Hey people. I have added a few photos to this blog thing. I am not sure if this is the best way to host photos, but if I can figure something better out later I will. The first picture is of a few volunteers on some weekend excursion... I cant remember where right now. The second photo is the house where my family lives. It is a nice house and they are very proud of that photograph. Whenever people come over they want me to show that picture to them. The third photo is on the balcony of the neighbors house. He is my host father's brother and I end up spending a lot of time drinking raki on that balcony with John, the volunteer who lives there. The fourth photo are the parents of my host mother. This photo was taken on Pashke, the Orthodox easter. I think that her entire family is Muslim, but they were all at our celebration anyways. The last photo is of Kuqan, the village where I live. It is a really nice photo from the balcony of my house. The man walking in the corner is Sokoli, my host father. I didn't even notice that he was in the photograph until he pointed it out to me.

In the photo with the two grandparents, the woman is wearing all black. This is usually a sign that the woman is a widow, but she obviously isn't. For a long time I couldnt figure out why she always dressed in balck, but one day I found out that she had a son who died. I still dont really know why, but he was 21 and he died twenty something years ago. I really like the two grandparents, they are really nice. It is much harder to communicate with the older people... I think that they mumble a bit more. When a group of old men get together to talk, I can not understand anything they say except they keep repeating the word respect over and over again. A little like older men in the states.

I will try to post some more photos later, maybe on another blog. Keep in touch and let me know how you are doing.

Hey guys, I am still trying to get this whole blogging thing down. I hope that my information quenches your blog thirst. I feel like my mission to spread a knowledge of albania throughout the entire known world can best be done through blogs about my life. Although they may be boring... and I have to censor out the bad stuff, this is how I will do it. I will try to find the most monotonous things to discuss here to keep the bad people away.

I taught my first English lesson today. I will be a high school teacher, but today I got to teach about 55 elementary students. It was a little out of control at times, but I eventually got the job done. The person observing me was a group 7 volunteer who will be leaving in June. She seems like kind of a badass with the whole teaching thing. She said that I did a pretty good job. It was kind of frustrating trying to get so many kids to pay attention and not to talk. I know that other grades will kind of be the same way though.

This is how I ended up teaching so many elementary kids today... We were supposed to set up a "practicum" with the local english teacher and school director. The school director is in charge of both the primary and secondary schools here in Kuqan plus he works in Elbasan at the university or for the government or something... I dont really know. Either way he is a very difficult man to get a hold of. We talked briefly to the english teacher who told us that she would tell her students to come to our lessons. On the first day nobody showed up. It was fine because we just ended up drinking beers in a bar next to the school. Everybody freaked out the second day and I they ended up talking to both the high school kids and the elementary school kids about coming because they figured that nobody would show up. The second day we had tons of little kids and some high school kids as well. Today, the third day, we had a whole bunch of everyone. Albanians are never really on time, so for the first 20 or so minutes of class there were all kinds of people coming in.

I dont know what kind of "cultural analysis" to take out of this. People dont really communicate with eachother in the ways that we would expect communication to take place. Everything is very informal, and to get things done one has to talk to everybody individually. This cannot happen too far in advance, however, because people dont like to plan in advance. I have heard once that people will say, "but what if something better comes up?" As a westerner we would think that this would be the reason to book times in advance.

Thats all I have for now. I will write anther blog later... maybe next week sometime. I'm also going to try to figure out how to post a few pictures on here. Albania is a really pretty country, especially this time of year. It has been raining a lot and everything is really green. I am not really looking forward to the heat that we will get to live through this summer. Apparently it is just really hot and dry all summer long. Albanians like this because they are always cold.