TirJazzFest

This year's Tirana Jazz Fest started on Tuesday night. It's nowhere near the size of Montreal's, but the festival has the same broad-minded definition of “jazz.” I missed the first hour of the opening concert, as the flier I had, in the best Albanian tradition, didn't list the time that anything started. I did manage to catch a little of two-piece band Lene Lovich, who played a sort of Nina Hagen-style Expressionist electro-cabaret show. Not really my sort of thing, but the venue for the festival (a nightclub called Lollipop, owned by the son of the Socialist ex-Prime Minister Fatos Nano) is a great place for a smallish concert.

GWB

Next month, George Bush will become the first sitting American president to visit Albania, and the government is excited:


There's a cafe in Tirana named after George Bush, and a "Bush Auto Repair" just outside the city. I hope he drives by at least one of them; maybe he'll be convinced to relax visa restrictions for Albanians. I also think that whoever owns the bus which flies a giant American flag with the words "Land of Milk and Honey" written across it should park it near the embassy for the weekend.

Reading about the security arrangements for his visit, I'm tempted to head down to the beach for the day. My last apartment had police officers with AK-47s stationed in the stairwell 24/7; I've sort of been enjoying the demilitarized ambiance of my new building. The prospect of a car-free city centre might outweigh the rooftop snipers and the rumoured shutdown of the cellphone network, though.

More excitingly, for me at least, Dolores O'Riordan (former lead singer of The Cranberries) is playing a concert here next month. Tirana's live music scene is still pretty dismal, encompassing mainly cover bands (some of which are pretty good) and local groups with names like The Sexy Very Much Band. The promoters who run The Living Room nightclub have recently started booking more international artists (including Dolores O'Riordan and, believe it or not, Deep Purple); hopefully this is a sign of better things to come.

Durres

I went to Durres, the port closest to Tirana, for the first time this weekend...

Castle walls in Durres Town

The main street in Durres Town, with the mosque at the far end


Random Roman columns in the middle of the
sidewalk. Also, the town Christmas tree in the background.


I managed to take this picture from the worst possible angle as we drove by. It's a giant wooden horse, on the road between Durres Town and Durres Beach.

Golem Beach at sunset

Montenegro Essentials

Full writeup on Montenegro coming as soon as I manage to get the pictures scanned in, but until then, here's some of the essential information on the country:

• Montenegro supposedly has the tallest population of any country in Europe, which I completely believe.

  
  

• A palacinke might be a crepe, or it might be ground beef rolled in a pancake and deep-fried. Also, ketchup on pizza.

  
  

• Montenegro is tiny: nothing is more than an hour or two's drive from anything else. The most popular forms of transportation seem to be minibus and hitchhiking.

  
  

• Hotels are mostly Soviet-style monsters; luckily, pretty much every household rents out its spare rooms during the summer. Unluckily, April is not considered “summer,” so it took me a while to find places to stay.

  
  

• Montenegrin beer is great, but there's only one brand, called Niksicko (most people drop the “sicko”). Wine is also pretty good, especially as the most expensive bottle at the market cost 3 euros.

  
  

• Montenegro is the world's newest country, and the only Former Yugoslav Republic to separate peacefully.

  
  

• Montenegrin cooks will deep-fry just about anything; “vegetables” means boiled potates and spinach and maybe rice.

  
  

• The Gulf of Kotor might be my favourite place in Europe.

Fort Dix

A few days ago, a militant Islamic group made up at least in part of ethnic Albanians (who were former citizens of the former Yugoslavia) was charged with planning an attack on an American military base in New Jersey.

The thing about religious conflict in Albania is that there isn't much, relatively speaking. The country's population is divided about 70/30 between Muslim and Christian, yet there's about as much tension as there is between Catholics and Protestants in the United States. Orthodox priests visit mosques on Muslim holy days, and vice versa; marriages between Christians and Muslims are so common as to be unremarkable.

I do see the danger, though, of militant Islamic groups finding a recruiting pool in Albania. I've been to towns in the northern part of the country where the roads are close to non-existent and the buildings downtown are in ruins, but the mosques are brand-new and immaculate. The other civilian airport in the country (besides Rinas Mother Teresa) is being built not in the biggest southern city (Vlora), nor in the tourist centre (Saranda), but in a small town in the northeast of the country, near Kosovo. All of these were built by Middle Eastern financiers.

Albania is one of the poorest countries in Europe; very few towns are about to turn down an infusion of petrodollars (or petrolekë, I guess). The problem is that the builders of a mosque, for example, are going to want to staff said mosque with clerics from, or at least sympathetic to, their own sects. Albanian Islam is marked by its liberality (the souvlaki stand downstairs from my apartment is filled with girls in miniskirts eating pork and drinking beer) and tolerance (Albania is the only European country which had a larger Jewish population in 1945 than in 1938); I'm not sure the same could be said for all Middle Eastern Islamic groups.

With the exception of the above-mentioned airport, very little if any Middle Eastern investment has gone towards improving the country's infrastructure; rather, most investment seems to be ideological rather than developmental. Many Albanians in the more developed parts of the country have a healthy skepticism towards foreign missionaries, but if the only building in a town that's not half-ruined is the mosque, I can see how the implied promises made by its financiers could sway people's opinion towards favouring the ideology behind the gifts.