Hail to the Chief!

Yes, the President was here yesterday, and yes I met him. Let me tell you the story...

I went to Vlora for the weekend for John's birthday. We went to the beach on Saturday and then went out for pizza on Saturday night. I left at around 9:30 for Tirana (having to meet outside of the embassy by 2:15) and I kind of barely made it.

He was the first president ever to visit Albania, and the country went nuts. I had to walk through the normally crowded streets of Tirana and they were pretty much empty. I think that there were almost 5000 police in the city brought from all over the country. There was one standing at about every 20 feet along the motorcade routes. The streets were closed to traffic so I had to walk for about an hour in the heat to get to the Peace Corps office.

I did end up making it here in time and even had time to take a quick shower and get dressed. We had to meet at the buses (not air conditioned by the way) and drove out to the airport where they had what they called a "meet and greet." We had to wait for about an hour, but finally Bush, the First Lady, the Ambassador, and John Negroponte (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Negroponte) all came out onto the stage. Bush gave a short speech where he talked about the hope of Albania and that it was an example of "emerging freedom" and he called the Albanian's who work at the embassy here "nationalists" where i think that he meant to call them Albanian nationals.

He then went down the line to shake hands and got to us where we shook his hand and he asked us a few questions. He put on a Peace Corps hat and called Laura over, who then put on the Peace Corps hat and spoke with us for a few seconds. Then we went outside to watch the plane take off, and it was back to Tirana.

Other than that things have been pretty uneventful. I have been staying busy though. School ended on Friday and they have the graduation for the fourth year students on Wednesday. I have been planning a "summer leadership program"for the last week in June... I am a little nervous about that because I think that I got in a little over my head with this one, but we'll see how it goes. I hope that everything will work out alright with it. I know that if nothing else there will be a few participants and I can just stand and talk to them for a week. I hope that it will turn out a little better than that though.

We have also been working to plan the Model United Nations program that will take place at the beginning of September. Hopefully that will go well too... the embassy kind of "dropped the ball" if you will and it is to four of us volunteers to pick it back up and make something happen with it.

Here are a few news links:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/11/world/europe/11prexy.html

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06/10/AR2007061000203.html

And a video:

http://www.cnn.com/video/partners/clickability/index.html?url=/video/politics/2007/06/10/henry.bush.albania.cnn