Animal Rights?

The recent flooding in Northern Albania has sparked a lot of thought and discussion.  "Did the government cause the disaster unintentionally as a consequence of  a scheme to skim money on the import of electricy?"  "Why has the drainage infrastructure been allowed to decay so badly?"  "Is it an act of god or man?" For me, the burning question is: "Would they eat a hippo?"  You might think this doesn't make much sense, but be patient. We'll get there.  But first I have to do some backing up. 

I confess I am not much of an animal rights activist.  Raised in the western U.S. among ranchers, I grew up in an environment that clearly defined "Us" and "Them."  People and Animals, that is.  We loved our dogs but didn't shy away from giving them the "Old Yeller" treatment if they needed it.  We took care of cattle or sheep because of their economic value and had no qualms about plinking at jack-rabbits for fun.  Hunting deer or antelope was a sacred rite which warranted a school holiday.  Seriously, if you scored a buck tag, no teacher would think about penalizing you for unauthorized absence as you spent the better part of a school week freezing your ass off in the slim hope of actually getting to plug Bambi.

From this background I ventured out into the world to discover there were lots of people who never "met their meat," so to speak.  Those who ate meat got it from the grocery store wrapped in plastic with little evidence that it was once a living animal.  Then there were the vegetarians, vegans, ovo-lacto-vegetarians, cat-lovers, dog-lovers, PETA members, and many more who held a starkly different view on the Us/Them relationship.  I listened, learned, and generally held my tongue among these folks.

When I came to Albania, I was back in my element.  The luxury of imbuing animals with human characteristics was not affordable here.  Animals had their work to do or their place on the table.  Period.  In fact, Albanians challenged my comfort level.  It's a common sight here to see a kasapi in a kiosk on the side of the road hacking away at the carcass of a lamb while three more line up for their turn.  Blood runs into the gutter while customers haggle over the choicest morsels.  Absolutely no squeamishness. 

As I learned more about Albania, I heard stories about families who kept a turkey in the bathroom in the run-up to New Years Eve.  That's like Thanksgiving here.  A real turkey bloodbath.  Family members would fend off the turkey while taking their morning constitutional, knowing it was a small price to pay for the feast of gjell deti and pershesh which awaited them.  The slaughtering also occured in the bathroom. 

And it wasn't just food animals.  At three in the morning on a cold January night I awoke to the sounds of a pitched battle outside my apartment in Tirana.  The sounds of gunfire were unmistakable and prolonged.  "What they hell are they shooting at," I wondered.  Turns out, it was dogs.  The mayor's office had a bounty of 500 lek for every tail collected in order to control the stray dog population.  The local hunter's clubs joined the game with gusto.  The most disturbing thing is this hunt was repeated every six month with no shortage of targets. Where are the spay and neuter folks when you need them?

The purest distillation of this experience happened when I went to a distant cousin's 40th birthday celebration in their ancestral village.  Twenty-six kilometers and two hours from the paved road landed me 200 years back in time.  The village of Zhej lies hard in the mountains of southern Albania. Normal vehicles stop a few klicks out of town to let mules take over.  The stoutest of 4x4's get you within 500 meters of the village.  Once there, the hospitality is unequaled.  Despite the fact that they just met me and I was only very distantly related to them by marriage, I was welcomed into the family and pampered.  The culmination of the celebration was the roasting of a young goat. 

A farmer from the neighboring village arrived with the kid slung over his mule.  Pleasantries were exchanged and the serious haggling began.  The goat was weighed, prodded, examined and assessed.  An elderly gentleman delighted in pointing out the subterfuge of the farmer. "Look at his stomach," the old man whispered.  "It's full of water.  This mashtruese has been forcing it to drink water all morning so it weighs more at sale."  A counter-tactic of delay was employed until the kid answered the call of nature in a huge way and resumed a more reasonable weight!  Once bought, the goat stayed in the garden with a crowd of children feeding it choice leaves until its final appointment with the cook. 

The end came quickly and without much ceremony.  The kid was led out behind the cookshed and dispatched swiftly with a sharp knife.  As I watched I gained a new appreciation of the rituals adopted by Islam or American Indians to offer up a prayer of thanks to the animal.  Despite ones outlook on the carnivore lifestyle, you can't deny that while we are "interested" in the process, the animal is "committed."  The cook quickly got to work preparing the carcass.   He started with the upper lip and began to peel the skin back until the entire head was bare.  Then he switched his attention to the rear legs and made a small incision near what would be the Achilles tendon on a person.  Into this cut, he rammed a stick, separating the hide from the meat.  Once the initial opening was made, he pressed his lips to the hole and blew furiously.  The hide came away cleanly and the rest was simple butchery.

Nothing was wasted.  The whole kid, including the head, was rubbed with salt and oregano and roasted over an open fire.  All of the men took turns keeping the spit rotating between sessions of raki drinking and story telling.  The innards were cleaned, spiced, and impaled on a long skewer. The whole thing was wrapped with small intestine and roasted over the coals to make an  incomparable kukurec. As I licked the grease off my fingers I wondered, "What would PETA think of this?"  Then I thought, "Who cares.. this is delicious!"

With this in mind, I had to chuckle when I read this article from the Southeastern European Times about a hippopotamus in Montenegro that escaped from its pen during the recent flooding.  The locals worried it was a dangerous beast threatening their children.  The owner swore it was a gentle lady who wouldn't hurt anyone because "she loves mud more than life itself."  According to him, the only danger was standing too close when she thrashed her tail while defecating to spread her scent around.  Local officials worried about creating an international incident if the hippo swam across Shkoder Lake into Albania.  Knowing what I do about Albanians and their relationship with animals, I know the real potential for a diplomatic brouhaha lies in the very real possibility of the Montenegrins being offered a steaming dish of hippo kukurec. 
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Bikes And A Brush

It really is a small world thanks to the Inter-Tubes.  I once had a job which involved reviewing lots and lots and lots of reporting on political topics of the day.  During this job I came to know of the reporting done by Heba Aly for Bloomberg and the Christian Science Monitor on the situation in Darfur.

Fast forward a few years and I'm in Tirana trying to stay up with the growing numbers of foreign travellers who visit this country.  Google Blogs gives a hit on a pair of cyclists who are in Dubrovnik trying to assess the possibility of biking through Albania on their way from Portugal to Jordan.  Yeah, I know.  Long ride.

Anyway, I drop a comment on their blog  and encourage them to come on down. A few days later, I'm sitting in a restaurant chatting with Heba Aly and Richard as they enjoy the experience of coming to Albania.  Well, I think they were enjoying it.  You'll have to keep up with their blogging to see how they feel. I hope to hear good things from them as they experience the ride over Qafe Llogara in December.

The title of this post?  It comes from a former co-worker who once enlightened me on the facts of meeting celebrities in LA.  He divided referred to a fleeting contact with a famous person as "a brush."  As in "a brush with fame."  There are two kinds: direct brushes where you meet a celebrity, and the indirect brush where you meet someone associated with a famous person.  Like meeting Cher's stylist or Tiger Woods' marriage counselor.... What?  Too soon?

Anyway, I had a direct brush with Heba Aly.  I hope she invites me to her Pulitzer Prize ceremony.  If she survives Llogara!
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'This Road Don't Go To Aintree'

Several writers have described the incredible hospitality of Albanians who have taken a disoriented foreigner under their wing and led them to their destination, often going well out of their way and losing hours of time in the process.  I admire and respect this generosity, but I suspect their is another force at work.  Albanians are so poor at giving directions that it's easier just to take the lost soul directly to his destination than it is to give directions.  

Hence the title of this entry.

Remember?  Burt Reynolds?  Deliverance?  Trying to get directions from the hillbillies?  I often feel his pain when I try to get directions here in Albania.  Even with my ability to communicate in Albanian, I end up being led like a kurban lamb through the narrow maze of streets.  Albanians just can not give directions.

I suspect many factors have combined to create this effect.  The first is the tribal nature of the people.  In the tightly-knit isolated communities of ancient Albania, everyone knew everyone who was within travelling distance.  No need to describe how to get to Uncle Genci's house because anyone who needed to go there had already been taken there once for a wedding, birth, death, birthday, engagement, or holiday celebration.  The only directions needed were, "Go to Uncle Genci's house". Second, this clannish-ness and isolation made any travellers immediately suspect.  If they asked for directions, it might not be wise to be too precise.  Who knows what this travelling foreigner has in mind?  Much safer to say a lot and tell nothing.   On top of this insularity, the Communist regime spread a creamy frosting of paranoia and secrecy.  Accurate maps were state secrets. If you need to go somewhere, the party will send a driver.  No need for you to clutter your mind with accurate directions.

So today a simple question such as' "How do I get to the Post Office?" will be answered with:
"I'll take your letter for you." (This avoids the need to give directions and provides an opportunity to display hospitality.  Bonus!)
"Come with me. I'll take you." (Ditto)
"Don't make yourself tired.  Get a cab." (Shows concern for your tiredness and allows you to impress with your wealth.)
"Post Office? Don't send things through the post.  They're all thieves and cheaters. The lines are so long because the workers are lazy.  Oh, god! The Post Office?  I tried to pay my phone bill last week and I waited for two hours in line and my knees were killing me... you know how bad my knees are?... Anyway, I wait two hours and this idiot behind the counter tries to tell me ...". Ad infinitum.

If you can pin someone down and insist they provide directions, you run up against linguistics and urban planning.  An American will tell you to go two blocks north, left on Main Street, and then 200 yards along to the Post Office on the right.  This simple procedure will fail here because Albanians don't think in terms of cardinal directions.  They grew up without detailed maps.  Speaking about north,south, east, or west gets you a "stunned mullet" look.

Tirana's layout also makes the term "block" useless.  No regular grid pattern here, thank you very much.  A block is the distance between two streets, but what counts as a street?  Do alleyways wide enough for a donkey but not a car count?  Street names?  Forget it.  They've been renamed more times than Prince!  In a single lifetime a street will have changed from it's original name based on what town it led to,  to an Italian name, to the name of a partisan, to Kruschev Street, then to an Albanian Communist's name after the split with the Soviets, then to it's original name, and then finally to Rruga Xhorxh Bushi in a fit of subservience to the only sitting U.S. President to ever visit Albania.  Street names don't mean shit. So what do you get?

First, they will establish a mutually understood landmark near your destination.  "Do you know the theater/museum/shoe factory?"  Of course you will say "No" because you don't recall ever seeing any of those structures in this part of town despite ten years of wandering around Tirana.  This is because they are referring to what the building used to be under Communism. 

For example, "te eksposita Shqiperia sot"  refers to the building that used to house the Albania Today exposition.  It's a warehouse/gas station now.  "Te pesembidhjete katesh" literally translates to "to the fifteen-story (building)" which everyone knows is the Tirana International Hotel because it was the only building over ten floors in the country for a very long time.  Now it's one of fifty. Likewise, "te xhamlliku" translates as "to the place of glass" meaning a building which was notable for it's modern all-glass facade .... in 1972! Today there's no glass at Xhamlliku but a hundred other modern buildings sport glass facades.  Guess which building they still call Xhamlliku? The ultimate insider's landmark is "te qimi" which refers to building which once housed a restaurant.  Was the restaurant called Qimi?  No, the name of the restaurant is forgotten, but what lingers is the memory of the woolen upholstery on the seats which were long and hairy.  Te qimi means "to the hair".

Once the landmark is clarified and agreed, directions are given from there and language fails.  Commonly used directions are:
me poshte - lower down
me lart - higher up
me tutje - more this way
matane - more on that side
me afer - closer
me larg - farther

A rough translation of the ensuing directions goes like this:
"How do I get to the Post Office?"
"Go to the hair."
"Near the madrassa?"
"Yes. Then continue higher up."
"Up the hill?"
"No, it's flat.  Continue 'up' away from the center of town about ten minutes."
"How far?"
"What do I know? Ten minutes... on the bus."
"All the way to the porcelain factory?"
"No, more this way."
"Which way?"
"Pass the chimney but don't pass the police station."
"Which side of the road is it on?"
"Next to the bakery."
"What bakery?"
"Do you want me to take your letter for you?"
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Another Intrepid Blogger

I came across yet another well-written chronicle of travel in Albania to share.  It gives an idea of what things can be like here in the off season.  His name is Mykel Board and his tale of (mis)adventure begins here.  Happy reading!
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