· worldwideharbour ·

2007-06-11T17:16:00.000+02:00

Rumour has it that while Bush was kissing hands and shaking babies in Fushe-Kruje, ~~somebody, um, stole his watch~~ ~~pulled his watch off and dropped it on the ground~~. He took it off himself, okay?

Lockdown

2007-06-10T23:19:00.000+02:00

I can't describe how nice it was to wake up this morning to the sound of birds instead of the taxi drivers across the street blasting “The Numa Numa Song”. Tirana should ban cars from the centre every weekend, not just when George Bush rolls into town.

What they didn't tell us beforehand was that most of the streets in my neighbourhood would be off-limits not just to cars but to pedestrians as well, and that they would be opened and closed seemingly at random. What would normally be a five-minute walk involved a kilometer-long detour across the river and around the lockdown zone. At one point, my block was completely cordoned off; I had to promise the police that I really did live there. At least the American army's anticipated seven-hour occupation of the city was, except for a helicopter or two, nearly invisible.

Bush was given the Nderi i Flamurit (Honour to the Flag) medal (Albania's “least gratuitously-distributed medals,” according to a newscaster). Tirana's Rruga e Barrikadave (Street of the Barricades) was renamed “George Bush Street” (or rather “Rruga Xhorxh Bush”; Albanians transliterate foreign names into Albanian phonetics. My name is “Xheims.”). He was also made an honourary citizen of the nearby “god-forsaken village” (the newscaster's words, not mine) of Fushe-Kruje, to which people “flocked from every muddy corner of Middle Albania” (newscaster again) to greet the sort of overwhelmed-looking president. Red, white and blue stovepipe hats and miniature American flags were everywhere.

So it must have made for a nice change from the protesters that usually greet Bush and his entourage. The president even made a spontaneous public appearance in Fushe-Kruje, stepping into a bakery (which I'm betting will be named “Bukeri Xhorxh Bush” by Monday); taking pictures with Fushe-Krujeans; and being generally embraced by the crowd. Some of the positivity, though, seemed to stem not from the prevalent pro-American attitude in Albania, although that's definitely part of it, but from the idea that Bush is somehow responsible for Kosovo's impending independence. Which, excepting his support for the Ahtisaari plan, I don't really see.

Really, Really Excited

2007-06-07T14:12:00.000+02:00

Bush's visit is drawing closer, and more decorations are going up, from the Pyramid:

to the streets:

to the video billboards:

I ventured inside the Pyramid yesterday to see what the Ekspozite was all about. The central part of the building is filled by a trade-show thing (honey, jewelry, galvanized steel sheeting; whatever you need). In one of the side rooms is a gallery showcasing great moments in Albanian-American Relations, interspersed with random photographs of the U. S. (and one which I think was taken in Toronto). The next gallery was filled entirely with photographs of George W. Bush. Here's Baby Bush:

There was a movie that was supposed to be playing, but only the audio was working. All I can tell you is that the soundtrack was heavy on "The Star-Spangled Banner."

TirJazzFest, #3

2007-06-04T19:57:00.000+02:00

The Jazz Fest continued on Friday with a collaborative show by festival president Hans-Joachim Roedelius, Swiss cellist Clementine Gasser, and Italian guitarist Fabio Capanni. Gasser's “unfriendly classical avant-garde” solos were the highlight of the concert; the guitarist's contributions were minimal and unobtrusive, while Roedelius's subtle, Eno-esque mix of piano and ambient soundscapes was entrancing, but I'd rather have listened to it on headphones than in a crowded club.

Hans-Joachim Roedelius

It didn't help that the crowd wasn't into the music at all. The American sitting next to me left after one song, saying “this isn't the kind of jazz I like.” I could see why: this was “jazz” as in “semi-improvised live collaboration,” not as in “sax, double bass, and drums.” The Tirana Semi-Improvised Music and also Some Jazz Festival doesn't have the same ring, though. Still, if you're bored at a concert and want to talk, go out on the terrasse. Please. I can't hear the music over your conversations.

Hans-Joachim Roedelius

After the main event, Roedelius played an amazing DJ set that swung from techno to ambient before settling into a shuffling, chilled-out breakbeat groove. Mr. Roedelius, you are a fantastic DJ, and thank you for letting us eat the rest of your snack table.

Clementine Gasser

Some general thoughts on the Jazz Fest:

It would be really great if the printed schedule of performances had some relation to reality. The Roedelius / Gasser / Capanni concert, scheduled for 7.30, didn't start until after 9.30.

Merchandise tables would be a good idea. We were talking to Clementine Gasser after the concert, when one of the staff came up to us and said “You want to buy a CD? Ten euros.” Well, okay, actually we did want to, but it was still awkward.

Lollipop is a near-perfect place for live music; they should have more shows there.

In other news, Tirana's finally getting a second movie theatre. The Imperial, in the Sheraton building, will open next week. My girlfriend took a quick tour of it this morning; apparently one of the screening rooms has huge, comfortable armchairs with buttons on the side that will eventually let you order food and drinks during the movie; at the moment they just turn on all the vacuum cleaners.

TirJazzFest, #2

2007-06-01T17:56:00.000+02:00

Thursday night (I skipped the accordion concert on Wednesday) was an Austrian duo, made up of guitarist Eric Spitzer-Marlyn and singer Lisa Stern, who, through the magic of live sampling, sang looped harmonies with herself. It reminded me a little of Final Fantasy, but with looped vocals instead of violin, and with more of a pop/jazz sound. At one point, she asked the crowd for an Albanian word to sing into the sampler, but I think all the native Albanian speakers were out smoking on the terrasse, so she ended up with a loop that sounded sort of Albanian-ish. A very cool show; I thoroughly enjoyed it.

French collective Leda Atomica was next. I didn't see the bandmembers touch a single conventional instrument (save the drums, and I'm sure there was something cool about them that I couldn't see). Instead, they played what looked like self-built instruments, including a sort of one-string electric violin and a series of amped-up metal rods attached to a 4'x4' sheet of metal. The thing in the picture above that looks sort of like a metal-shop rendition of a Georgia O'Keefe painting, or a robot stingray, works like a kind of personal amphitheatre: singing into the flangey part at the bottom amplifies and distorts the singer's voice. The music itself (sort of Middle-Eastern influenced avant-garde electronica) was too heavy and over-serious after the opening band (plus it was near 11pm), so we headed out, feeling sorry for the American Ambassador, who had to sit front and center until, I'm assuming, the end of the concert.

TirJazzFest

2007-05-31T12:18:00.000+02:00

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

2007-05-29T16:11:00.000+02:00

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

2007-05-13T13:54:00.000+02:00

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

2007-05-11T14:35:00.000+02:00

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

2007-05-11T14:01:00.000+02:00

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.

Montenegro

2007-04-18T13:59:00.000+02:00

Wow.

More later.

Ashiana

2007-04-12T12:44:00.000+02:00

I finally went to Albania's first Indian restaurant last night. It's not easy to find unless you know where you should look (it's in a basement on a side street near the river), but is totally worth tracking down. There's no tandoor (because they're in the basement, I guess), but the palak paneer and channa masala are great. Actually, everything was great except for the onion bhaji, which had no spice at all. Also, they make "chicken lollipops." I see myself returning often. Next task: finding the Mexican restaurant.

In other news, the new Ulrich Schnauss album has been released, so I'm enveloped in a warm blanket of electro-shoegaze. Also, the weather is amazing. Hopefully it'll stay like this for my trip to Montenegro next week.

The Power Out

2007-04-12T12:28:00.000+02:00

I spent the best part of last month struggling with my apartments' drains, which suddenly stopped draining and started doing the reverse. After two days of consultations with the landlord, several visits from plumbers, and using the bathroom at the bakery downstairs, we figured out that the pipes in the building (which was probably built in the 1940s) weren't designed for toilet paper.

This is something I've come to realize over my time living in Albania: even the most modernized parts of the country rest on an infrastructure that's shaky at best. In the southern parts of the country, the power is out for 2 hours a day in the winter; in Tirana, the outages can last eight hours or more (according to the power company, half of the country's electricity is stolen before reaching its destination, which doesn't help things). My neighbourhood has power almost all of the time, but the water's turned off at 10pm every day. So the ultra-modern office building down the street relies on a diesel generator to keep its escalators moving; the pub around the corner may or may not have running water; and my newly-renovated apartment in downtown Tirana is incompatible with toilet paper.

For me, these things are minor annoyances, but for foreign investors who might bring some badly needed money and employment into the country, they're major considerations. A supermarket can't operate without 24/7 electricity for its refrigerators and freezers; a medical clinic needs water. The few foreign companies (like Mercedes and Italian supermarket chain Conad) which have opened branches in Albania have had to work around the infrastructure, adding generators and water tanks to their stores. Most multinationals, however, seem to have decided that it's not worth the effort (there's no McDonald's in Albania).

The relative absence of multinational corporations may not be an entirely bad thing (like I said, there's no McDonald's), but locally-owned businesses are affected by the same factors that keep foreign investors away.