Back in Tirana I spent most of my time walking around, taking in the fact that I was really there. The same faces kept appearing on a multitude of heads which can be a little alarming- there seems to be a certain way the eye sockets and forehead which make the Albanian male in particular look very much the same. For the younger generation you could be forgiven for thinking that it was
a good time to be young and Albanian. It was as if a Pandora's
The new elite of society now live in the former Block that the old guard had once occupied- tall buildings, smart shops, 80s style external lifts- I was starting to feel befuddled and sat down at one of the endless number of bars, where just about appropriately, Charlton and Blackburn's game was being projected onto a big screen.
Back at the hotel, I fell into conversation with the night clerk Bruno, 27 years old, and Lambe, who at 50 had his own perspective on things. It was an interesting discourse- Lambe had never set foot outside his country, and clearly felt the disclocation and disorientation that the fall of the ancien regime had engendered. "Hoxha was a wise man, " he said "he gave us security- now we have had thirteen years of chaos!" Berisha and Moisu, a recent and the current president were "mad" the former "should be in a mental hospital." Both were blamed for the pyramid sales debacle.
Bruno had lived in England, and had even lived in Dudley, so we discussed the merits of the Mery Hill Centre. His stay in the UK hadn't worked out, and a failed romance hadn't helped. "Albanians want to go abroad for five years, earn lots of money, come back and build a house" he said, and its widely appreciated that Albania could not function without receipts from family members abroad. "We tell all the officials in England we are Kosovars to help us stay", he recalled, remembering interviews at the Immigration Service at Croydon, "but it doesn't always work." I asked about the Mercedes Benz invasion- "Oh, they're very cheap, a thousand Euros second hand- they are very good on our terrible roads."
"They're all stolen," countered Lambe "all controlled by the mafia. I remember when Tirana was so lovely- nothing on the roads- people just talked and discussed things." He expressed disbelief that when Albania and Hoxha were mentioned in Britain, it was often in the same breath as Kim-il-Sung and North Korea. It has to be said that propoganda takes diverse forms and has many sources. Raising other aspects of Albanian-British relations was risky: "That was your fault!" he shouted, when I raised the loss of life and damage Albanian mines had caused to British warships in the Corfu Channel in 1946.
I knew how to lighten the mood. I asked him about Norman Wisdom, whose films had been incredibly (some might say mystifyingly) popular here. "Oh yes, " said Lambe "they were so funny..- Pitkin in hospital, Pitkin in the army." He almost cried when he told me he had been unable to see Wisdom on his visit to Tirana. Relieved at last, that Albanian Wisdomania had not been an urban myth, I went to bed after scanning the bewildering array of local television channels.
I skipped breakfast, and thus missed another encounter with my favourite piece of transgibberation so far, one that I had found on a bottle of mineral water- "suffled as it gush from the source of the woods of Tepelena." My final morning saw a visit to the National History Museum, with yet more flints and ceramics, but I did get to see a mosaic removed from the ampitheatre in Durres. There were a few other visitors, but I was oddly alone in the "Terror and Genocide 1944-1992" section, which housed pictures of executions, show trials, the fall of the regime, and a mock-up of a Secret Police cell. Outside everyone was going about their business, a large open-air foreign currency exchange was buzzing excitedly in one corner of the square; I felt as though I were the only tourist in Albania and momentarily, I felt rather proud.
Macedonia