Life in the Land Where Donkey Cart Meets Luxury Sedan

   

   Things I have seen (or see regularly) on my 2-minute walk to school:

• a man standing on a rickety old donkey cart transporting a new washing machine
• local kiddos walking to class 
• gangs of turkeys
• flocks of sheep
• at least 15 chickens of at least 15 colors
• chained, barking dogs
• Albanians working in the fields
• the café where we have our much-loved coffee breaks
• friendly neighbors
• rank cess pools
• beautiful 3 and 4 story homes
• simple 2 room homes
• 4 bunkers, which now serve as extra home-storage (photos to come)
• homes under various stages of construction/destruction
• trash
• more trash
• a vision of my broken, bruised body flying through the air over the adjacent green fields after being smashed by a rouge furgon (passenger van that serves - surprisingly efficiently - as the main form of transportation in Albania)
• the beautiful mountains that surround Thanë
• pot holes
• old women dressed in black
• a fence adorned with an old windbreaker, arms stretched out and a baby doll’s head sticking out of the neck hole – super creepy
• lines of fluttering laundry
• Albanian flags
• 10+ solar-panel-heated water tanks atop roofs
• trees and flowers in bloom
• men on bikes
• “vehicles” zooming, lumbering, or bouncing down the road 
•  assume a speed of 40+ mph for vehicles that have the ability
• there is barely room for a bus and a motorcycle to pass each other safely
• the “sidewalk” is an intermittent gravel/grass path that many feet have worn down over time in an attempt not to become roadkill
• the “vehicles”:
• military convoys
• shiny new Mercedes
• more shiny new Mercedes (always speeding)
• huge old buses (which we use frequently)
• luxury travel buses driving so fast they look as if they will tip over at every turn
• communist-era vans held together with duct tape and prayer
• home-made horse-drawn carts toting various objects
• household appliances
• other people
• vegetables
• scrap metal
• sheep
• ???
• motor bikes that are so unnecessarily loud I want to throw a rock at the drivers heads
• half-motorcycle, half-push cart “things”
• other motorized contraptions I cannot even begin to describe