Infrastructure

$1 = 86.95 lekë; $1 = .7024 Euro; $1 = .5581 Pounds.

The dollar is the strongest it has been against all these currencies since we've been here.  Don't know how long it will last, but the 369 lekë bottle of wine is now $4.24 instead of $4.82.  Which is a nice direction to be going.  $230 instead of $261.44 for my driver.  That extra 31.44 is equal to 7 bottles of free wine!  (For my friends who prefer to deal in more abstract terms, instead of free wine, it is a 13.67% increase in my available spending money.  A couple of you have encouraged me to post on why I think Obama is going to lose, and I will, but this problem with language is one of the Democrats' biggest problems.  Of course I could say one bottle of free wine, but that would be elitist.)

Lack of infrastructure is a huge problem here.  From previous posts you've no doubt gotten the idea that roads are poor, and they are.  Many intercity highways are undergoing improvement, and some entirely new highways are being built.  Imagine the New Orleans to Jackson drive being a dangerous eight-hour trip, and you get the picture.  But that aspect will probably change relatively quickly, within a couple of years.

Harder to deal with are water and electricity.  City water here is not particularly safe to drink.  All embassy houses have distillers, and we have a continual supply of about 30 gallons of distilled water for drinking/cooking.  Our housekeeper takes about 10 gallons home with her a week.  Servet takes two boxes filled with empty plastic coke bottles or juice bottles, about twice a week, probably 20 gallons.  Water is cut off every day for several hours.  We have a water tank in the yard, probably 1200 gallons or so, that fills up when the city water is running, so we have a continual supply of water.  (The tank has run dry twice, and a water truck from the embassy comes to fill it).  The vast majority of people in town do not have water during the day, and have a routine of filling bathtubs at night so they'll have water during the day.  Many have small tanks on the roof that look to be maybe 40 or 50 gallon capacity, but I've assumed they were for water-pressure purposes and not for storage, although 50 gallons is better than nothing.

Electricity goes off almost every day for some period of time, from two minutes to five hours.  I have long since quit resetting the oven clock, microwave clock, or any other non-battery operated clock.  Sometimes the power goes off and on several times in a short period of time.  These power surges especially play havoc with light bulbs, which don't last too long.   We have a generator which automatically comes on when the power goes off, but of course the embassy houses in the neighborhood are the only ones on our street who do.  Interestingly, the English embassy people don't have these "perks" and neither do people like USAID contractors or NGO groups.  

When we were in Himara this summer, our fancy hotel had scheduled power outages from 10:00 to noon, and 3 to 6.  Of course with no air conditioning from 3 to 6, it was midnight before the room cooled down.

My understanding is that almost all of the electricity generated in Albania is hydroelectric.  That works fine, of course, except that there is not enough water to run the turbines in the summer, nor enough water to pipe around the city.  Last winter it rained enough and there was enough snow that people say this summer was much better power-wise than last summer.  If true, last summer must have been pretty dismal.

As you've probably noticed if you've tried to call or email, our internet is very sporadic.  It works say for ten days straight, then is out for a couple hours, then on, then out maybe three days, then back on, and so forth.  We've had two five-day outages, and many, many shorter ones.  Don't know the reason for that. 

I am much less sanguine about the likelihood of improvements in these areas any time soon, mostly for the reason that huge amounts of construction are going on here, thousands of units of apartments and commercial buildings as well as houses, and "hooking them up" to the grids will place added burdens on an inadequate system.

Tirana is a dirty city -- dusty and dirty.  The dust is because it doesn't rain.  It rained Sunday, Monday and Tuesday, and the streets look cleaner.  But that was the first time it's rained in about three months.   Summer dust, however, is a Mother Nature event -- that won't change.  Like Tucson or Albuquerque.  

Highways and water/electricity will improve with time.  I'm curious about trash collection.  If there ever was a country that needed to ban plastic bags, it is Albania.  They are everywhere.  There are small dumpsters here and there, but they fill up way before they're emptied, so there is almost always a mound of garbage on the ground around them.  I think one of the smog-causing problems here, besides the gazillion automobiles, are the constant trash fires going on.  Little ones, like around the corner from us people will dump stuff on the street and burn it.  Litter is all over, and I wonder what can be done about that.  People everywhere litter, I know, but Albania is sort of extreme, and I don't know whether it's habit, if it's a new phenomenon (probably so -- from what I understand of "during communism time" there wasn't enough to litter with), and how much regular trash collection would ameliorate the situation.

When we got back from Italy we had to spend 100,000 lekë to get the car fixed.  Today that is $1150 dollars.  A month ago it would have been $1307.  Quiz:  For Rankin County Republicans, how many bottles of free wine is this?  For DC Democrats, what percentage increase is this, and what percent of the top bracket would this place me in, if applicable, or is this just a windfall profit, too small to be unconscionable?