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5/3/99
Spring is in the air today. The weather has been changeable and erratic, starting out warm and humid and changing to chilly. Rain has been falling steadily, and even hail has come down a couple of times.
I am glad the winter is almost over. Winter in Albania is almost unbearable. We have power cuts continuously, sometimes more often than we actually have it on! Just now I turned on the tap and brown water surged out; the pipes are so bad here that sewage often mixes with the fresh water supply. It has been terribly cold, and the two electric heaters that we have in our tiny one bedroom apartment have at times barely been able to make an impact. We sit watching TV in the evenings (when there's power) wrapped up in blankets.
Spring can be beautiful here. Crimson poppies carpet the fields mixed with other wildflowers, while the sky is so incredibly blue and clear. By the summer a thick haze will have descended so that your vision is obscured beyond a kilometer or so. On the down side, the spring rains will have turned the streets into mud which is so thick and deep that it threatens to never let you go. I've never been in a place with such appalling roads; the road surface disintegrates after a single hard rain. Once we even saw a truck which broke its back in one of the enormous potholes.
There is a bridge in the north which I am particularly fond of. Built in the 1920s, the government has attempted to close it a number of times by piling dirt and rubble at either end. Each time, the cars drive right over the barriers. The bridge is in such bad shape that you can see the river through the gaps in the concrete. I have seen with my own eyes a truck which got stuck there, suspended over the river below with the possibility that a fatal amount of bridge could go beneath it. Yet people continue to use it!
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