Storybook Life

I'm trying to establish new routines and become familiar with my surroundings. It's just tough. But I am making progress.

I'm getting along just fine with my host family. They whipped out a chess board on my first night here. I was elated! Eddie and Baba:

A couple things about chess with my new family (I don't know if these things are specific to the household or to Albanians generally):

1. They use a term to announce when the queen is threatened, as well as the king. It's something like "shay!" for the queen and "shah!" for the king.

2. Chess is collaborative. Eddie helped me quite a bit when I played Emin. I lost to them both. I enjoyed losing very much.

I LOVE THIS PHOTO:

So now I go to training on weekdays. I have a chilly 20 min. walk to my school. I have language instruction in the morning and cultural training in the afternoon. I come home sometime between 4pm and 5pm. It's easy to get from my home to the school. Everywhere is cold. Albania cold is different than Iowa cold--not worse, but different somehow.

The Albanian language is crazy. 36 letters (using our Western alphabet though, which is nice), with 7 vowels and 29 consonants.

To give you an idea of what I'm dealing with... one of our activities was to write our name phonetically with the Albanian alphabet. Here's what "Jason" (a common name in English) would look like:

XHEJSËN

So I feel pretty good about that.

A good closing item: photos from my PCV group's walking tour of the village where I live (Shëngjin, pronounced "sheng-YEEN" *I THINK*) and the neighboring village where my training site is (Kuqan, which is pronounced "KOO-chahn"). Albania is gorgeous. I had so much fun taking these photos: