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As a point of comparison, seven-and-a-half hours is somewhat longer than your standard European work day.

We have eaten incredibly well here: we’ve tried raclette, which is a Swiss delicacy involving slabs of cheese melted in little pans on a bazier and then scraped onto bites of potato and pickled onion; we’ve feasted on roast chicken picnic lunches; and we’ve dug deep tracks into rhubarb cobbler made with ingredients fresh from the Middelmanns’ garden. And all these treats are accompanied by so much golden, crusty bread that I fear, in the words of a New York panhandler who I once offered a roll, that I’m turning into a loaf.

Long after the last sauce is sopped up with the last morsels of bread, we sit there, listening. After a while, the muscles begin to twitch of their own accord, and, when wisdom loses the battle to youthful immaturity, you begin to commit little sins against Emily Post and common decency. Perhaps (spitballing here) you fold your cloth napkin into origami shapes, or rearrange your silverware on your plate to tell the time, or (if you are a true mannerless brute) warily catch the eye of another fellow sufferer and burst into spasms of laughter ill-disguised as minor aneurysms.

When we are dismissed, we retire to our chalet trembling with intellectual fatigue, yet somehow we must continue the conversation for hours over yet more white bread, which inhabits every nook and cranny of Switzerland, I think. My fear is that is we stay much longer, we will become accustomed to passing days in this way. Every time I pull my chair to the table, it gets a little easier to stay…and stay…and stay. Culture shock is imminent when I return to the New York desk-lunching world.

Apart from these daily activities, on Sunday we went to a church in the little village of Lausanne, where Udo preached in English to a tiny and friendly international congregation.

Later, we picnicked be a lake that looked over into France, and it was warm enough to think about swimming, though not perhaps to commit the act. I think the snow is melting more each day from the peaks I see out my window, but perhaps it’s just the sunlight fooling my eyes.

We went to a Bach concert that afternoon at an ancient cathedral, falling gently asleep in our chairs to strains of the world’s finest music, surrounded ancient Swiss bishops in their crypts and sarcophagi and ancient (but living) Swiss laypeople in stiff wooden chairs like ours.

As we groggily got up to leave, the sun was setting over the frilly rooftops and belltowers and cobblestones, and the whole of the dusk felt absolutely authentically Swiss.

Another delight: every fountain in Switzerland must run with clear, drinkable water by law, if it doesn’t sport a sign bearing the words “non-potable.” I’m drinking more fresh Alpine water than I’ve ever before desired, simply because of the novelty of being able to scoop it at random from any stone pool or wooden trench.

Tuesday was our last day in Switzerland, and also Eri’s 22nd birthday. Jill bought a fascinating fruitcake with what looked like partially dissolved aspirin tablets speckled across the top. It was covered with wrinkles that seemed to give it nearly the appearance of human flesh, and we warned Eri that she could look forward to looking like that by the time she turned 40 if she kept indulging in Mediterranean suntans.

We leave tomorrow for Manuel’s wedding in Warsaw, Polan, As usual, our flight blans include absurdly lengthy layovers (this time in London), and some degree of ambiguity as to the likelihood of actually arriving. I’m told Poland is lovely and full of castles, but don’t know if anything will compare in my mind to the all-consuming mountains and hilly vineyards of Switzerland.

It’s strange to think how long it has been since I have been inside an English speaking country.

The morning weather report from the twice-blessed Maison de Tourisme  said “partial sun”–better than partial clouds, I quipped to Udo, as he gazed uncertainly at the sky–but we sallied forth to the village of Solalex, at the base of the Alp we hoped to climb.

Eri had urged us, when we were packing for Europe, to include lots of sundresses and tank tops; my mother had insisted that I throw in a sweatshirt and a few pairs of pants. Apparently the other girls’ mothers hadn’t been a part of their packing processes, and they sat on wooden benches in a lodge, shivering in shorts and meager hoodies and sipping expensive coffee as we waited for a second carload of our team to arrive so we could begin the hike.

A few of our number owe our survival to Deborah, who threw a bag of heavy gore-tex jackets and a pair or two of sweats into the back of her minivan. But when the flurry of grabbing garments and layering them on subided, Eri still stood in her fashionably brief summer shorts. And so Deborah made the ultimate sacrifice and offered to trade her sensible dark cotton pants for Eri’s flimsy gear. They disappeared into a nearby restroom and emerged a few moments later, Eri with a look of relief on her face, and Deborah with a blush of embarrassment. Soon after, she began the drive back to the chalet to change into something more decent, and the rest of us started up the mountain.

The first part of the hike was truly beautiful. We were panting and damp after just a few minutes of the uphill climb, and rolled up our sleeves to back in the mountain air. Soon, we could see nothing around us but mountains on every side, vast and lushly green.

In places, as we climbed higher and the greenery diminished, we saw a rusty-colored line streaking horizontally across the peaks, like nothing so much as a gargantuan bathtub ring. All that we saw had once been underwater, Udo said, but only that russet ring persuaded me to believe it. Further on, we passed a road leading to a town that had been utterly buried by a landslide in 1760, leaving no survivors. Udo kept reminding us how cruel the mountains were when untamed by human enterprise, and how fragile life up here could be when faced with nature in its purer forms. Only, the words he said were softened by the sun on our faces. For me, all I lacked was a goodly supply of lembas bread and a sturdy hobbit-cloak before you could leave me, contented, in these mountains forever.

Our first stop was at a cozy little restaurant-lodge where we could eat a packed picnic lunch indoors if we ordered a hot drink. So we asked for hot chocolates and unloaded a feast of crusty bread, gruyere cheese, salami-like sausage called “shepherd’s stick,” pickles, and cucumbers. The lodge felt toasty as we sat down and began to demolish the piles of food one broken-off hunk at a time, us still a little warm from our climb and warmer still from the cocoa in front of us. As we talked about Swiss history and World War II, this glow began to abate and we sipped our hot drinks a little more eagerly. Half an hour later, we realized that hiking in the cold was highly preferable to sitting still in it, and the roof over our heads gave little protection from the growing chill in the air.

The sun had disappeared as we geared up to begin again, still moving uphill. We jogged a bit to keep warm, till the hard work of climbing thawed us out a little. And then, strangely, it began to hail, little pebbles of ice that were novel at first, but quickly began annoying as they whipped across our faces and pelted the crevices between our sweatshirt hoods and our necks. Eri said that Albanians had a tradition that hail would stop if firstborn children caught it on their tongues as it fell. Rachel and I gamely gave this a shot, but the pellets only slowed for a moment before resuming, larger, wetter, and more insistent than before.

We were up high enough–2000 meters at this point– that we saw snowbanks alongside the path, some of them pink with dust that had blown North from the Sahara desert. Hail was now swirling around us so that we could barely see, and every Reader’s Digest “true story” I had ever read returned to memory with vivid special effects.

It was a fair day when the nine young hikers began their Alpine excursion. Young and adventurous, none of them suspected that by the end of that day, four of them would be dead and the others would be frostbitten beyond recognition, crippled for life, and turned feral, viciously trying to eat each other for survival.

Mmmm. I always loved those stories.

And then we reached the crest of the trail. Above us, we could see a bulbous peak called the Lion’s Head. Further off, we spied Le Mirroir, a nearly smooth rock face that required experts and grappling equipment to scale. We would not reach a summit today, but we felt pleased with our progress nonetheless.

I had vaguely remembered Udo saying that our hike was mostly downhill, and here we were, four hours in and yet to take the first step downward. Descent is less strenuous, but a little more scary, because a misplaced foot can send you tumbling down the mountainside. And, to keep us challenged, as soon as we had passed the crest and addressed ourselves to the declining slope, the hail turned smoothly into a drenching rain.

What followed came in stages. First, finding we no longer were panting for breath as we hiked, we pulled our sweatshirt hoods further over our faces and sang “Climb Every Mountain” as we plodded along, ignoring the downpour as well as we could. Then the wind shifted, and the rain began to come at us more strategically, soaking the backs of our legs and dripping into our socks. And now the path was zig-zagging, so as we turned the first corner, the rain began to target our shins and unprotected faces. All this while, Udo, spry at 69, strode on ahead, picking his way among the rocks and mud and carrying an umbrella aloft as if this were a rainy jaunt down 34th Street.

Soon, every inch of us was soaked and we could barely distinguish the wet from the cold. There was another lodge restaurant about an hour away, Udo told us, and so we kept blindly on, clutching the precious hope of a hot drink before a roaring fireplace, where we could dry off and bask in self-congratulation, feeling tough, traveled, and eminently Alpsy. Aside from the constant struggle to stay upright, my mind soon tuned out every thought but this one.

Forty minutes later, as the cold rain continued to fall, Udo turned to us with a little smile. “It hasn’t been pure pleasure here for some time now, has it?”

We looked at him in curiosity, teeth chattering. Then, wordless, we continued on. And just as we caught a distant glimpse of the warm, cheery-looking lodge, the clouds broke and the rain cleared. At the base of the trail, at a place called Pont de Nant, Udo left us so that he could hitchike back to town (hitchiking being, I’m told, a very effective method of transport in Switzerland) and bring back his van to get us.

Rachel and I tumbled giddily into the clearing as visions of sugarplums danced in our heads. The rest of the group had fallen behind a little ways, but by a process of effective mountain communication (us: “WHO PUT THE OVERALLS IN MRS. MURPHY’S CHOWDER?” Them: (waving of arms and legs) ) we knew that they were still alive and all right, and that they wanted us to go on ahead and save them a spot at the lodge, order some cafe au lait and perhaps warm up their seats for them by the fire. It was the least we could do.

Did you guess, on this day of days, that the restaurant was closed until June? Neither did we.

This establishment, I stress, was a solo operation, not a small village, station, or strip mall. There was, thank God, a public WC, but apart from that, all we had at our disposal was a jutting doorstep at the entrance of a lodge restaurant gutted and filled with raw timber. And a herd of cows that might serve us for warmth if we became desperate enough to kill them and lie amongst their innards. And–can you guess it?–it once more began to rain.

We were all together now, and an unnamed number of our party began to build what I imagine was a very illegal fire from the timber that was lying around. The rest of us rummaged through Udo’s leather knapsack and made short work of what remained for lunch, which amounted to a sausage stick, some hunks of bread, and a few bars of chocolate that we found hidden in the bag’s inner pockets. We wouldn’t have to draw lots and eat each other for some time now.

A sweet Swiss woman who caught the opening strains of my broken French and told me gently but firmly, “I speak English,” told us that theere was a village five minutes’ drive farther down the mountain, where we might find provisions and warmth. Eri, Jill, Tim, Rachel, and I volunteered for the journey, while the rest remained huddled on the stoop to stand watch for Udo. Our way down was now paved with asphalt, so we forced our beaten and waterlogged bodies to jog it.

And there, a ways down, was where we bumped into Udo, as he returned triumphantly in his van. We looked like hurricane survivors, and our bodies at this point only obeyed us because they hadn’t the strength to rebel. But as we ascended the hill in the van to collect the others and our soggy things, we were shocked to realize that we had run almost a mile in our miserable state.

And that brings me to the cabin where I sat shivering and wondering if warmth would ever again be mine. I’ll keep you posted on my thermal state.

My head would soon enter a state of perpetual throbbing from the constant forceful encounters with low thresholds and arched ceilings. A small price to pay to stay in an Alpine chalet.

The rest of the place brought back all kinds of happy recollections from days of playing house: fixings for tea and hot chocolate, stacks of warm blankets, old childrens’ books on every shelf. We had a bedroom, living area, a roomy kitchen, and thankfully, a bathroom with an enclosed shower, a sufficient supply of warm water, and among other wonders, a toilet in which you could flush toilet paper.

Eri and I shared this apartment, with the two other girls across the way in a similar set-up, and the boys a floor below us. In the center lived Edith Schaeffer, the widow of Francis Schaeffer, and a prolific author in her own right. She lived with a full-time caretaker, and though we did not see much of her, we all soon thought of her as “mother.”

After the stars around my head cleared from my abrupt wake-up call, I went to the tiny double doors that opened from my bedroom onto a long balcony.

I gasped. While we were sleeping, someone had installed an Alp outside the window. It towered above me, exactly like I’d thought an Alp should. It was lush with trees and had traces of snow at the peak. I heard cowbells. And around me was a  neighborhood of ancient chalets, intricately carved with lacy wooden fringe around the balconies and eaves. It was more than breathtaking.

I was born in New Hampshire. I had visited Montana. I had never seen mountains like these. They were dramatic, pristine, and immediate — I felt I could nearly reach out through the crisp air and touch them.

And though Udo and his wife Deborah insisted to us that the mountains were carefully cultivated for pasture by the dairy farmers who lived in them, they looked virgin, untouched by human hands.

Everything I saw reminded me of Heidi, but as usual, the Hollywood version of the Alps had nothing on the real thing. In my excitement, I woke Eri (actually, I woke everyone I could find, but only Eri stayed awake) and we decided to leave our cabin, still pajama-clad, and go in search of a bakery we had heard Udo mention. I should say boulangerie, for we were in the French-speaking part of Switzerland now.

We climbed an impossibly steep path for a short ways (beaming as we panted for breath: we were in the mountains!) and then we were on the main road. Eri maid what was probably an illegal chain of daisies, considering that everything is either protected or prohibited in Switzerland. (Later, even sweet, innocent Rachel would commit a violation by plucking a protected dark-blue Gentian off a hillside. No one was safe.)

Regardless of our bizarre pyjamas-and-daisies getup, everyone we passed would smile and say “Bonjour” as we went by, from the woman biking up the steep slope with her child in carriage to the old man at a little tobacco stand in town. It was for all the world like the opening scene from Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, except for the sad lack of people popping out of windows and chimneys. And except for the handsome, arrogant Gaston — for the dairy farming region of Switzerland has the population of a very spry and vigorous retirement community.

We became a little high on the outpouring of perceived goodwill and began to frolick and sing, bidding cars and houses “Bonjour!” as we passed them.

Later, we were saddened to learn from Deborah that strangers greet each other in this fashion in conformity to a strict local standard of etiquette, and are thought outrageously rude if they do not. The more we learned about the Swiss, the more we found that they favored the stick over the carrot.

Finally, we reached the small village of Gryon, withits bakery and tea room, offering  a tantalizing assortment of goods for astonishingly high prices, posted in the local currency of Swiss Francs, which value at just under a dollar. We ordered piping hot cafe au lait and croissants au chocolat. I successfully asked for a glass of water in French and was beginning to feel a rosy glow of oneness and goodwill with all mankind the world over, when the check was brought to us.

Eri produced a 100-Euro bill to pay our tab, which in terms of smoothness was like trying to ask a Starbucks barista to make change from a one-pound bar of gold bullion. The servers refused to countenance the bill in no uncertain terms, and my contented smile was replaced with a blush of shame as I muttered “pardon” and tried to figure in my head how many hours of dishwashing was roughly equivalent to our breakfast bill of nine Swiss francs.

But I didn’t even know how to say “dishwashing” in French, so I slid guiltily out of my chair and proceeded to inquire at every other establishment in town (there were five) if they might change my bill.

Finally, a man at the Maison de Tourisme grudgingly took the bill and handed me back 140 Francs, shorting me about 10, as it later turned out, on account of my wanton ignorance and poor language skills. We were allowed to leave the bakery at last, and our good spirits rapidly returned. Before walking back to our chalet, we stopped at a market to gawk at the vast selection of world-class cheese and chocolate and to purchase some Gouda.

In spite of the way the picturesque village eerily reminded me of Duloc from Shrek, I was fairly certain I’d like it here.

Jill, a King’s grad from 2007, joined us at lunchtime; her brother Tim, who just finished his Freshman year, had moved in before we arrived. Lunches here make Albanian lunches seem like eat-and-dash affairs; we sat down to rice salad and crusty bread at 1p.m., and rose from tea and cookies at 4:30 out of sheer practical necessity.

But there are no pregnant pauses or awkward silences throughout the three-and-a-halfhours that lunch discussions usually run; Udo and Deborah fill every moment with expansive discussion on subject ranging from true Christianity to the Tower of Babel. To join the conversation, one must assert oneself most vigorously, which we at first attempted only rarely and timidly. Actually, we never really moved past that phase.

Between lunch and dinner, we were all appointed to carefully chosen garden tasks. I got the thankless job of nettle-pulling, which I did with a will until they stung through my gardening gloves, and then shifted to half-heartedly shoving them around with my shoe.

Dinner was just like lunch, with copious amounts of bread, excellent lasagna, and salad, followed by tea and hour upon hour of a very Swiss kind og conversation, centering on gun laws, home schooling, and self-defense, all from a very different perspective.

But they released us at 9:30, only three hours into the onversation. This was an early night, they sai, because tomorrow Udo would take us on a six-hour hike in the Alps. We crept back in silence, as noise between 10p.m. and 6p.m. violates local statute, then all convened at one apartment, where, strangely enough after hours of talking, the conversation flowed like wine.

The Middelmanns (the couple mentioned above) open their home to guests in an endeavor they call the Francis Schaeffer Foundation, which attempts to stay as true as possible to the intents and ideas of its namesake.

Our connection once more in this trot of the globe is The King’s College. Udo Middelmann is a professor of theology who taught my modern philosophy class in the spring. Aside from what I learned, which was considerable, I was impressed to note how attentive he was to his students. In no other class have I been chastised so graciously and so faithfully for falling asleep.

In spite of this embarrassing habit of mine, the Middelmann’s welcomed my friends and me to their Alpine retreat. And now all that stood between us and Switzerland was several hundred miles, a mountain range, a few border crossings…well, actually a number of things. Thank God they invented airplanes.

This was also our chance, finally, to take the quintessential European Train Ride of Significant Length. We’d already veered off the prescribed path my renting a car early on instead of investing in a Eurorail pass, but perhaps this journey would redeem us: a ride listed in all the hardy, globe-trekking Web sites as a world-class delight, even in second class.

We’d land in Milan, shuttle in to Milan’s Centrale train station and ride the rails to Geneva and from thence to a little town called, adorably, Bex. Near there was the little villae of Gryon, where the cows were all happy, and the shepherds woke villagers in the mornings with their ethereal, melodic yodeling. I hoped.

Fast forward a few hours. We sit atop a mountain of our own luggage at the most conspicuous part of Centrale Station, a banister of the marble staircase at the entrance, looking and feeling like vagrants, and without a certain resting place for our world-weary heads.

*************

After bidding a reluctant farewell to Tirana, we had touched down in Milan and basked in Western Europe’s warm and quasi-familiar embrace. As we filed off the plane, Eri had thoughtlessly (and loudly) announced to the group, “we can call Kari by her real name again!”

But this particular flight was mainly elderly Albanians, who answered her exuberance with a horrified glare.

I should mentio that we were flying the Bulgarian airline BelAir, an economic but daring choice of carrier. Eri’s father told us to carry umbrellas on board just in case we had to eject quickly and float ourselves down to earth. On the landing, the plane careened wildly from one side to the other, barely leveling before its wheels plunked forcefully down upon the asphalt, us white-knuckled and breathless within the cabin.

Our breakfast was in our throats, but thankfully advanced no further. As we slowed to a halt, I wickedly employed an old trick my father taught me: give a few clear, confident claps, then settle back in your seat to watch the confused round of applause ripple forth. Soon, half the plane was applauding (one fellow uncertainly shouted “Bravo!”), an ovation foer the most unpraiseworthy landing I’ve ever experienced.

We had a tight connection, then, to our train station shuttle, and a train we had to catch or we’d be looking at a 3a.m. arrival in Switzerland. Everything was running smoothly until we arrived at the luggage carousel to find that the handlers had forwarded Matt’s bag to Narnia.

Our customer service representative swore up and down in his seductive Italian accent that the bad was in the airport, but as an hour ticked by and no bag appeared, we were forced to conclude that this was the work of the Deep Magic and leave, having given instructions for the bag to be forwarded when found.

That is how we missed our train. And that is how we came to end up on the marble stairs, eating the remainder of the German chocolate and wondering if we should spend the night in Milan or Geneva. But it turns out that there was a direct train after all that could take us into Bex by 10:30 that night after all.

And the beauty of that ride, so praised by those guidebooks and Web sites, was if anything underreported. Milan city blocks gave way to mountains on this side and grassy streams on that, and castles perched on hilltops, and sparkling lakes and still-icy creeks. We chugged through villages of stone that redefined the term “ancient” for our American minds and conjured up images of Roman garrisons and barbarian settlements just the way you’d hope they would.

Swiss customs on the train were as painless as flashing an American passport, and aside from a tight connection in which I nearly got left behind forever in some petit Swiss village, all went smoothly.

Udo, our host, greeted us at the station with warm hugs and loaded us snugly into his van. As we wound up the mountain in the dark, we had little idea of what the morning would reveal to us.

Most of us got our hairs cut today. I got some sleek layers and finally look almost chic enough to be Albanian ($4 for the cut). Rachel got bangs and a blonde touch-up ($7 for cut and highlights). Eri got an adorable bob and bright red color ($7 for everything). And Matt was happier with his $3 stylish haircut than the rest of us put together.

In the afternoon, Rachel and I went souveniring. I got an Albanian wallet. And even more than the blood-red insignia, I figured it to be local-made on account of the remarkably strong length of chain that it provided for cinching to one’s pocket or purse. The thing would give the air of authenticity to the back pocket of a prison inmate or gang-banger, but one thing it will not do is get picked from my pocket unawares by the wiliest of scamps I encounter in my travels.

Tomorrow, we leave for Geneca, where our traveler’s insurance will kick back in (the policy does not exist that covers Albania, I think). An Albanian girl told me yesterday that Shpresa was an ugly name. So I guess I’ll be glad to go back to Hope.

I still do not refer to Albanian mastery of the English language. Here are a few more of the English-named establishments I have encountered in the streets of Tirana: Placebo Cafe (Tagline: “Where you only think you’re having a good time”) and Cafe Amnesia (where, in the long run, how and what they serve you doesn’t matter.)

We’ve gotten into a habit of drawing picture-notes for Eri’s Nene and parents when we leave the house, and Karine has perfected the science of thus being understood. We left one for Eri when we left the house today, more out of habit than necessity. It morphed into a miniature novel with a winding plot and copious amounts of death, accompanied by discreet illustrations, and included the following opening line, lifted from Dumb and Dumber: “Weve fone to a place that’s warm, where the beer flows like wine, and the women flock like the salmon of Capistrano.”

The Albanian method of daytime social recreation is to move fluidly from cafe to cafe, spending a few hours at each over espresso, macchiato, or Fanta. The same idea apparently applies to evenings, for when we ventured out later with a group of Eri’s close high school friends, the coffeehouse we met in emptied almost completely around 10p.m. Eri respondered to my query by informing me that all the patrons had “gone for seconds” as the second leg of the night unfolded.

One last note here: all of Eri’s friends spoke perfect English. And so do I. This is how we communicated. I feel increasingly fit for the title of “Budallaqe Amerikane (Stupid American).”

One final portrait of Tirana before I wear the subject out:

Eri and her family live on a dirt road with houses on one side, and on the other, a tangle of a number of things: a junk heap, a pile of concrete barriers, and the practive field for the national football (soccer) team.

But two houses down from Eri’s, at the end of the street, a hotel and restaurant with a world-class rating of six stars and an award from 50 world chefs for its cuisine has just opened its doors. It has been ten years in the building, with every stone and brick cut and laid by specialists, not contractors. Waiters, nearly blushing with pride, showed us gleaming wine cellars and cozy suites upstairs. The owner, who has aged far past his years in the laborious process of building this palace, sat today under a pristine white awning, playing chess with his neighbors. With our caffe Americanos at a distant table, we were the only other customers.

For decades, the muncipal government has promised that this dusty lane will become a main thoroughfare connecting a freshly built neighborhood with Tirana’s economic and business centers. But departments refuse to issue the propoer permits, and secretive attempts to so much as pave the road at private expense are continually squelched by the government and change-averse neighbors.

So the lovely hotel and restaurant sits empty on this hot, bright summer day, standing as an act of faith in Albania’s future. If allowed, it could transform the neighborhood and bring international business into the region.

“I wanted to build something that would outlast me,” the owner told Eri when she was a waitress in high school at her family’s restaurant, which closed last year.  I hope I get a chance to return and bear witness to this hardworking man’s success.

At this point, I was going to talk about swimming, but I pre-autoredacted this enture section, not because of objectionable content but merely because it bored me.

Let this suffice: the water is lovely; all of Albania knows me a bit more intimately on account of an unfortunate swimsuit mishap, and I remain sunburned a vibrant red on my Hope chest.

In fact, I have little to say concerning this whole day. Rachel became sick in the early evening and Eri’s parents took her to a hospital clinic, at which the dotor diagnosed her allergic to the nation at largel Matt, Kari, and I stayed back and helpfully watched Dumb and Dumber from Matt’s iPhone.

At 4a.m., Eri and Rachel came into my room and told me they were leaving for Tirana immediately because they both felt ill. I was already up at this point on account of a vigil I had chosen to keep against a horde of insolent and vindictive mosquitoes. But naught could be done for them or for me until the morning. Until tomorrow, then.

We walked along the point where the waves lapped the sand, feet barely in or barely out of the warm water. An Albanian ambassador visiting our college in New York had once gravely told us that “Albanian b*tches were better than Italian b*tches because they were virgin b*tches,” and now I saw firsthand what it meant to be a virgin, uh, you know.

The sea, the coast, and the sky radiated Mediterranean loveliness, and the water felt good to our feet–at least it did until we came upone a stone cistern of some sort, clogged with trash, that emptied right into the beachfront. A rusting ship hull was scuttled, it appeared, a very short way off the coast, and another rusty pipe or two emerged from the sand right at the water’s edge to channel its dubious contents straight into the water.

Recalling my smoggy memories of Tirana, I wondered if the EU would ever take a cue from the Simpsons Movie and enclose Albania in a Plexiglas dome to keep its pollution from spreading to the rest of Europe. Disheartened by these things, we moved further up the sand for a time; then, the sun got too hot, and we went back to splashing through the water.

Adventures in Alb-English communication are always a delight, in part because Albanians outside of Tirana tend not to care so much for English as they do in the bigger European cities, and in much greater part because of my abysmal pronunciation of Albanian words.

I’m pretty sure that when I inquired if the man who owned a beach cart spoke English or accepted Euro, he told me off with a smile on his face, proudly averring that he would only ever speak Albanian and deal in the nation’s true currency, and making short work of what he thought of my language and money in a few concise gestures. We never did find a place to change dollars for Lek; we ventured into a few promising spots, but all looked recently closed or abandoned, and none could give us directions in a language we understood.

This isn’t to say that any English is good English, however. Many shop signs tastefully interspersed English words with their Albanian names, but I couldn’t reconcile myself to the Hotel Enigma. I could too easily imagine reserving a room there and conversing with the manager:

“Is breakfast included?”

“I can’t tell you; it’s a mystery!”

“Are the sheets clean?”

“Yours to discover, my friend…”

Anyway, our walk probably took us along a good three miles of coastline and back, and returned us to the house dusty and happily hungry. And so began a day whose pattern is beginning to become the pleasant norm: morning at the beach, large cafe lunch, nap in the heat of the day, then another stint at the beach when the sun’s rays have cooled to a warm glow.

Evening adventures usually include chatting and looking at the stars. I hope I always remember this.