LURA

The first three photos are from the hotel looking down at Lura. There are actually three little villages called Lura: Krej Lura, Fushe Lura, and Gur Lura. We were in Gur Lura. Gur means stone. Gur Lura is the highest in the valley. These little mountain villages are snowed in during the winter. One of the guys at work is an ex-military officer, and he commanded a battalion based at Peshkopi, on the other side of the mountains. When I told him where I'd spent the Fourth of July weekend, he just laughed. He had a company based in Lura; in fact, the old barracks are just down the road from the hotel. He had to visit several times a year. Besnik, who we rode with back from Lura, is from a little town close to Peshkopi, and he told us when he left home to attend university in Tirana, he walked from there to Kurbnesh to catch a ferganz or hitchhike to Tirana, an all-day walk. Same with my work colleague, when he came to visit his family in Tirana, he would walk to Kurbnesh to catch a bus or hitchhike. The copper mine in Kurbnesh blocked the road so there was no through-traffic. There's not a lot of traffic now. There are scores of these little mountain villages in Albania, and understandably they're losing population. In Tirana we know people who live in Tirana but were born in places like this; not unlike Mississippi, where it is not at all unusual to meet people born and raised in the now little and forlorn dried-up towns around the state who have moved to Jackson.

This is supper, waiting to be served. There were about 30 of us on this trip, and a couple of the guys had made the trip a few days before to arrange accomodation for us all at the hotel and to have the meal prepared. They brought me the head and put it in front of me -- Cindy said I was the guest of honor. I guess because I was the instigator and they knew I really wanted to make the trip. Turns out barbecued goat brains are kind of sweet.

After supper they started making toasts. Someone made a toast to our Fourth of July, so I made a toast. Cindy said it was more like a short story. But I explained that we didn't know how to make toasts because of Thomas Jefferson. They were very popular in colonial America, and as happens with anything involving drinking, the more they drank the more toasts that were made, and the more toasts the more they drank until sometimes they became rather rambunctious affairs. Anyway, when Jefferson was in Paris he discovered the French did not play this particular drinking game, and when he became president he discontinued the practice. So it is his fault I don't know how to make a toast. But I'd already toasted enough that it seemed the proper thing to do.