Its been a while...
I have been gone on and off for a while, but that isn't a very good excuse for not posting regularly. I guess that to some extent I have kind of gotten into a routine and there isn't a whole lot new going on, and at the internet cafe in my town blogger comes up in Italian. I know that there is a way to change that, and I also know that I could probably figure out how to work it in Italian, but I never really want to spend the time on that.
So whats new you ask? I went to Athens to take the GRE. I actually took the test on the 9th, but I was still able to see a little bit of the town. We studied for the test at Starbucks - great idea - and at the hostel that we stayed at - bad idea - but apparently I didn't study enough. I am not too happy with my test scores... they might still be enough to get me into a grad program, but I may consider retaking the test when I get home. It will give me a chance to pay off all of those student loans that are currently sitting accruing interest.
I traveled to Athens with Joey and Kayla, two of my esteemed colleagues here at Peace Corps Albania. We met Joey's parents there who were awesome and it was a lot of fun to hang out with them. We went to the Acropolis and experienced some of Athens dining options. They stayed at a nice hotel with a rooftop pool, we spent part of the afternoon chilling out there after we finished our test. It made me call my own mother to remind her of her promise and desire to come out here to Albania.
After Athens, I came back to Albania for about a week just to leave again, but this time for Belgrade in Serbia. There was an English teaching conference in Belgrade to which I went with some more of my fellow volunteers.
Belgrade was an awesome city reflecting many different periods in it's history. It is an old town, full of old buildings. There are a lot of typical communist buildings, there are modern buildings, there are still shells of buildings from when the city was bombed by NATO in 1999.
We went on a sort of a quest - taking almost two full days - to find the grave of Tito. We had seen it on a map and walked to where we thought it was, but we couldn't find it. We then went back to our hostel and asked the guy where Tito was buried, he told us that we hadn't gone far enough. We probably would have given up, but talking to a woman that evening, she insisted that we visit the grave. She said that he was a simple man, and remembering a greater Yugoslavia, she said that it is really worth seeing. We saw that it was located near the new Albanian embassy, so the next day we set out again in search for the grave. We walked for a long time, my feet were tired, but we continued on. We still couldn't find it. We found an Indonesian embassy, but no Albanian one. We were just about to give up when we stumbled onto a park and a large building. We went up to the building and found a marker (in Serbian) the only word that we could make out was Tito. We assumed, again, that this was the grave. It was kind of a let down.
I walked up to the museum and asked some guys who were sitting outside if that really was the grave. They said that it wasn't and that the museum closed in five minutes so that I should hurry. Behind the museum sits the Hall of Flowers (or something like that) and I walked through it and then through Tito's museum, to finally find the building where he is sort of enshrined. When I finally found it I has a small sense of accomplishment, just because we had spent so much time looking for this place. Looking through the one book that they had in the "guest shop" or more the desk with the old book on it, there used to be special guards specifically to guard the grave, but they were somehow missing. I guess that there aren't as many people who want to harm Tito as once thought. There was just one guy standing there who kind of waved me inside.