We’ve been traveling through the Balkans for 5 days now: Bulgaria, Macedonia and Albania. We’ve seen the grandiose arquitecture of Sofia, a 150 year-old capital built upon the ruins of a 5th century Roman metropolis. In Macedonia, the slim miranets of mosques point up blue and white from the clusters of red brick houses. We arrived two days ago to Lake Ohrid, one of the oldest and deepest lakes in Europe. This lake is ancient, maybe 5 million years old, and it lays over the borders of Macedonia and Albania with the calm confidence of age.
We have been scrambling to communicate, but there’s little hope for us: The alphabet of Bulgaria’s Slavic language is slightly different from that of Macedonia, where they use a “j” and pronounce their country Makedonia, with a hard /k/. Albania’s language is not Slavic: in fact, it is unique in the European languages, and linguists think it evolved from an old Balkan language. This is all to say that my abilities to carry on a conversation so far have been pretty minimal, especially among the older population. I resort to miming: eating air barbarically with my hands and tickling the same air when I turn it into a keyboard to show I want to do some work. Smiling is culturally relative, and I’m realizing how language is fundamental to good manners: we have learned the words for “Thank you,” “Excuse me,” and greetings. Fala mendireet. Me fal. Tuña tieta. These are the phrases I’m working on now, in Albania. Soon, in Croatia, we’ll switch back to blogadaria and its friend izvenitye.
Learning the words is a small hurdle to jump for the privialage of being here, near this beautiful body of water and the communities that have been established on its shores. We ate trout last night in Pogradec, while the entire city came out for its nightly 8:00 pm walk. Babies and their parents, young woman in heels, men wearing brand name t-shirts and elderly women in dark dresses and kerchiefs all walked slowly down the lake’s sidewalk, socializing in the most easy and natural of ways. We merged with the crowds to walk back to our room, where I fell easily to sleep under well preserved 90210 sheets.
La Giraffa 