23 Maj-Exploring Virgin Beaches

Rachel, Matt, and I began today with a long, long morning walk on the beach under the Mediterranean sun, partly for pleasure, and partly to find a place to change our dollars and Euro into Lek, the local and fabulously cheap currency. I wore a white v-neck shirt that I had fortunately stored in my carry-on, and while the sun felt marvelous in the morning hours, by noon I was branded with a scarlet V like an upside-down Hester Prynne. No matter what I wear for the rest of this trip, I will look ridiculous.

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.