One hundred years ago in Albania if a man gave you a drink, you were under his protection until someone else showed you a similar kindness. If you were injured, he had to avenge you. This view has not entirely disappeared.
The most notable instance of hospitality I encountered on my trip to Albania was when the parents of a friend of a friend of a driver found for me by a random person on the street offered to put me up for the night. Well, let me fill in. I was in Saranda, a dirty little beach town in the south of Albania. I had spent two hours at midday walking along the dirty little beach one way and then the other, and I was ready to move on, along the what turned out to be spectacular coast road from there to Vlorë. (The letter ë in Albanian is pronounced schwa, as in Vlorschwa.) I asked a taxi outside the center-of-town hotel and he said he'd take me for $100, which I knew was outrageous, so I walked a few blocks away, and asked a random person on the street where a taxi stand was. He took me two more blocks to a large square with a lot of buses and a few cars. None of the cars were labeled as taxis; they were just sitting there with someone behind the steering wheel. The random person approached one driver and then called me over. The bargaining was brief. I was willing to pay $50, but the driver said only $40. I didn't want him to feel he had blown it by asking too little, so I said $30, and he said yes. Even with that, one felt that this was like winning the lottery for him. That was okay with me. It was like winning the lottery for me, too. That's what economics is all about.
His name was Andrea. He was 21, tall, and extremely good looking. He had a friend with him, named Sokol, 20, smaller and even better looking. Before leaving they drove back to their apartments to change into their best clothes, and on the way there Andrea leaned out the window and shouted to everyone he knew, ``I've got an American and I'm taking him to Vlorë for $30!!'' I loved his exuberance. As I waited behind his apartment building, his mother came down and introduced herself, and asked me to take a picture of her with her son. At Sokol's apartment building, while we waited for Sokol to change into his best clothes, five or six attractive girls leaned out a window or came outside to hang around Andrea.
The price went up along the way. We got to the key junction outside Saranda, and instead of turning left onto the coast road, they turned right. They intended to backtrack to the town of Gjirokastër on a road I had taken that morning, then north through the ugly oil fields of Ballsh and Fier that I had taken the day before, and finally back south on an uninteresting stretch of the coast road to Vlorë. They said the coast road was too bumpy. But for me the coast road was the whole point. This was the ``Albanian Riviera''. (I hate it when countries don't have enough pride to call things by their own names. Albania also calls its high mountains in the north the ``Albanian Alps''.) I said $40, and they took the coast road. In the end, I gave them $50, grateful as I was that they had apparently decided not to rob and kill me.
These things are not without risk. I was looking for a mid-level way to travel in Albania. I could have gotten a car and driver, and guide if I was lucky, through Albtourist (about which more later) for $180 with hotel and food, or I could have rented a taxi for $100 a day on the steps of the Hotel Tirana, or I could have walked two blocks away to a taxi stand and gotten a taxi for $75 or even $60 a day. (It was on this reconnaissance mission my first afternoon in Tirana that I had my first picture-taking incident. I would clearly announce myself as a tourist by wearing my Minolta Maxxon camera (The one that betrayed me in Borneo; it was okay on this trip, except that sometimes it would go completely dead and I would have to give it a sharp blow to the battery pack.) around my neck. In general, Albanians were willing to have their pictures taken; sometimes they loved it; sometimes they were so insistent that I had trouble not taking their picture. A man on a two-hour ferry ride pestered me the whole time to take his picture, and was constantly telling me what else to take as well; in a way it was rather touching that he should be so anxious that I would find his country beautiful. The one exception to the willingness to pose was that sometimes girls between ten and twenty would be shy about it. As I was walking around Tirana that first afternoon, I spotted a man standing next to his taxi, talking with two women, one about thirty, one about twenty. I approached him to find out what he would charge to take me to Gjirokastër. They were quite amused by my morpheme-by-morpheme, inflectionless Albanian. After that conversation was over, I figured enough rapport was established that I could take their picture, so I asked. Only the younger woman was reluctant. Her friend tried to convince her, then to pull her into the picture. At one point the older one had her arms around the younger pinning her in the frame, and the younger one momentarily dropped her hands from her face, and that's when I snapped the picture. I thought it was all in good fun. But the younger one burst into tears, shook loose, and ran away. The older one ran after her to calm her down, and I ran after them both to apologize as profusely as I knew how in Albanian. Immediately, we were surrounded by about half a dozen young Albanian toughs. I thought they were there to defend the honor of their Albanian women, but it turned out that the women were just as afraid of them as I was. They exchanged words I didn't understand, and the women hurried away. One of the young toughs looked at me and sniggered with a look of complicity and made a gesture that seemed to claim that the women were Lesbians. I smiled pleasantly, and hurried off in the other direction, wishing a return of the young woman's soul from my camera where it had been captured. Apparently it did return to her, for about fifteen minutes later I was walking past a bus and heard a knock on the window and it was her, smiling and waving at me. I debated whether to buy her some flowers at a kiosk that was conveniently there, but the bus pulled away before I could.)
Or I could have traveled from town to town by bus, as I did from Tirana to Berat, and then from Gjirokastër to Saranda, and then from Vlorë to Tirana, for a dollar a day. When they would let me pay. It was not always easy for me to pay in Albania. I was anxious to enter into the local economy, which I would count as successful when I got change for a crisp new 100-lek note (about a dollar) in grimy, shredded, greasy, old 10-lek notes. On my first afternoon excursion I entered a dark shop swarming with people and flies and bought an ice cream cone, but the man wouldn't take my money, until I stood there and stood there and stood there waving it. Finally he took it, seeing that I would not give in and that my ice cream was about to melt. I was less persistent on the bus I took from Tirana to Berat the next morning. I had asked a huge young Albanian man standing on a street corner where the bus to Berat was, and he put his arm around me and walked me to the first bus, about fifty meters away, learning that I was an American tourist, and that no, I wasn't an Albanian-American. Then he asked me something I didn't understand, and I said I didn't, and he prompted me, ``Brooklyn? Tchicago?'' so I said, ``California.'' He walked me to the head of the line at the first bus, and the ticket taker ushered me to his own reserved seat at the front of the bus, and then in Berat refused to take my money. Since I didn't know how much it was, there was no way I could just leave it for him, and it seemed like continuing to offer it was beginning to insult him.
I'm actually not so sure now what I really could have paid for. My last three days in Albania, through irritating circumstances I'll describe later, I had my own driver, Agim Bano, and I gradually realized there was a ceremony attached to giving someone money. He would offer a tip to someone, the someone would hold up his hand in a gesture that fended off the gift, Agim would then with various thrusts and parries try to get past that hand and would eventually succeed in sticking the money into the man's pocket. At that point it was accepted. I mastered this technique well enough to give Agim a tip at the airport as we said goodbye.
But the trouble with the one-dollar buses was that I couldn't stop when I wanted to to take pictures. The mid-level of travel was to find a taxi, or at least a man with a car, in the provincial towns and negotiate a reasonable rate. I did this twice. The other time was in Berat my second day. It was midafternoon and I was sure the buses were through for the day. So I engaged a man for $20. (He had asked $25.) He took a friend along in the back seat.
Now there's the matter of the police in Albania. You run into them every ten kilometers or so along the road, and sometimes they wave you on through, and sometimes they just stop you and check papers, though never mine--I had a feeling they were a bit in awe of foreigners--but mostly if you're in a car, they stop you to hit you up for a ride. When it's a bus they stop, the people laugh and jeer at them, something that would have landed them in jail in the old days, and the police ignore that and go about their business in a quick and perfunctory manner. I asked a man in Shkodra about this. He said there were in fact more police stops today than during the Communist era. There needed to be, since there was more crime now. He said the policemen were all young men, something I had noticed, since it was now a more attractive career. All the police in the Communist era were old men, and they had mostly retired.
We were stopped by the police on our way to Gjirokastër, and a brash, young and very obnoxious soldier got in the back seat. He had not had much experience with foreigners, and his view of how you talked to them was if they didn't understand Albanian, try shouting Albanian louder. He shouted even louder than the tapes of Michael Jackson and Greek rock that the driver had blaring out of his car stereo. And to make sure I was listening, he would grab me roughly by the shoulder. I could only keep from losing my temper with him by reminding myself of stories of Albanian vengeance.
With all my ``Nuk kuptoj''s (``I don't understand.'') and ``Nuk di''s (``I don't know.'') I finally got out of the conversation. But it was still apparently about me, for I heard a lot of ``turisti'' and ``dollari''. Then it turned to politics, as I heard a lot of ``George Bush.''
I tried a few times to stop and take pictures. The driver was quite willing to stop, but utterly baffled at what I wanted to take pictures of, e.g., completely ordinary villages on distant hilltops.
I think I've exhausted all my asides, as well as the 72 registers in your short-term memory, and I'm ready to pop back to ``These things are not without risk.'' Remember that?
These things are not without risk. I didn't know who Andrea and Sokol were, and why shouldn't they rob me? I won't say I was anxious. I get a constant rush of adrenalin when I travel, so I don't get anxious. Rather I get wary. I keep track of escape routes, I note who else is around, whether friends or strangers, and I carry myself tough. Much the same attitude I adopt when I walk down the street in New York City. So I was wary when instead of driving out to the highway in Saranda, we went into the residential area and behind a block of apartment buildings, and I was glad to see other people around, and I was glad when I realized it was so Andrea could change his clothes, not so they could rob me. Whenever I asked him to stop along the way so I could take a picture, I would casually loop my daypack over my shoulder before getting out of the car; after all, why should they wait til the end of the ride to get $40, when they could just drive off with my daypack and get (though they wouldn't have known the exact amount) $700 plus an American passport.
Along the way, we gave rides to other people. This seems to be expected in Albania. If you have an empty seat, you fill it. When several days later I was traveling around with Agim with a whole empty back seat, people on the road would wave us down, and when they realized we weren't stopping, they'd step into the road shaking their fists at us furiously. Andrea and Sokol gave rides to people, first to a large, middle-aged farmer whom we took from a random curve in the road 10 km to the next village, and third, at the instigation of a policeman who stopped us and made us detour into the beautiful town of Himara, two attractive, blonde, middle-aged peasant women, whom we took 30 km, over the spectacular high pass of Llogarasë to the village of Dukati. But the second ride brought me to the height of wariness. In the town of Lukove, Sokol spotted two of his friends by the road and we stopped and they got in, and we took them as far as Borsh, 20 km away. On the way I realized that we were on a very lonely stretch of the road in some very wild country, and here I was, with my $700 and my American passport, alone in the car with four strong young men, complete strangers to me, who all knew each other, speaking in a language I didn't understand. Well, nothing happened, except that they gave me a peach, which I felt obliged to eat. (Civilized human that I am, I don't trust food that isn't bought in a supermarket.)
We got to Vlorë around 6:30, just when it was beginning to get dark. For me, when I'm traveling, this is the highest stress part of the day, and always has been, ever since I hitchhiked around the western U.S. in my college days. There is a rational explanation for this--it is the time of day that I seriously have to consider where I will spend the night. But in fact, the feeling is much more visceral. In the famous paper ``What the Frog's Eye Tells the Frog's Brain'' Lettvin, Maturana, et al. show that the frog can see two things--a small dark object about 12 inches from its nose, which makes its tongue flick out, and a dark shadow falling over its back, which makes it jump. This time of evening is for me what the dark shadow is for the frog. As my ancestors evolved from amphibians to people, the fear of the falling of a dark shadow evolved with them into the fear of the coming of evening.
The town of Vlorë was not calculated to ease my anxiety, er, wariness. It is one of those huge, desolate, anonymous, Eastern European cities with miles of identical apartment blocks, with broad empty avenues and not a shop or cafe or bar to provide a refuge. The beauty of the coastline gave way to industry as soon as we entered the town.
Sokol was driving by now, and I told him I wanted to go to a hotel near the bus station. In fact, there was such a place, as I discovered the next morning, not more than a kilometer from where I spent the night. But we didn't go there. Instead Sokol turned into an alleyway between two apartment blocks and bumped along it and behind a third and came to a stop between a wall and a trash bin. I sat calmly in the car, but I studied escape routes and noted with relief people watching us from various balconies. Sokol shouted up and a woman came out onto a second floor balcony. There was a brief conversation, and then Sokol said I was invited in for coffee. I declined, saying I wanted to get to the hotel before dark. But then a pleasant, intelligent, short, gray and balding man of, it turned out, 57, came down to the car and repeated the offer of coffee. I liked him immediately, so my resolve weakened, and I accepted. I won't say I let down my guard, but at least the conspiracy to rob and kill me was getting larger and larger, perhaps even larger than the CIA conspiracy to kill Kennedy. (The analogy that occurred to me, in line with my celebrity status, was this: Imagine a taxi driver picking up a famous movie star, and deciding on the spur of the moment to rob and kill him. Implausible.)
So that's how I got to Mustafa Kaçi's apartment. That's how it came about that he was the one who taught me about Albanian hospitality.
Because I really was a celebrity. The first American tourist. They had seen plenty of American missionaries. That was one of the biggest surprises, although I guess it shouldn't have been--that hordes of American, born-again Christian missionaries would swoop in like vultures to feed on the carcass of Balkan Communism. Albania should prove fertile ground. Of course they already have their own traditional religions, thank you--70% Muslim, 20% Greek Orthodox, and 10% Roman Catholic. No Southern Baptist tradition. But religion has been discouraged since 1944 and stringently suppressed since 1967. (You could see it in the mosques, which are either in ruins or only beginning to be repaired. And maybe I imagined it, but the worshipers I saw in the Tirana mosque seemed tentative and unsure of exactly what to do.) That's enough for a generation to grow up free from the traditional religions, leaving the missionaries with virgin territory to plow. I talked to a number of the missionaries, and they were all nice people--after all, that's their business. But it all struck me as a grand deception. These people are coming in as the first representatives of modern Western culture, and their appeal is primarily as representatives of modern Western culture, yet in modern Western culture they constitute a backwater.
They had seen a few Albanian-American businessmen, coming there to look for business opportunities, like the Albanian-American I met in Tirana who owned a restaurant in New Jersey and was looking to open one on the ``Albanian Riviera''. But a British diplomat I talked to in the Tirana Airport waiting for the plane to Rome said that the ``investment climate'' was not favorable enough yet. For example, foreigners cannot yet own land in Albania.
They had apparently seen some German tourists in Saranda, perhaps over for the day from Corfu, although I didn't see any, because someone greeted me with ``Grüss Gott''.
I saw a busload of Greek tourists in Tepelenë, just north of Gjirokastër. Greece, like Yugoslavia, has never reconciled itself to Albania's existence, and this was no doubt the advance army of invasion.
But I was the first American tourist. Certainly the first one traveling the way I was traveling. I did meet an American geography teacher from Massachusetts later in Shkodra, traveling in a study group with half a dozen Brits.
So I was a celebrity, and while Mustafa's wife served me coffee, relatives and neighbors trooped in and out of the apartment, almost in shifts, to meet me. Mustafa was a retired electrical engineer. He had studied in Leningrad in the late 1950s, but had been sent home in 1961 when Soviet-Albanian relations soured over Khrushchev's overtures to Yugoslavia. His wife showed me their photo album with pictures of him in Leningrad, and then their wedding pictures. They had three sons, a 27-year-old who was working in Rome, a 26-year-old, Sokol's friend, who had worked in Greece for a while last year but was now living at home, and a 19-year-old who had once won honorable mention in an international children's art contest, and was now an artist in Saranda.
They insisted I stay for dinner, and they insisted I stay the night. I could have the son's room while he slept on the couch in the living room. I yielded to dinner, but resisted on staying the night, saying I had to leave by bus to Tirana very early. Mustafa went to telephone the hotel and returned with a pallid expression. He said I couldn't possibly stay in the hotel; it was so expensive--$25 a night. I couldn't exactly tell him that that was in the noise for me.
When the conversation had exhausted my sparse knowledge of Albanian, I got out my notes on Albanian, which had considerably more words than I had memorized, and Mustafa browsed through them, looking for words that he could use. When he hit the word for ``guest'', he pointed to it and he pointed to me, and then I could not refuse.
Accepting hospitality has its drawbacks. I had wondered about the availability of food in Albania before going there, and in fact had packed a dozen granola bars just in case. But food turned out not to be a problem. There was never much choice, but there was always something. Albania is not a starving country. There is poverty, but it is not Africa-style poverty, or even Asia-style poverty. It is the kind of poverty that means there are horses and wagons on the highways. It is the kind of poverty that means two men can walk down the middle of the main street in Tirana, carrying a sheep between them, and that a woman can sit casually smoking a cigarette waiting at a bus stop while her goat nibbles the hedge behind her. There is food enough for everyone. I soon learned why. It is not the Albanians. When the Communists were in power, the people worked because they had to. When the Communists fell, they didn't have to work anymore, so they didn't. So they didn't produce any food. The European Community stepped in with Operation Pelican, supplying food until the harvest came in in October, and as I rode along the highways I would encounter long convoys of Italian army trucks distributing the food aid. Even the bread comes from food aid. I don't know what happens after October, whether there will be a harvest. Albania has, for the most part, decollectivized agriculture. They divided the collective farms up into individual plots and distributed them. But the people have no equipment to work them with. I saw people bending over in wheat fields with sickles. I saw a man pushing a hand plow pulled by one cow. But the landscape is covered with beautiful green and yellow corn fields, many of them harvested with cows and sheep grazing in the stubble. So maybe there will be a harvest.
Anyway, when you are a guest, you don't have any choice about what you eat, and my worst fears were realized. I was served liver. I hate liver. I gag on liver. I can't keep it down. As I stared at the plate waiting for the others to be served, I plotted out my strategy carefully. There were wonderfully pungent olives on the plate, and hot red peppers, and feta cheese and tomato slices, and I had just been served a glass of that strong Balkan liquor called raki that explodes in your mouth and burns your esophagus. I would cut off a small piece of liver, combine it on the fork with an olive or pepper, chew it with my molars, and swallow it without ever letting the liver touch my tongue. If some did, I would kill the sensation with a sip of the raki. I couldn't finish all the liver, but if I left a little bit of everything, they might not suspect. I was well into execution of this plan when Mustafa's wife brought out a second plate, heaped with very tough chicken and lots of French fries. On this I couldn't even begin.
And then-- Well, whatever the state of Albanian agriculture, they certainly have plenty of watermelons. Early in the year the government had everyone plant watermelons, with the idea of exporting them to the rest of Europe. But when the harvest came in, the government stupidly decided that it would be unseemly to export watermelons while receiving food aid. So now Albania has a glut of watermelons. I passed truckloads of watermelons on the roads, wagonloads of watermelons, cartloads of watermelons. Broken watermelons littered the highways. And now Mustafa's son cut up a watermelon and placed most of it in front of me.
I don't think my strategy worked very well. Everyone else cleaned their plate, while I had scraps of liver and heaps of chicken and most of a watermelon remaining. Mustafa's wife brightened when I complimented her on the dinner, but I don't think she believed me.
The second drawback of accepting hospitality was the plumbing. Well, for all I know the plumbing at the hotel was worse. Plumbing was always an adventure in Albania. The first thing I'd do when I got to a hotel room was fix the plumbing if I could. In the room in Shkodra to get the water in the toilet to stop running, I propped up the float with a hanger, and then to flush the toilet I first had to fill the tank with the shower head, which was at the end of a hose. The shower head itself dripped so to stop the noise I had to lay it on the floor by the drain. In the middle of my first night in Tirana, the faucet in the bathroom spontaneously turned on, and I woke up in the middle of a dream about my room being flooded. In the bathroom of my room in Gjirokastër, the light didn't work, so I couldn't really tell what else didn't work. I kept the toilet lid closed just in case.
The biggest adventure in plumbing, however, came in the Hotel Tirana, Albania's biggest and second most ``luxurious'' hotel. It was midday. I had just returned from Vlorë by bus and was waiting for the man at Albtourist to find me a driver, and I wanted to go to the toilet--excuse me for going into detail, but #2. I tried the men's room on the ground floor, but the door was locked. I looked for the concierge and spotted her going down some stairs into the basement and I called down to her. She ignored me and I kept calling and she kept ignoring me, and finally the concierge for the first floor showed up and told me to follow her up there. Once in the stall, I wiped some drops of water off the seat with some toilet paper, figuring they were left over from when the stall was cleaned, and some of the water soaked through to my fingers. When I was through, I tested a suspicion I had begun to have, discovered that the toilet seat did not stay up, and realized that those drops of water may not have been so innocent. So I was quite desperate to wash my hands. But when I tried the sink, there was no water. I boldly strode into the women's room to use the sink there, but no water. There was no running water in the entire hotel. The first-floor concierge had no real interest in helping me find water, and probably didn't understand the problem. I had traveled light around southern Albania, with only a day pack with a change of clothes in it, leaving my suitcase at the Hotel Tirana. Since my first night in Albania I had stayed on the ninth floor, I had left the suitcase with the ninth-floor concierge and had given her a pack of Marlboros to think kindly of me while my suitcase was in her care. So now to wash my hands I went up to the ninth floor, found the concierge, retrieved my suitcase, gave her a tip, and then pleaded for water to wash my hands. She let me into someone's room, and when I turned on the faucet, there was just enough water for the job left in the pipes.
The plumbing in Mustafa's apartment was a complex arrangement of tanks and hoses and faucets, but it all came down to one tiny faucet that had a thick rubber band looped over the spigot. When you unloosed the rubber band, a trickle of cold water would dribble out of the faucet. I was able to shave with that, looking at my shadow in lieu of a mirror--my hand knew where to shave, but my eyes had to look at something. A shower was out of the question, as was flushing the toilet, a fact that led to my adventure in the Hotel Tirana later that morning.
Modernization comes to a country unevenly. In contrast with the plumbing, Mustafa had had the television on during the entire dinner, and he constantly switched channels with his remote control, from an Italian soap opera on the station from Rome to an American soap opera on the station from Tirana.
My night at Mustafa's was the biggest example of hospitality, but certainly not the only one. When I checked into the hotel in Shkodra, the clerk behind the desk, whose name was ``Ilir'', invited me over to his apartment after dinner for coffee. Like Mustafa's apartment and like other apartments I have seen in eastern Europe, it was on an unlit street in a run-down building, the steps to the second-floor entrance were crumbling, you could see through the floorboards in the kitchen, but the living room was a place of warmth and beauty. This is the part of their home that they can do something with, that is really their own, and this is where they invest their money and energy. There was a large cabinet on one side of the room with their china and various objects of display, and on the other side of the room a black, family heirloom chest of drawers from 1875. His two cute teenage daughters were sitting on a couch watching ``Karate Kid'' on television, and his wife's mother, dressed in black, was sitting in another corner. They took me into the bedroom and showed me their son, a 12-day-old baby. I took photographs of the family, including the first photograph ever of their son. I'll send them the family portraits when I get them developed.
The next night in Shkodra, I walked around the neighborhood of the hotel after dinner and stopped in at a small, warm-looking cafe with a number of people in it. I ordered a raki and took a chair. Within five minutes I had been invited to join a table with three teachers in their 50s and a driver of 40. As our conversation went through the usual course--where am I from, describe my family, where have I been in Albania--the rest of the people in the cafe gathered around me. The conversation then turned to politics. The statements were pretty basic: ``Enver Hoxha bad.'' ``George Bush good.'' They liked George Bush, but didn't seem distressed when I said I was for Clinton. They didn't know anything about Clinton. (Do any of us?) Then the cook came out with ice cream for me, and then for everyone else. They kept my glass of raki filled, and I had to start pretending to drink or I wouldn't have made it back to the hotel. The brother of the driver of 40 showed up; he was a doctor, and wanted to know how much a doctor made in America. I tried to temper the information by quoting the price of a house in California. Just before closing time, the driver of 40, a family man, insisted I spend the night in his apartment instead of the hotel. I declined. Then a rather strange-looking, hatchet-faced man who had entered the cafe rather late and had moved his chair right next to mine, also insisted I stay in his apartment. This I declined too. I wondered if he was gay; I didn't know the signals in Albania, or the attitudes. When the cafe closed, he accompanied me back to the hotel. He took my arm, but I shook his hand loose. As we approached the door of the hotel, he said, ``Ten dollars.'' I didn't reply. He said, ``Ten dollars. You understand?'' I said, ``I understand `ten dollars', but I don't understand who's giving it to whom and for what.'' I don't think he understood. At the door he kissed me on both cheeks, the Albanian-style farewell.
There were small acts of hospitality. On the crowded bus from Gjirokastër to Saranda an old man insisted I take his seat, while he sat on a bundle in the aisle. There was no way I could refuse without insulting him. Anyway, it paid off for him, because I gave him a pack of Marlboros when we arrived in Saranda--I really did appreciate that seat. On the bus from Vlorë to Tirana we stopped at a cafe briefly, and the man who was sitting next to me on the bus insisted on paying for my coffee. Again, to refuse would have been to insult. He won too. All the men at the front of the bus took their smoking seriously and were constantly passing cigarettes back and forth. I took out a pack of Marlboros, gave them to the man, and indicated that he should pass them around to the others. He opened the pack, though slowly, and passed a few cigarettes around to some of the men, and they lit up. But I had the feeling that it was with some reluctance, as if they were being forced to smoke money.
There is a moral issue here--I'm quite aware of it. Should I be encouraging them in something as unhealthy as smoking cigarettes? But remember, I was a tourist, not a missionary.
My final example of hospitality, rather dubious hospitality in this case, is from my second day in Albania, while I was walking around the inner city of Berat, on top of a mountain, inside the walls of a fortress. The brief summary of Albanian history is this: In 3000 years they have never had a beneficial relationship with another country. Their few periods of independence have been spent fighting off their eventual conquerors. You can see this in their architecture. All their monuments are fortresses, and every city of suitable antiquity has its fortress on top of the nearest hill. What is distinctive about their traditional houses is that they are built like fortresses, with stone walls and small windows on the first two floors. Even in this century, the fortress mentality has persisted. Enver Hoxha was convinced his enemies would invade so he had bunkers placed everywhere. You ride past ordinary corn fields, and there in the middle or at the edge are three or four of these things, hemispheres of concrete sticking above the ground like giant soldiers' helmets. (There is a housing shortage in Albania, and I saw one of the bunkers that had been converted into a home, with a stick fence around it and chickens in the yard.)
So I was walking around the town inside the fortress on top of the hill in Berat--a wonderful town, with the maze-like character of villages on Greek islands, except the houses and streets were all made out of shiny white rocks--when a very cute girl about (exactly, as it turned out) ten years old suddenly appeared in the street before me, well aware of her photogenicity, and posing. I took her picture. She spoke a little English and a little more Italian, and was very bright. (Calculating, as it turned out.) I told her I was an American, and she took me by the hand and led me through streets to a gate, and through the gate into a courtyard and up the steps into her house. No explanation.
I was praying that her mother or father would be home, but they weren't. Only her 15-year-old sister. They had me sit down and served me ice water and preserves. Now I was rather nervous at this moment. Imagine the same situation in America. The father comes home and sees a strange, middle-aged man sitting in his house with his two young daughters. I'd risk being shot. I didn't know Albanian attitudes on this question, but there again were those stories of Albanian vengeance.
Anyway, I was safe. Neither parent came home while I was there.
The girl--her name was Brunilola Paga, Bruna for short--pointed to my camera and asked if she could take a picture of me. I thought her hospitality was worth at least one wasted picture, so I gave her the camera, without the flash, and showed her where to push. She took my picture, all dark I'm sure, and then before I could leap across the room to stop her, she whirled the camera around the room going snap, snap, snap, snap. If I hadn't caught her when I did, she would have taken the whole roll.
Then she came over and sat down beside me, and hooked her finger under my watchband and said, ``I like your watch.'' I took this to mean she not only liked it, she wanted it. When I made it clear I wasn't going to give it to her, she asked for my ball-point pen. I told her I needed it, so she asked me for the notebook she had spotted in my daypack, the one I kept my journal in. I took pictures of her and her sister, with as much of the living room as I could, including the washing machine and refrigerator (but unfortunately not the dead chicken that was the only item in the refrigerator). Then I took down their address, and Bruna placed a whole order--the photographs, a watch, a pen, a notebook, a dollar, and a Michael Jackson tape.
I said I wanted to walk around the village some more, so she led me out, and up to the top of the village where on the battlements of the fortress, in an old lookout tower, there was a coffee house. This is exactly what I had hoped to find. In my travels I race from sight to site, but the moments I remember with greatest fondness have me sitting at an outdoor table at a cafe with a beautiful view. I ordered a coffee for me and lemonades for Bruna and her little brother, who had tagged along, and went to sit at a table by the parapet with a beautiful view of the modern town below and the length of the Osum River valley, closely hemmed in by mountains. Bruna finished her lemonade and asked if I would buy her and her brother some chocolate, so I did. When I went to pay the bill, I learned that the coffee was 3 leks (about 3 cents), the lemonades were 10 leks each, and the chocolate bars were 120 leks each. She knew what to ask for.
I needed to move on, she walked me to the arched gate of the old town, and we shook hands goodbye. I had successfully held onto my camera, my watch, my pen, and my notebook. But I still have her address and that Christmas list, and I wonder if I should send her a Michael Jackson tape.