Merigoesaround

Quizzzzz: Who is experiencing the wildest cultural shock at Harvard's KSG? - Russians - Frenchies - Californians And the answer is...Californians!! Life in Boston can be challenging for westcoasters. Not this week though, we are having a wonderful 'Indian summer' that will not last very long. These are, of course, official stats.

But herewith a picture from this summer in Barcelona. And also one in my room in Cambridge. My new computer is fantastic...it has everything, everything. I haven't told many people...bu I spilled a cup of tea with HONEY on the keyboard just two days after I purchased it. Buuuuuaaaaa... Please bear with me. It is the black cute apple laptop. Harvard IT service changed the keyboard (for free)...but I felt miserable for a week. The computer is great...but it is making me loose sooo much time with all these applications.

Yes, the amount of work is ridiculously high, the never-ending readings put you under pressure, it seems that everybody is super cool, super cute and super clever. I believe the trick is to forget for a second about the Harvard label and immerse myself in my busy timetable. 4 subjects plus gym, plus social life. Here it is when things get complicated. Most amazing people have amazing social skills/lives and over here...they like partying!! I never thought it would be that easy to feel like a student again. But after a couple of drinks and some dancing at yesterday's Mexican Independence fiesta...I was glad I am. Of course you can do that when you are part of the labour market, but the whole procrastination feeling of going out when you should be reading 2 books for next Monday is lovely. Intelligently enough, clubs in Boston close at 2.00am...otherwise, considering the amount of Latinos concentrated at any party, it will go until veeery early in the morning. Harvard students also d...

I am not in Tirana anymore. Which puts me in big trouble with the title of this blog. What shall I do? Shall I change the name of my blog? Shall I create a new one for this new chapter of my life in Cambridge? I have not still decided on this. I have decided on so many things in the last 3 days though...How to fly out of Tirana at a reasonable price/time on the 1st of September (the day that maaaany, many Albanians living abroad decided ALSO to leave the country), how to get to the U.S by the 3rd of September, which cell-phone company, bank account, morning University-style outfit to choose...many, many choices. Today was the first day of the orientation week at Harvard University...maybe this blog should be simply titled "Desmitifying Harvard"...I could write a sort of anti-elite, anti-23-old-leaders-of-the-world blog; after all, I am insider, I AM IN...Yaes. I thought that all this was a mistake. I would make it into Cambridge, go to the Registrar's office and find an o...

This is just the "aperitif" of my final departure, scheduled for the 31st of August. Tomorrow I will travel to Barcelona in a very unexpected mission. Mission 'removal of osteoma osteoid'. This blog has become partly a journal partly an 'Ode to Albania'. I have shared some intimate thoughts on smells, indecent flirts, my passion for tomatoes, for genuine faces and places... I would also explain you more about my horn and its discovery by Albanian doctors. But later on, after it's been removed. Cuernuda = with horns.

This is what you more or less see when you get to Tirana from the airport. Political divergences between the municipality of Tirana (governed by the SP) and the central government (DP lead) are the cause behind this urban tragedy. I cross it everyday twice...and twice a day I feel the words "bad politics" over my shoulders. I wonder why the donor community, EC included, does nothing. I wonder why civil society remains silent. I can't help but wonder what PM Berisha thinks when his official car ventures in this bumpy tragedy on his way to the airport... Microchanges like this will be a real lesson to this country. And I believe the international community is covering its back ignoring this. "Il faut se couvrir"...dissent a Bruxelles. I do not believe in national/regional/local strategies anymore. Tell me where is the problem and what can we do to solve it. I hope you understand what I mean.

I am being ironic. I am developing an allergy to flat gigantic screens. Tirana must be the city in Europe with more flat screens per square km. Do Albanians know they are not playing in the World Cup? Am I in this mood because I can hear the masses screaming outside in the terrace of a bar besides my home? I think I am just annoyed by the huge constrast of Albania?! How can one be impervious to such visual (and emotional) ups and downs. One moment you are crossing a bridge that smells like dung, inhabited by Roma kids, a guy begging with no arms, an old lady with a depressed expression...and on the other side of the bridge the startling bar complex 'Taiwan' accommodates the masses, decorated with the most expensive white-leather sofas, teak tables and Illy capuccino...and flat screens in all directions. So, yesterday I decided to miss Spain-Tunisia match and attended one of the many cultural activities sponsored by donors and Embassies in Tirana. This was about experimental da...

Highlanders wear the oval one!

As my 28th anniversary approaches I think it is time to learn how to drive. To get a driving license. Since the hope of getting a Spanish one is fading year after year...I decided to get an Albanian one and try to drive around the world with it (well, with the international one that I will apply for after getting the Albanian). It is not clear at all whether I will be able to use the Albanian "patente" in EU member states. As a matter of fact, I think I am the first Spaniard in this situation. So, all started with the teacher hunting. I needed an Italian-speaking teacher with loads of pedagogy and patience. And I found him: Sokol. He lived 8 years in Italy, where he studied law. Upon his return to Albania he opened a driving school (Clash 2000) and a lawyers' buffet together with his brother. Wonderful Sokol is just the perfect person, funny, witty, patieeent. He told me that if I learn how to drive in Albania, I will drive in the wildest jungle, in the driest desert...ev...

Is this realistic? Probably not. Today I realized once more how lucky I am for being an EU member citizen. Life would be different if I were Bielorussian, Albanian, Moldovan or from one of the many countries with strict restrictions on visas and traveling of their nationals abroad. The first time I left Spain I was 17 and I went to the U.K. to improve my English skills. Erion, my landlord's son, has the exact same age, and the exact same purpose. But he is Albanian. The UK consulate rejected his visa application today. This is very wrong. To treat a 17 year old kid willing to have a great summer as a corrupt thug trying to do dirty businesses abroad is a big mistake. It makes people conscious about holding the right or the wrong passport...a passport is just a piece of paper that should not make the difference. Oh well, after all...I might be an idealist.

Today I lack ideals. Not ideas. IDEALS. Oh, how much admiration I have for idealist! Where can I buy some? Human Rights observance, Development Aid effectiveness, Good Governance...Can anybody teach me how to passionately and truly believe in all this? Sigh...

I belong to noisy, dusty, chaotic places. I belong to Tirana. Tirana si e dua. Yesterday I had a terrible nightmare. I dreamt I got lost in a gigantic Safeway supermarket in Boston...so many types of chips, products, I started checking yoghurt brands and lost 30 minutes of study time. For those unaware, I am moving to Boston by the end of August. Oh orderly cities, how fastly I forgot about you. Here in Tirana the choice is much smaller, the pollution in the late hours of the day is as heavy as to make you feel being inside a bar or at home and now it is starting to get really, really warm. And I love all these adversities. Despite the fact that every single morning of my Albanian days I have been woken up by claxoning minivans. I also scream at non considerate car drivers, at drivers that block my street, the entrance to the bank, pimp-like drivers who go nowhere, just drive, windows open, listening to really loud trashy Albanian disco music and impregnating everything with a slummy O...

...the feel good reaction is much sweeter. Even if it is not exactly what you had in mind. I elaborate. When I learnt that I was coming to Tirana I started reading all kind of true and false stories posted in the internet. Today, after a year and a half here, I would say that most of what I read back then was false. This is a huge problem in Albania: its bad reputation and the lack of information about this country beyond its borders. Gangs, trafficking, drugs, blood feuds, bad infrastructure, corruption, underdevelopment, crime...you name it. I am not going to say that none of this is true...but there are few articles giving credit to positive economic/political developments. I just read a paper on Corruption and Organized Crime in Albania, from the IUE in Florence, written by an Italian that a)uses sources from 2002 and b)shows her ignorance on this country. Not to offend anybody, but as we Spaniards have many cliches on Latino America...Italians are extremely unfair with Albania. I ...

I haven't devoted any post to my visit to "Hugo L'Africain". I was in Benin recently. Apart from the terrific safari with a bunch of funny Quebecois, the culinary richness of Cotonou, the good times bodyboarding and watching how Hot Hugo practices surf and the colonial lifestyle of yobos (whites)...I was ashamed by the level of poverty in that corner of Africa. In my mind, I thought the documentaries I watched in those long boring Sunday afternoons of my Spanish adolescence selected the worst places in Africa, the most impoverished ones, portraying how appalling poverty and misery are. But hey, no...it was not a selection...it is pretty much like that all around. What makes me wonder..where is the money? where are the thousands of millions of donor's money? I think I have the answer to this question. And sometimes I wish I didn't. Picture of Benin's gas station in this post. Many more here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/meritxell

My landlord wants something else than a formal owner-tenant relationship with me. Note: he is 55, married, not especially ugly but smells what my colleague Dritan and I have come to describe as “montagnard” or ‘comunistish’. I know when he is being at my place repairing something just for the smell I get pleasure from when opening my front door. Leather aroma with a touch of rotten wood. Seriously, I think he wants to exercise his extra-marital talents with me. The fact that my landlord is conspicuously hitting on me and another story that follows below have made me wonder about marital relations in Albania. Reportedly, 3 out of 4 Albanian women have suffered from some kind of domestic violence. Regardless the reliability of this data (data and Albania are not good friends), I have had the impression, since the beginning of my Albanian life, that the percentage must be quite high…It is also high in my own country. However, conditions in Iberia are different. Spanish ladies integration ...

In a good way... It is not that I lack stories. I lack time between one and the next. So many things happening. So many trips, new friends, changes at work. I thought that working for the international public administration I would never say "I am super busy", but, oh yes, I am. Forget about the sleepy civil servant, sometimes we really work!! It might be because I have few months to stay in bukur Shqiperie (nice Albania) and I want to squeeze every single day of it. I have seen the most beautiful rainbows ever, smell the sage and other herbs in Southern lost places, eat the best meat with the kindest and most afable service. I can't leave this place without visiting the Albanian region bordering Kosovo, check the pictures! I promise I come back soon. Most probably tomorrow.

ONE: Some months ago a new person came to live on the third floor. He had a consultant look. I was right, that is what he is. A Turkish consultant. TWO: At work, during the last same 3-5 months, I have monitored the privatization of the state-owned fixed telephony company: Albtelecom. This company is NOT doing well, no investments during the last three years, penetration of the mobile phone networks is reducing its benefits, problems with the network and poor client service are some issues that I myself have suffered from (as you can read in previous posts). And how do these two stories fit together? Well, it turns out that my neighbor upstairs works for a Turkish company, Calik Group, which is the only bidder that has accepted to buy Albtelecom. So, I am monitoring him...the Turkish consultant. This is the perfect example of European neighborhood policy. Those from the College of Europe can laugh. During this monitoring we have had discussions about the process of privatization (and o...

Life is contrast in Albania. Yesterday and today are almost synonyms in some areas of the country. This is my finding after a short trip to the North East. Yesterday, life was hard, "we did not have much, we had little to eat, it was cold, no leisure activities", locals said in Peshkopi...but today "we have TVs and satellite dishes that only work some hours per day because of electricity cuts, there are few jobs and the future looks rather gloomy...still, we have good meat and the people and the atmosphere are much better than in Tirana". Again, contrast...we have good meat!! even if we have to cook it in a communist-era wooden oven!!, they said. People from Peshkopi are Dibrans (from the district it belongs to: Diber) and I breathed a certain degree of nationalism there, and felt support for the very conflictive idea of Greater Albania. Despite being only about 200km far from Tirana (it takes 5 hours to get there!!...by car not by bicycle, I swear) I felt in a Musl...

Cerrado por vacaciones. Forced blog vacations, indeed. I haven't had the time to write more during the last weeks. No creativity crisis. This drought of blog postings is mostly due to problems in organizing my duties AND, what is more important, a fixed telephone line problem which now lasts for more than a month... I have no fixed phone line or internet from home... "temporarily", ha! Albtelecom does not answer to my cellphone calls anymore... with this, you can imagine how service-oriented, pro-problem solving the Albanian fixed telephone monopoly is. I stop complaining. All in all, I will come back with my views on the new Albanian government as soon as... I can. Photos from Peshkopi, where I am going next week, will be soon posted.