April 12, 2008

The Quest is Over!!

This Saturday (update: this was actually a while ago, I just forgot to post it), I had a really interesting experience. I went up to a historical city outside of Tirana with a group of Albanians and Americans. We were there to do a clean up at a local school. We met a group of Albanian students and distributed bags and plastic gloves and set to work picking up trash from the school yard. The students got really into it and a bunch of other children from the town also pitched in. I got to talk to two girls Ana and Renisa (rhymes with Denisa, my Albanian name.) We ended up picking up about 15 bags of trash from the school area.
Then we headed up the mountain to see the ancient city. It’s an unexcavated site that was built by the Illyrians (the original people of the area) and dates back to the 5th century BCE. Right now, most of it is uncovered, but you can see the tops of the walls and the remains of a number of city gates. It was a beautiful walk and we ate pomegranates off the trees. They also were picking a berry that we later identified as myrtle, but I didn’t try any of that. I wasn’t 100% sure what it was and wasn’t too keen on experimenting with wild berries. We were followed along the way by about 20 boys from the town. We were definitely one of the more exciting things that had happened to them lately. A funny moment was when one of the boys found a dead snake and showed it to me and very seriously told me not to eat it. Maybe he was confused by the pomegranates, but believe me I had no desire to eat a dead snake.