small details

I was totally out of luck with my dreams of warmer days. Instead, winter has returned to Kosovo, and the city is mostly white again. But today is sunny, which comes quite welcomed after a week of grey skies, and relatively warm, so I am thrilled that my laundry handing outside to dry has a small chance of actually doing so (instead of freezing...again!). In general, I am feeling more set up and cozy in my apartment since I bought such fabulously exciting things as candles (to make those evening power outages somewhat relaxing), a fry pan, a knife (small but mighty!), a good tea mug (since I knocked over and completely smashed the last one during a recent power outage), and some more dvd's. I still haven't started cooking on any regular basis, but now that is more a function of my schedule being irregular than of my not wanting to bother... well... I suppose it's a bit of laziness on my part, too, because it takes effort to come up with yummy meals based on the limited (or simply different) selection of foods here. Back to the apartment, though, there is now just one remaining problem: my kitchen being my living room, the nearly white carpet is taking quite a beating!

It's not only my apartment that feels comfortable... I've been thinking a lot lately about how much more comfortable, in general, I now feel about living here, especially when I compare it to memories of how lost I felt when I first arrived. It's almost as if the process of adapting to a new environment is so gradual that you can miss the changes entirely unless you take the time to consider what is different. When I came, and was sick, going to a pharmacy for aspirin was a challenge. Really, I had no clue where to look for anything, and something so theoretically simple as shopping at the local grocery store seemed complicated and foreign. Now, the sensation is one of ease, and the difference is that I no longer feel totally lost when I walk down the street. Maybe it's small, but definitely recognizable...

Like, for instance, the other night... I went to the Oda Theatre to see a very popular local comedy called "Three Fat Germans." A friend from the office was involved in the show's creation and I know a few of the actors, so I had been meaning to go for a few weeks now...even though it is all in Albanian. I insisted that someone tell me about the plot (albeit in minimal detail) before the play started, and the comedy was very physical and easy to follow for at least 45 minutes (or half of the performance). After the show, however, I was actually uncertain about how much of the dialogue I could follow. I did not realize at first that I could understand many individual words and common phrases, likely because they did not necessarily translate into an ability to understand full sentences or even general ideas. Even so, I think I would have been much more lost watching the play a few weeks ago than I was the other night.

Ok. Clearly, my Albanian needs work. But as for things and experiences in daily life, nothing is really that new for me anymore... It seems I'm left with the small details to ponder...