Albanian proverb to the effect that a woman must work harder than a donkey because a donkey feeds on grass, while a woman feeds on bread. Culture is an important factor in determining the economic success of a nation. But, that said, what else is there to say? Germany got rich with a culture as barbaric—a couple of world wars and a Holocaust prove it—as anything ever seen. Tibet stayed poor with a culture so wonderful that half of the movie stars in America want to move there. And how do you change a culture anyway? We could wire Albania for cable and let its citizens see how the rest of the world lives. Jerry Springer should give them some good ideas. Albania did not improve upon inspection. Even the animals in the Tirana zoo had been stolen. The monkeys were gone from Monkey Island. The aviary was empty of birds. All the large ruminants had been “eaten,” said Elmaz. Only two lions, a tiger, and a wolf remained in captivity. No one had had the guts to steal them—although several young men seemed to be gearing themselves to the task. The bars on the wolf’s cage had been pried back. One young man stuck his hand inside, shouted, and snatched the hand back. The wolf ignored him, and the men went down the hall to tease the tiger and lions. In the middle of downtown Tirana, 200 yards from Skenderbeg Square, is a block-long hole in the ground. Garbage fires smolder at the bottom. This is where Sijdia Holdings was going to build Albania’s first Sheraton hotel with pyramid-scheme investments. Only a portion of the cellar was completed. The basement staircase rises above ground level on one side of the hole. There’s a door into the stairwell with a neon sign above it: CLUB ALBANIA . Entirely too symbolic The nearby apartment buildings that housed the country’s communist elite were built in the clean, austere International style of twentieth-century cities everywhere, but they’re crumbling. Where big chunks of stucco have fallen away, primitive rubble-wall construction is visible, ready to explode with the structures’ weight in the eastern Mediterranean’s next little earthquake. Apartments for the common folk were built much worse. Elmaz’s mother had had the unenviable job of teaching geography to students who, as far as they knew, would never be allowed to leave the country. She lived in a block of flats with four stories of haphazardly laid masonry courses. Flaking mortar oozed from every joint. The bricks looked like they’d been dug from beds of clay with
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