--Sunday, 17 December 00--
i woke up around 7 AM and looked out the window to see the golden sunlight being reflected off the windows of homes on Dragodan and I fell gently back to sleep. When I got up at 9 AM the outside was shrouded in a chilly mixture of opaque fog and gray smoke from the numerous wood-burning stoves.

Fog seems to be a regular winter phenomenon here; already, we have had a stretch of five foggy days in a row and frequent other days here and there. Fog is worse than bleak gray skies (the probable alternative) because it makes the air visible and if you know what is in the air (smoke from open fires, cigarette smoke, smoke from wood burning stoves, and smoke from the sulfur-rich coal, lignite, used at the nearby power plants), you really don't want to be reminded about what you are breathing.

Made a cheddar cheese omlet and fried some bacon. Yum, yum.
Walked downtown to get a tan but forgot my tanning goggles. Ran into Matt Macellaro in front of the Monaco and we decided to have a coffee in the Grand (the only place with a generator large enough to allow cappuccino machines to run).


--Thursday, 21 December 00--
November was delightful, cooling gradually. We were still eating outdoors in the first week of December we have had a light snow and today all the puddles are frozen. Still, a gentle cold.

I thought the day would be slow and that I would have a chance to get ahead but I was wrong. It was a steady stream of crises, but mostly those caused by errors and unfortunate delays not due to departmental neglect.

I asked Thuy if she was interested in pizza for lunch and she suggested something better and we agreed Parliament and hamburgers! My stomach agreed by producing volumes of anticipatory acid. This made me call the Government Building for a ride which came in time.

Leka and Kozi joined us and we had a relaxed, pleasant meal with good conversation. We talked about my position that I spoke American, not English. Thuy disagreed at first but as I pointed out how Americans love to noun verbs and verb nouns she seemed to disagree lessly.


--Friday, 22 December 00--
Well, another day from Hell, from the deep, brighter, more intensely flaming regions of the very nether world.

I heard someone say that he had been at a meeting where Kouchner pointed out to the Albanians that there were more car washes here than in America but that the trash was a public problem. I versus We. The speaker went on to say that Kouchner was on the mark but there is no effective administrative follow through which is not surprising perhaps since his "most important priority" seemed to change by the day.


--Saturday, 23 December 00--
The day was yet another of those bleak, gray-sky days that Balkans are noted for. It was the coldest yet of the increasingly cold mornings that have marked our descent into the icy depths of winter. As I left my apartment building I noticed some small puddles in the frozen ruts left by the cars that park on what was once grass next to my building. There were a number of those thin panes of ice that are created when a small amount of water freezes and it all ends up as the top layer, leaving air underneath. I walked over these patches of thin ice, gently placed my foot on the surface and increased the pressure until I could hear the distinctive sound of fracturing ice -- not a little like the sound glass makes when you do the same thing to it. I get some inexplicable thrill when I hear that sound. In the winter I even make a point of looking for these ice patches as they are not very common. Thus refreshed, I walked on to work, my eye out for additional thrills.

Smile called me in the morning and we went to Napoli for pizza but, for the forth or fifth time in a row it had no electricity and thus no pizza, so we went and had a delightful Chinese meal at the Golden Road. Smile used chop sticks for most of the meal -- he is making real progress in developing dexterity but he loses patience after a while. But he always wants to try chop sticks first.

I asked him if Albanian food had spicy dishes and he said no. This was Smile's first time eating hot food! And I know that he really likes it because when I was taking half of what remained of a garlic and hot pepper thin strips of dried beef appetizer and asked him if he would like some (hoping he would say no), he said yes and took and ate his portion of it.

We talked about what Albanians do on New Year's Eve and he said that the ideal thing was to go to a restaurant or a hotel that had a band and some good singers (he emphasized the latter). "If no good singers, no people come," he said.

I suggested that he, Kimeta and I might celebrate New Year's Eve together and he liked the idea. He said he would read the papers and find a venue with good singers and we would go together. The result ought to be interesting even though Smile said that we would all have to dress up.

A view of the moon at dusk.

--Sunday, 24 December 00--
Christmas Eve and colder than ever.

Did some writing and then made an exploratory outing to a nearby store to get some orange juice and to figure out exactly how cold it was. Colder than I thought.

Smile called to say that he and Kimeta had to buy me a Christmas gift and wouldn't take no for an answer. He wanted to know the right color and size so I settled on a solid color, large and warm shirt of some kind. He said that he would come by for me at seven tomorrow night.

I decided to go the outdoor market at the base of Germia to try to find something for Smile and Kimeta and walked there and around but cabbages and electrical outlets didn't seem quite on target.

Around 2 PM I went out to get a haircut. I went to the same place where I had been scalped six weeks ago and put my head into the same hands. I gave the same instructions as I had before: "shkurt" for the top and "shum shkurt" for the sides and back. This time I got what I wanted: a close haircut which I could still part. A Christmas gift to me in its own right.

Joe