Two weeks into the Albanian Adventure

Life in Tirana is full of warm sun, friendly people and delicious fresh fruits and vegetables. The first 10 days have been part adjusting to this wild decision to settle in a foreign country for a few years and part acclimating to the city, its sounds, colors and vibrancy.  Of note:

• Watch where you are walking. The sidewalks are holes, missing stones and sometimes only 6 inches of space between you and the cars
• crossing the streets where there are few traffic lights is best to find an Albanian and just skip along with him or her
• how the multitude of stores can survive is beyond me. The typical clothing store is 12 feet by 24 feet with maybe 50 items of poorly made clothing and no one seems to be in them
• mini farmers markets all over the city
• skinned dead (obviously) sheep hanging in the windows of small meat stores
• beautiful mountains surrounding the city and in view from our windows

Challenges:

• electricity is crazy. With all our electronic appliances, we have converters for this, adapters for that, some outlets with 3 holes and some with 2 big holes and a stove that shorts out and blows all of the electricity for the apt.
• finding lamps, rugs and furniture that isn't either really cheap or very expensive. Guess we will have to go to Greece and shop at the Ikea!
• learning Albanian. There are 36 letters and Gj is like chic

Celebrations:

• tomorrow is a national holiday...."Summer Day". Last night the public works dept. took down the white holiday lights that spanned the main street and now have gigantic flower like decorations. Every park has tons of annuals planted by 20 or so women from a government dept. and trees are in bloom.
•  Reuniting with my husband and sharing this adventure together.

I will try to master the skill of putting up photos in the next month!!!
All for now. I hope everyone is doing well.
Betsy