I was a huge fan of the first Survivor so much so that I actually watched the season finale of that show in a hospital. Plug. A character on that show named Dr. Sean had this strategy for voting people out alphabetically based on their first lines, and like Branch Rickey integrated the major leagues, I too have integrated that into my life. It has kind of hampered my social life to have every meal be a complex process of eating 26 food products starting with each subsequent letter of the alphabet (33 on my trips to Russia, thank God I don't play that Cambodia game). Especially frustrating is what to do with "x." Do I wait 20 minutes for the takeout Chinese, or do I do the lazy man's way, which is whipping up some SPAM, putting it on a frying pan, adding a sauce with a splash of Red Bull and a little bit of spray-on Right Guard Extreme deodorant so it can be Xtreme SPAM. Life's dilemmas. This is just a ridiculous way of saying I'm going to talk about Albania.
You might know it as Shqiperia, if you could take your eyes off my asymmetric and misshapen nipples down towards my pants, no, not there, honey, I see you likey, but a little to my left, and read it on my pants. I'm a fan. Albania's a nice place. Tirana, the capital, is crossed by the Lada River, and as always, I faced that big decision we all face when crossing rivers, whether to ford the river or caulk the wagon. I caulked the hell out of that shit and lost only 15 pounds of pemmican. On the south side is the Blloku, the former Communist/Stalinist/Maoist...wait, shit all those people are revisionists, Albania needs its own term. The people who were honchos rolled there. I've been to Albania twice now. Most of my memorable experiences have been on Albanian buses. Of course, these buses are lamentably slow. You could probably get from Gjirokaster (in the south) to Tirana faster in a three-legged race with notoriously slow former Japan baseball star Cecil Fielder than in an Albanian bus. One time, I broke up with a girl, got back together again, and probably some other stuff happened. My most recent time was crossing from Pogradec to Tirane. Albania has like one two-lane road. When snow happens, it's a kerfuffle. For reference, it took us five hours to pass a small creek. But it was awesome, because Albanian buses have Albanian girls-mostly college students coming back from Greece. So, five hours of bliss for me. Plus, I got to learn how to say in Albanian "The womenfolk need to go to the bathroom, stop the bus."
Albania's most famous features are its concrete bunkers. They are most prominently found along the eastern borders with what used to be Yugoslavia. Now, they're fake countries like My Big Fat Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia and Montenegro. The Albanians were terrified of a land invasion from Yugoslavia. Tito, he was a revisionist, the most capitalist of all failed communists, and a great threat. Albania has a proud military. In Skanderbeg Square, you can see an army of tanks designed by the company that makes Power Wheels which makes up the 2nd Armored Division of the Albanian Army. Children drive them helter skelter in parade procession that would be something like if the city of Scottsbluff, Nebraska, had an army (which would still probably beat the Italians!) You laugh, but those determined eight-year-olds totally cut off the Italians' left flank at the Battle of Sarande. But, what most military historians who laugh at Albania's wasteful building of hundreds of thousands of concrete bunkers are ignorant buffoons. They forget that Albania wasn't expecting an invasion of infantrymen bearing guns and tanks and howitzers and the like. Yugoslavia has spent billions of dollars building up its basketball playing branch of the Armed Forces. Anybody who knows anything about Albania knows that, good people though they are, they can't defend against the pick and roll, post up, and you try to pump fake, they'll fall for it every time. And one if you can knock down the shot.
You might know it as Shqiperia, if you could take your eyes off my asymmetric and misshapen nipples down towards my pants, no, not there, honey, I see you likey, but a little to my left, and read it on my pants. I'm a fan. Albania's a nice place. Tirana, the capital, is crossed by the Lada River, and as always, I faced that big decision we all face when crossing rivers, whether to ford the river or caulk the wagon. I caulked the hell out of that shit and lost only 15 pounds of pemmican. On the south side is the Blloku, the former Communist/Stalinist/Maoist...wait, shit all those people are revisionists, Albania needs its own term. The people who were honchos rolled there. I've been to Albania twice now. Most of my memorable experiences have been on Albanian buses. Of course, these buses are lamentably slow. You could probably get from Gjirokaster (in the south) to Tirana faster in a three-legged race with notoriously slow former Japan baseball star Cecil Fielder than in an Albanian bus. One time, I broke up with a girl, got back together again, and probably some other stuff happened. My most recent time was crossing from Pogradec to Tirane. Albania has like one two-lane road. When snow happens, it's a kerfuffle. For reference, it took us five hours to pass a small creek. But it was awesome, because Albanian buses have Albanian girls-mostly college students coming back from Greece. So, five hours of bliss for me. Plus, I got to learn how to say in Albanian "The womenfolk need to go to the bathroom, stop the bus."
Albania's most famous features are its concrete bunkers. They are most prominently found along the eastern borders with what used to be Yugoslavia. Now, they're fake countries like My Big Fat Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia and Montenegro. The Albanians were terrified of a land invasion from Yugoslavia. Tito, he was a revisionist, the most capitalist of all failed communists, and a great threat. Albania has a proud military. In Skanderbeg Square, you can see an army of tanks designed by the company that makes Power Wheels which makes up the 2nd Armored Division of the Albanian Army. Children drive them helter skelter in parade procession that would be something like if the city of Scottsbluff, Nebraska, had an army (which would still probably beat the Italians!) You laugh, but those determined eight-year-olds totally cut off the Italians' left flank at the Battle of Sarande. But, what most military historians who laugh at Albania's wasteful building of hundreds of thousands of concrete bunkers are ignorant buffoons. They forget that Albania wasn't expecting an invasion of infantrymen bearing guns and tanks and howitzers and the like. Yugoslavia has spent billions of dollars building up its basketball playing branch of the Armed Forces. Anybody who knows anything about Albania knows that, good people though they are, they can't defend against the pick and roll, post up, and you try to pump fake, they'll fall for it every time. And one if you can knock down the shot.
Sunset at Shkoder Castle is really beautiful. Enough for sentimentality. A trip to Durres on the coast was uneventful, riding the bumper cars at a dilapidated amusement park, shooting people who I was not sure were threats to the Communist Party. What came of you, Albania? Now, you're just attractive beaches, kitschy Stalinist architecture and a modicum of normalcy. You may put up your facade of dangerousness by the omnipresent Gypsies vs. Albanians melees at every train station in Europe, but you've gone soft. Yeah, sure, I was subject to an attempted and not particularly well executed attempted robbery, but when did you forget about fun? No jolly youths invited me to steal Italian cars! I was ready to be convinced into a pyramid scheme, because really, when you think about it, hey thanks for the vodka shot, I could totally turn this 1000 leke into a million. When I grew up in the Seattle area, all the young street thugs were sifting through their copies of the Economist and copycat Tosks were capping makeshift Ghegs all over the place. And now, where's your Tupac Shakur? That's right, he never really existed. Step it up, Shqiperia.
