Operation Tirana
I was walking with a group of kids when a guy came galloping down the road on an ill looking horse. He had no spurs, but was cracking a whip and outrunning the cars. ‘Tirana Cowboy,’ I remarked to a wave of giggles. I was hoping the horse had a radar for the deep square potholes that pepper the streets here. You have to look down while walking around, and not because of dog droppings like in this part of Europe.
Tirana reminds me of pioneer days. The cowboys are in Mercedes and most of the ‘Indians’ I’ve met haven’t hit puberty. Ethnic Albanians seem especially lost in the wave of change. The darker people are, the rougher they seem to live. There are too many children sleeping on the street or being used as bait for the cash that can come with having your heart ripped out. Where is Angelina Jolie I wondered while stepping over children curled up on cardboard mattresses as I crossed the park. I don’t think the grass had been cut since Spring had sprung. A young chap in his older brother’s tracksuit tried to convince us that our football was his. He wanted that ball so badly that we broke down and bought him one for the equivalent of five euro. Chaz looked at me with a straight face and said, ‘feeding homeless dogs and buying footballs for kids, what better life could you have.’ Personally I could find a lot of answers for that, but none of them detract from the truth I felt in his statement. The land of the eagle is humbling and full of limping youngsters.
Having come here with absolutely no plan it’s amazing what we’ve accomplished. We know the people in the neighborhood and they know us. Obviously I don’t mean this in a deeply intimate way. Language, time and even history prevent this, but we know enough to drop mirëdita’s and this morning there was a teenage girl waiting outside for Peter to appear. She’d seen him on TV last night, fell in love, and found out where we slept.
We were invited by a local magazine called Trendy, to appear on a popular Albanian television program called Free Zone. The Green Room looked like an abandoned veteran’s club, with chipped paint and mismatched furniture. Besides us, and a bartender who had the straight-lipped smile of a proper thug, the other guests were a group of 5 rather beautiful young women. One of them was so young that her mother had accompanied her to the studio. ‘She was just 17, you know what I mean,’ and this added to the discomfort we all felt. We were there for a laugh, not to get out a message. Nobody came into the room to tell us what the program was about or when we’d go on. The only thing we really knew was that it was a live program. Three whiskies, an espresso and a couple of Raki later, we made our way into the studio. The music started, people clapped, and we were asked to take a seat with the audience for about ten minutes.
Then we got moved up to a table, which mirrored another one. It wasn’t really a mirror of course, because across from us the faces were nowhere near as ugly, skeptical or by nature determined to make a mess of the whole situation, which is sort of what we did.
Morcky kept yelling GALO, which is a reference to our mate Andrea Galvagno who you’d love to have on your team when you find out you’re competing against young models in some sort of name that song challenge. Galo. Galo. Galo. When asked about the hunger strikes, we responded that we were there for the tomatoes and because as far as countries with Eagles on their flags go, Albania was good by us. Like I said previously, our politics were not begging for transparency like the newspapers as the hunger strike came to a close. We were transparent. So transparent that the host asked us if we were on drugs, which none of us was. This was even before Morcky managed to spritz some nasty red bullish energy drink into the air and spray the show’s host, or drew a cock and balls on the table where we sat. It was however after he’d sort of warned us by telling us that lots of people around Albania, Korsovo and Macedonia were watching. We won the Mega Battle, and the Mega Mega Battle, and even the Mega Mega Mega battle, but in a winner takes all Mega Mega Mega Mega Battle we lost. The girls delighted. Our friends watching in a nearby bar told us that people were almost as outraged as Irish fans watching Thierry Henry handle the ball as the French confirmed their presence in South Africa this summer. When the show finished, the host didn’t thank us. He just got up and out, hustling back stage in a way I interpreted as either extremely pissed off or just arrogant. In my eyes, this show was exactly the kind of numbing globalization that could continue to ignore places like Albania.
Then the next day this girl was waiting outside of our hotel to see the beautiful Jan Peter Horns and everywhere we went somebody laughed and said ‘nice job’ or made some other reference to having seen us on TV. Forget Japan, after 3 days we’re already big in Tirana.
Big for 5 minutes and for what? Nothing more than bringing something into the country that had nothing to do with the United Nations, the black market or failing global politics.
Kids, Dogs, Football, Politics, Media, Vegetables, Raki, Beer, Lads, Swans, Words and other Instruments: happy Albanian days …
