys came back and rerouted the whole thing, and now it is nowhere near this particular neighbor. On that same day, the neighbors are doing a little pole-climbing, I assumed, to tap into our internet connection and get a little free service. My husband informed me that I was mistaken, that they were only stealing electricity, not internet - what a relief! Now, we just have to check electric bills to see whether it is our electricity or someone else's that is being pilfered.

And, finally, did I mention we got our car? We did the unthinkable, at least in environmental terms, when we left Bethesda. We sold our just-barely-over-a-year-old Toyota Prius and bought a 6-year-old Mercedes ML 370 SUV. Doc, before you scream in agony, I had a good reason for this. First of all, the Prius would never have survived the potholes here and no one in this country would have had a clue how to repair a hybrid. Secondly, I wanted the Mercedes because there are tons of them here and all over the Balkans, so if we break down en route somewhere, then we'll have a better chance of getting it fixed. Anyway, in my very first attempt to get this SUV down our very narrow and steep driveway, I got the front (just under the front right bumper) hung on our retaining wall. This house is the very first ever built by our entrepreneurial landlord, and he could use some pointers on driveway and garage size. We allegedly have a 3-car garage, but I think it would only hold about 3 Mini-coopers or maybe Smart Cars. Anyway, in my going back and forth to try and get unstuck, I just made things worse, to the point that the back right wheel is now completely off the ground. So, I finally had the good sense to put the thing in park and go get Dave. So, my husband, whose right eye is still recuperating from surgery, climbs in, and the neighbors across the street feel sorry for us and offer to help (these are not the same neighbors who cut our internet cable). So, we pop the back door open, two guys sit down back there and I climb in the back seat. This was enough to get the wheel back on the ground and allow the thing to be backed out of its predicament. Dave then turned it around and backed down the driveway - he drives better than me even with only one semi-good eye.

Oh well, that's about it for now - I did not write anything about work, but it's just as challenging as ever - and never boring, which is the best part.

Keep those comments coming - and come see us in Albania (we now have chairs you can sit in).
Cindy