The last few days, finally on a short holiday in Istria (and my dear are these Croatians afraid to enter the EU on July 1!), I’ve been trying to think what to write about, or at least, where to start on reporting about the current Albanian pre-election situation. A small recap: about two weeks [...]
Thus was the main event of Albania’s 100th independence day. A cake fight. Thousands of people had gathered at the central Skënderbeg square as Mayor Basha of Tirana cut the giant supercake (a world record) with an extended pizza knife and presented the first piece to Kosovar president Jahjaga. After several pieces of cake [...]
The distinction between the representative, parliamentary democracies of capitalism, and vanguardists should be carefully marked (as Marcos does, in his way during his exchange with ETA). The Subcommandante shits on the vanguardists, whereas one of the designations of the representative, parliamentary system (and its attendees) is that this system is “full of shit”, as are [...]
Having arrived in Shkup/Skop(l)je in Macedonia after a six hour drive and finding myself on the film set of an advertisement for telecom company Plus (one day I’ll make a post with all the advertisements my friends have played in; I’m surrounded daily by the faces of Plus, Vodafone, and Eagle Mobile), I thought [...]
Biking up and down to the immigration and employment offices to gather all my documents to extend my residency permit here (not so easy when you’re self-employed), I discovered that the main boulevard in Tirana has been decorated by Albanian flags and large banners stating “I <3 Çamëria.” At both ends of the boulevard [...]
Tomorrow will be Liberation Day (Dita e Çlirimit) a.k.a. Flag Day (Dita e Flamurit) in Albania, and I’ll miss it, unfortunately. Friends told me that the streets of central Tirana have been decorated in the national colors kuq e zi (red and black. The Albanian national flag is the only national flag in solely these colors). I [...]