August 4, 2012
A sad tale of George W. Bush: Tirana
THERE IS a street in Tirana named after George W. Bush. It is the Rr George W. Bush, so there's no mistaking it. You could easily miss it, though, because it's only short and it's right outside the surprisingly small Albanian parliament, so you may be looking at that instead.
I suppose Albania thought it the least it could do. To make amends. Because they stole his watch when he was in the village where we ate our sandwiches yesterday. He'd gone to see how businessmen were getting on with money America had put into the region. Delighted with the reaction of the crowd on the street, he stepped away from his minders and to shake more hands. When he got back to the embassy, he found someone had slipped his watch off his wrist.
Tirana is not a large place. The centre is a big open square with a cycle path round it but no cyclists to ride on it. In the middle is a big statue of Skanderbeg, the national hero, standing there scowling with a cow's head on his helmet. He is all but the national symbol.
Around the square are the opera house and the imposing national history museum, which we heard contained moving descriptions of the terrible labour camps that shamed the country in the communist period. We never saw them because the building was closed.
To one side, running away from the centre on the other side of the bottle-strewn trickle that is the capital's river in midsummer is The Block. These days it is the trendy area of town full of posh shops and cafés and bars. Until the communists were elected out of power, it was where the elite lived. Their houses are still there, down one side of the street, fenced off by flaking railings, the grass longer than it would have been back then. Nobody gives them a glance.
The back streets, as ever, are more charismatic. That is where the street stalls are, the men who sell paint brushes, sink stoppers, screwdrivers and mothballs from a single stand. We looked for glue and found it. We could have bought anything.
The ministry buildings are a sunset orange. Outside are cylinders of concrete with a hole cut out the side to make room for a man to stand. They are the sentry boxes of former times. I don't know if they are used now but the crumbling foundations of some suggests they aren't.
All around the town are betting shops. There are more betting shops in Albania than there are bets to place. One, across the road from our hotel, is so gaudy with flashing neon lights in purple and yellow that I mistook it for a strip club. The young lad who looks after the hotel in the afternoon asked where we were from and, when we said Bordeaux because we've it's a town which, although 150km from us, people recognise, he said "Ah yes, the Girondins."
The Gironde is the estuary close to the city and gives it its name, Bordeaux, "at the water's edge." To him, though, the Girondins were the city's footballers. He began giving us a history of their fortune, concluding that they're no longer the force they were.
When we asked how he knew so much of a team on the other side of Europe, he said: "Because I bet on football."
Everybody bets on everything, we get the impression. What it says of a country, I don't know. Is it a sign of a country that has fallen to where the people have few hopes other than the escape a bet may bring them? Or is it a token that life has progressed enough that there is now the money and the frivolity to enjoy a flutter.
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