Site Placement!!!

So I found out yesterday where I'll be going for my site placement for the next 2 years. I won't be headed there until the end of may...I'm not even half way through our training right now (which is crazy...because it feels like it's been forever...in a good way though!). But I will be headed to Burrel...it is in the north central part of the country..and from what I can tell, it doesn't look like there are too many attractions there. It's in one of the poorest areas of the country. And I think the latest big claim to fame there is that there were some Kosovars who kidnapped some Serbians and killed them to harvest their organs on the black market. So...good to know!

However, my supervisor in the Peace Corps says that my Albanian counterpart is awesome. He apparently has lived in England for 9 years and his wife is foreign ( I'm not exactly sure what ethnicity though). I think he's pretty progressive for an Albanian man so we'll see! ...my site mate is also pretty awesome so I'm excited about that. There aren't any current volunteers where we're headed so we'll have kind of a clean slate to start out with (which also means a lot more work making contacts).

In other events...today we had a culture day in our village for our host families. Our families made some traditional food and we made some American food (ok...we did make FRENCH toast...but we also made baked apples because we couldn't find brown sugar to do a crisp...or other various things that we could have used to cook with to make cookies or something). Like most Albanian gatherings, it ended in dancing. It's kind of awesome here that people LOVE to dance so much. As I was told today (and by an Albanian boy)...part of the reason guys love to dance is because it's one of the only ways for the girls to get out of their houses (and housework!) here. So ALL the guys can dance because it's one of their few opportunities for spending time with girls outside of school. I do have to say...that Americans could learn from this! :) Every girl loves a man who can dance! My sister Eliza dressed up in a traditional costume and Brett and Alex from my group dressed in traditional outfits that their host parents brought along. I will have to post pictures SOON! We did some typical Albanian circle dancing and then busted out the rock/pop...which is pretty much ALL from American...seriously...Britney Spears, Akon, and Rihanna...felt like I was in an American dance club. Except that it was at 2 o'clock in the afternoon...and not in the morning!

This past week we also started assisting with typing classes at the high school as part of our community project. It was pretty awesome! Albanian classrooms tend to be a little less disciplined than American ones so we were kind of worried. But kids were so ridiculously focused it was great! It was probably because they have never learned typing on an actual computer keyboard...only from a textbook. So we downloaded this interactive typing program that allows them to start using the computers in their lab at school to learn typing. If you know how to type here it's pretty much an instantaneous job. People over 30 here have NO idea how to use computers, and even current college students have no idea how to type. So it's definitely a much-needed skill we can easily transfer here. We're going to try and go in for 3 days a week, at least 1-2 hours a day during training so we can provide some consistency. I think our first day we definitely had some kids sneak in who weren't even actually in the class. And like most Albanians who have no qualms with staring, people kept stopping by the classroom to stand outside the door and stare in at us. Makes me laugh every time!