Experience Albania: Travel, Pictures, History, Culture

  The Kaceli’s ‘New Year’s’ tree
My host sister and I had a little photo shoot a few days ago, in effort to make a holiday photo CD for a cousin who just moved to Belgium.  Here’s what my camera found:
  
Anila (host mom) making me a cup of Turkish coffee, and Zaku (host grandpa) and [...]

Wearing their ladies’ letter jackets
Originally uploaded by nicollet.
 
I’m not asking their permission, but posting this on instinct.
I hope they keep talking to me, becauase this was too good to pass up!
Those are definitely letter jackets from high school … Mike is wearing my sister’s and Ben has mine. Such dedication they have!

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Originally uploaded by jimmyloubill.

Rewind to the teacher training that my counterpart and I organized a few weeks ago. Here’s a photo of me with Isabel, the English Language Fellow who was one of the other presenters.

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Originally uploaded by jimmyloubill.

If any of you are wondering what Katie is like as a teacher, here’s a visual!

 I experienced my first teacher’s lunch (party) on Friday.  With a table full of over 25 teachers from my school, it was a guaranteed good time.
A sampling of the party-goers: 
  
I patted myself on the back for the Albanian songs and dances I’ve made sure to learn over the past nine months, as I [...]

 
Above: the teacher’s room, where the offical ‘registrars’ (books where students’ grades are recorded and filed) are kept and teachers rest if they have an hour off from teaching.  It’s nice and bright and I like to correct papers in here some time.  It also gives me a chance to talk to a wide [...]

Such a great group of students from Berat - the perfect representatives.  And their advancement to the FINAL round is an added bonus.  While they lost to a team from Tirane during the finals, both teams did so well - I was very, very proud of them.
Arrival time - the group plus their coach, Fitore, [...]

I was in the seaside town of Durres last weekend for an Albanian-wide debate tournament with our debate team from Berat.  We were one coach (my counterpart, Fitore), one assistant coach (me) and six students (two teams of three). 
Let me begin by setting the scene …
The sunset the first night, in two lovely shades.
 
The resort grounds:
 
A [...]

One of the specific requests that my school and counterpart included in their Peace Corps volunteer application was to ‘get’ a volunteer who is willing to organize and implement teacher trainings. My counterpart and I did just that on Friday. The first of hopefully many teacher trainings is now off the ground and [...]

I went along with James and his counterpart, Mirela (featured in a recent post) to an AIDS day event at another high school in Berat (there are three public schools and two professional schools - the high school I teach at is under the professional category). Students gathered and a panel consisting of Red [...]