Eating Bad Meat, Grandma’s Famine, Skeletal Jews and Knut Hamsun

As published at SubStack, 3/31/22:

[Food Lover’s in Windhoek on 3/30/22]

In Albania, there’s a chain called Big Market. Despite its name, each Big Market is smallish. At my Tirana store, I bought cheeses, eggs, juices, nuts, chocolate, instant soups and yogurts. Without a kitchen, I couldn’t buy meat. The eggs, I boiled with an electric kettle. Once, I got some cheese that had gone bad, but instead of going to Big Market to complain, I simply tried to eat it all. If I remember correctly, I managed to swallow at least half.

In Windhoek, I usually shop at Checkers, a South African chain. Among its more unexpected items are fresh mint leaves, Thai fish sauce and lousy sushi. From its deli, I’ve gotten creamed spinach, curried ground beef and mutton stew. I’ve tried its fat cakes, a Namibian staple. Since no bread at Checkers has a crust, I’ve pretty much gone without bread for nearly five months.

At nearby Food Lover’s, another South African chain, one can sometimes find a tolerable loaf of German black bread, or Schwarzbrot. Rejecting crust, Namibians sneer at the needed contrast that heightens and sweetens softness. Foolishly, they miss out on that metallic tease in the bra strap.

Just about everybody is fussy about food and drinks. Your cup of coffee must have, say, two teaspoons of sugar and not 2 ½. Your rice must be basmati and not jasmine, much less short grain, and cooked just so. You won’t tolerate gouda with your burger.

[dinner at home in Windhoek on 3/30/22]

A month ago at Checkers, I bought some thick bacon that had gone slightly sour, so, of course, I ate it all. This morning, I did it again, but with beef that looked suspicious even as I picked it off the shelf. It didn’t feel cold enough and there was too much blood in the black Styrofoam tray. Though I cooked it two different ways, with a crazy amount and mix of seasoning, each bite was dreadful. Still, I managed to eat about half of it.

From these examples, it’s easy to conclude I’m just a moron, or a cheap moron, to be specific, but it’s more complicated than that. Having made a mistake in buying spoiled food, I doubled down by eating it, to prove that it’s not so bad. I was also punishing myself, though in two of these cases, I couldn’t have guessed there was anything dodgy.

Moreover, my pathology is hardly unusual. After you’ve been Pfizered twice, say, you hear about “vaccinated” people dying or having their limbs amputated, with all sorts of hellish complications awaiting those, like yourself, who are seemingly unscathed. Though taunted by these evil possibilities, you take a third and fourth booster shot, to prove you were right all along, and, damn it, that you’re with credible people like Noam Chomsky and Amy Goodman, and not a bunch of conspiracy freaks! With her maternal look of concern and girlish victory sign, Amy always has your back, and front too.

There’s another reason for me swallowing crap. If I drop a peanut on the floor, I’ll pick it up and eat it. I save ketchup packets from fast food meals, and not just because I remember making ketchup soup. Of course, you can get too weird about this, and maybe I have.

Among the quirks of Vietnamese is the inclusion of “eat” to describe numerous activities, so to dress, for example, is to ăn mặc, eat and dress. To talk is to ăn nói, eat and talk. To have sex is to ăn nằm, eat and lie down with somebody. To be married is to ăn ở, eat and live with somebody. The preoccupation with “eat” as the language was formed can only mean it was always on their minds.

To indulge in pleasures is to eat and play, ăn chơi. To celebrate is to eat with happiness, ăn mừng. To go to a party is to eat at a party, ăn tiệc. To look for work is to look for something to eat, kiếm ăn. To do well in business is to eat customers, ăn khách.

Growing up in Vietnam, I wasn’t poor, but I remember my grandma talking, in snippets, about the famine she witnessed at the end of World War II, when at least a million Vietnamese died. As she got senile, she would mention seeing Mr. or Mrs. such and such lying in the road.

[Saigon, 10/10/19]

It’s quite possible more Vietnamese than Jews perished during WWII, but but let’s clarify something first: No Jews were murdered by gas, none! Like the Vietnamese and so many others, many Jews starved to death because supply lines were broken everywhere by the end of World War II, due to Allies’ bombing. Outside concentration camps, Germans also starved.

Just cut out already the (delousing) gas and violin in frozen weather among corpses after a death march, etc. Starving in prison was bad enough. In Primo Levi’s If This Is A Man, hunger is a steady undercurrent, as it is in all gulag literature, “A fortnight after my arrival [in Auschwitz] I already had the prescribed hunger, that chronic hunger unknown to free men, which makes one dream at night, and settles in all the limbs of one's body.” And, “But how could one imagine not being hungry? The Lager is hunger: we ourselves are hunger, living hunger.”

Those photos of skeletal Jews prove there were no death camps. Clearly useless as workers, they still weren’t shot or, I’m about to throw up my rotten beef, gassed, because there was no Final Solution! Right now, I have more lethal gas than Dachau and Auschwitz combined, a contention I’m willing to debate with any professor at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Let’s rumble!

Why keep so many Jews alive until 1945 if all you wanted was to mass murder them? Ann Frank spent five months inside concentration camp infirmaries before dying of typhus. Why feed and nurse a bedridden 15-year-old of a race you wanted to exterminate? As for the six million figure, it was bandied about even decades before WWII. Now quietly retired, it still circulates among brainwashed Jewish ass smoochers as a sacrosanct myth.

Though World War III hasn’t quite started, supply line problems already exist, with food shortages and famines discussed even in the mainstream media. Mass starvation appears to be the aim, though, and not a side effect of global conflicts.

US sanctions on Russia block much needed wheat and fertilizer to dozens of countries, including the USA. Worsening this situation, an unreliable PCR test that often yields false positives has led to a fake pandemic, but affecting birds instead of birdbrains. Already, +15 million chickens and turkeys in the US have been culled. For Covid, a bogus “health” passport was introduced to control one’s access to everything. Since that didn’t quite stick, a food rationing card will be rolled out to do the same. Obey, or you won’t be able to live.

Like pain, hunger is instantly forgotten once it’s solved, so a sated man may be sickened by the sight of an overflowing buffet! Those who don’t know when they’ll eat next, however, become hunger. Nothing degrades so prolifically, and so creatively, as hunger.

In 1920, Knut Hamsun was awarded the Nobel Prize, 30 years after the publication of his most famous novel, Hunger. In this semi autobiographical account, the starving writer bites his forefinger and gnaws a raw bone meant for a dog. Here’s a passage, as translated by Robert Bly:

Nothing to do, I was dying with open eyes, helpless, staring up at the ceiling. Finally I put my forefinger in my mouth and started sucking on it. Something started to flicker in my brain, an idea that had gotten free in there, a lunatic notion. Suppose I took a bite? Without a moment’s hesitation I shut my eyes and clamped down hard with my teeth.

I leaped up. Finally I was awake. A little blood trickled from the finger, and I licked it off. There wasn't much pain, the wound didn’t amount to anything, but I was suddenly myself again. I shook my head, walked to the window, and found a rag for my finger. While I stood puttering about with that, my eyes suddenly filled, I cried softly to myself. The poor bitten thin finger looked so pitiful. My God, I was a long way down.

Details asides, it’s the psychology of abjectly prolong hunger that grips. Pray that you will only know it through literature.

[Windhoek, 3/30/22]

Covid Feuilleton #12

As published at SubStack, 1/20/22:

[Tirana, 5/23/21]

Though we vain transients have been in this transit lounge for six million years, we only had access to its entirety for less than a century. Before air travel, so few could circle the earth, they were basically freaks. 

Of the 269 men who set out with Magellan on 9/20/1519, only 19 made it back to Spain on 9/6/1522, with Magellan killed halfway, for forcing Jesus onto some Pinoys. To this scowling ubermensch, we owe the name Pacific Ocean, yes, the one with countless tsunamis, typhoons and undersea volcanoes. One just burped loudly near Tonga.

Swarmed with YouTube travel vlogs from legions of dorks and ditzes, we forget how inaccessible and unknown the world was just yesterday. Isabella Bird Bishop, “In the winter of 1894, when I was about to sail for Korea (to which some people erroneously give the name of “The Korea”), many interested friends hazarded guesses at its position,—the Equator, the Mediterranean, and the Black Sea being among them, a hazy notion that it is in the Greek Archipelago cropping up frequently. It was curious that not one of these educated, and, in some cases, intelligent people came within 2,000 miles of its actual latitude and longitude.”

Think about that, just 128 years ago, even some very bright people thought Korea was a Greek island!

With Covid and the Great Reset already locking out much of the world, it’s entirely possible an infant will grow up believing the USA is a Chinese shithole. Masked, thus oxygen deprived, his IQ is already nosediving.

The first passenger flight on a fixed wing aircraft went just 23 miles, five feet above water, from St. Petersburg to Tampa on 1/1/1914. For this, its lone passenger paid $400, or $10,500 in today’s dollars! If the Great Reset has its way, air travel will be limited to only the fattest cats.

With net zero carbon emissions by 2050 as their goal, global elites are quite open about what they want from us. In 2019, Imperial College London, Oxford and other top UK universities released Absolute Zero, which maps our future. We must cut out red meat, and stop flying, so no more airlines by 2050, they tell us.

Still, we’re not quite grounded yet. With airbnb, booking.com, half a dozen cheap flight websites, Google Maps and universal Wi-Fi, traveling is still absurdly easy, despite stressful Covid restrictions, which can change so abruptly.

After landing in Tirana on 2/4/21, though, I just wanted to linger a while. Luckily, my pad on Mine Peza was close to pleasant cafes and good restaurants, though it took a while to sort them out, naturally. The sublime Detari Fish, with its attached market, I only discovered after five months. Sitting in its semi-basement dining room with a plate of freshly caught octopus and sardines in olive oil with lemon, or tagliatelle with huge shrimps, I couldn’t believe how lucky I was, or how stupid for not walking in much earlier. It had no menu, period, to advertise its low prices. There were times I thought they had miscalculated the bill.

[Tirana, 8/2/21]

One had to communicate in Albanian, Italian or English, with the last two possible only if certain workers were present. Of course, one could just point to a displayed fish and say “makarona” for pasta, or “oriz” for rice. Usually, a culture borrows foreign nouns to name alien objects, such as a computer or a phone. In Albania, however, I couldn’t help but notice that some of its most ordinary and, one would think, timeless words, such as peshku (fish), pulë (chicken), fasule (beans) or oriz (rice), also have foreign roots. One must conclude, then, that before Albanians encountered Romans, they had no idea what a fish or chicken was, or what beans or rice was before they had Greek girlfriends. Sure, they might have seen a chicken or fish now and then, but since they had no name for either, chickens and fish were interchangeable.

My most regular spot was Lami’s, just 25 yards from my building. I went there maybe a hundred times to get a macchiato or cappuccino, plus, often, a pretty good burek or lousy croissant. Like most outside France, it was just croissant-shaped, but what are you going to do? Arriving there usually just after it opened at 7AM, I often claimed a table facing its open door, so I could see all the lovely people walking by. Sometimes a very spunky yet ugly boy would walk in with his mom. His fierce expression was comic and impressive.

Two young women worked at Lami’s seven days a week, with a third showing up occasionally. Despite their low-waged jobs, they spoke English comfortably, sans accent, and this was a place away from tourists. During all my visits, I may have seen four other foreigners, with one a Chinese likely from the nearby Chinese Embassy. On Lami’s logo is an Italian sentence, “Il pane è una cosa viva.” Bread is a live thing. Inside its bathroom is a sign in English, “I hope everything came out OK.” I suspect scatological humor is common in Albania, for the menu at Spaghetti Western also includes “sweet-fart beans.”

Just six weeks into my Tirana sojourn, something went wrong, and though subtle at first, it was unmistakable. Having never exercised regularly, and with a fondness for a few beers, you know, every so often, I wasn’t exactly Adonis, but with my constant walking, I was in reasonably good shape, with no history of any sustained illness, not bad for someone 57-years-old.

When I write and read too much, my eyes ache, but half a day’s rest always fixes the problem. This time, though, I had a headache that, though not yet severe, intensified even after rest and better eating. Thinking I just needed some fresh greens, I went out and got a Greek salad, but even that didn’t go down right.

Right at this time, I happened to meet an American street musician, singing in Turkish outside what’s left of Tirana Castle. Despite my groggy state, I wanted to hear this man’s story, so invited him out for a couple of beers, which we had in a pool hall just off Skanderbeg Square.

A native of Kansas, he had lived overseas for 5 ½ years. Traveling as cheaply as possible, and sometimes sleeping outside, he’d been to Portugal, Spain, France, Ireland, Bulgaria, Turkey (four times), Greece, North Macedonia, Croatia, Serbia, Kosovo and Albania (three times). Incredibly, we had a mutual Tirana acquaintance, Julit, the travel vlogger and TV dating show star. As we drifted into politics, he told me about his experience teaching at a yeshiva, where he learnt from his students some hideous Jewish beliefs about goyim. Though I wanted to hear much more, I never met this vagabond again, for I would be shut down for a month, starting that night.

Bedbound for ten days, totally exhausted yet unable to sleep, so no rest, with my mind muddled and often hallucinating, I could hardly tell day from night. Not that it mattered. I just wanted my misery to end. At least I didn’t consider jumping out my 8th floor window. A trip to the bathroom, just three steps from my bed, could only occur after hours of stalling and self persuasion. The only ready-to-eat food I had was half a bag of potato chips and some chocolate, but, again, it took too much effort to reach them, so I ate almost nothing for ten days, not that I had any appetite. There were some juices in the fridge, which I did manage to drink, after tremendous effort. Everything was too out of reach, too difficult or too risky, including just shifting in bed, for it might amplify my discomfort, which was no longer confined to my head, but entire body. Everything ached.

Soon after the worst was over, I wrote, “My mouth was constantly bitter. I was just gross. My mucus, dandruff, earwax and even smegma proliferated.” Just to sit in Lami’s again had become my only goal in this life or any other, but it was out of the question. Grimly, though, I did manage to inch my way to a neighborhood market to get cheeses, yogurts, pistachios, potato chips, for its saltiness, I suppose, and several bottles of mixed juices. Juices and sunlight, I craved above everything else.

Sixteen days into my illness, I walked like an octogenarian into Lami’s. Since a bad illness is a debasement and rude reminder of your ultimate worthlessness, it’s not unnatural to be embarrassed, so I felt super exposed just standing in front of the glass case. Plus, I had to learn how to behave naturally again, though with all of my faculties, mental and physical, still shaky. My sudden desire to order a cherry cheesecake at 7 in the morning only increased my self-consciousness. With a most unnatural chuckle that was more like a blood and phlegm choked gurgle, I even said, “It’s not exactly breakfast food, ha ha!” Jesus, man, maybe I should have jumped out that 8th floor window.

Looking back, I’m glad I was never hospitalized, because if I did have Covid, a ventilator and/or remdesivir would have too likely killed me, as they have millions worldwide. Too poor to afford health insurance my entire adult life, I had seen a doctor or dentist just a handful of times in four decades, so I was not inclined to seek professional medical help anyway, no matter where I was.

With their maltreatment of Covid patients and/or injection of toxic jabs into the healthy, millions of doctors and nurses worldwide have become angels of death. Two years into this carnage, none can plead ignorance of what they’re doing. Of course, all those who mask, dissemble or facilitate this horror in any way, to the least degree, are also guilty.

[to be continued, of course and unfortunately]

[Tirana, 3/25/21]

Covid Feuilleton #11

As published at SubStack, 1/18/22:

[Klos, 6/6/21]

Land of Albania! let me bend mine eyes
On thee, thou rugged nurse of savage men!
The cross descends, thy minarets arise,
And the pale crescent sparkles in the glen,
--from Lord Byron’s “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage”

In May of 2021, I received an email from an American who said he wanted to go to a Tirana bar I had mentioned in an article. On a shelf, there were five wine bottles with labels showing a portrait of Mussolini, JFK, Lenin, Hitler or Stalin. After I had given him the address, I thought, What if he’ll go there to raise a big stink?

In 1987, the Gestapo Bar in Seoul had to change its name after an uproar, and in 2000, the same fate met another Seoul bar, Third Reich. Although Nazi glamor is certainly not kosher, Communist chic is ultra cool. In Manhattan, for example, there’s the KGB Bar in the Bowery, right on the edge of the Ukrainian Village. Who cares if more Ukrainians were murdered by Communists than Jews by Nazis? There is only one Holocaust.

During the 2016 Democratic Convention in Philadelphia, dozens of tattooed white hipsters paraded down Broad Street, with many waving red flags, some with a hammer and sickle even. Who cares if Little Cambodia was just seven blocks away? Only one Holocaust matters.

In 2006, Gavin Newsom appointed Jack Hirschman as Poet Laureate of San Francisco. A Stalinist freak, Hirschman could only talk about Stalin or himself when I met him at Caffe Trieste in 2008. Among Hirschman’s books is Joey: The Poems of Joseph Stalin.

Entering Tirana’s Bunk’art, a museum of Communist crimes, you’re immediately greeted by a Primo Levi quotation, “ALL THOSE THAT FORGET THEIR PAST ARE CONDEMNED TO RELIVE IT.” Again, the Holocaust, in a memorial to victims of Jewish thinking! In a country where no Jews died during World War II, there’s a Holocaust Memorial. Even post-Communist Albania, then, has been jewjacked. Soros and his son have been busy there.

The American, let’s call him Jonathan, turned out to be very well-traveled, erudite and politically astute. I met him and his wife several times, and not just in Tirana, but Gjirokaster, that stone city like some prehistoric creature clawing its way up a mountainside, to paraphrase Kadare. Before Jonathan left Albania, we talked about how fine a country it was, with the sweetest people, so a great refuge from all the Covid madness roiling nearly everywhere else. We agreed, though, that Albania would not be near the top of any list of European countries to visit, but this has long been the verdict. Even before it was sealed for 45 years by Communists, almost no one went there.

Smack in the center of Europe, Albania was remote. In 1788, Gibbon wrote, “A country in sight of Italy is less known than the wilds of America.” Exploring it in 1809, 21-year-old Lord Byron congratulated himself for being just the second Englishman to advance “beyond the capital into the interior.”

So enamored with the Land of Eagles, Byron cosplayed as an Albanian warrior in his most famous oil portrait, though with a soft, white hand showing. Writing to his mum, Byron admitted that Ali Pasha, “The Lion of Yannina,” clearly saw him as an overcivilized and pampered pup, “He said he was certain I was a man of birth, because I had small ears, curling hair, and little white hands… He told me to consider him as a father whilst I was in Turkey, and said he looked on me as his son. Indeed, he treated me like a child, sending me almonds and sugared sherbet, fruit and sweetmeats, twenty times a day.”

[Tirana, 4/25/21]

In the 21st century, Albania is very much on the mass tourist itinerary, though most visitors favor its beaches, naturally, over its austere mountains. In Kukes, for example, I got startled second looks from adults even, while several kids couldn’t hide their glee at encountering such an alien.

To be higher is to be more inaccessible, thus safer. In Italy, you have all these hill towns that are walled, with their fields outside, so at night or during an attack, you’re safely walled in, up the hill. Though the term “running for the hills” is attributed to the Johnstown Flood of 1889, it makes sense literally, in countless cases. In 1995, I heard a man in Sapa, Vietnam describe his survival of the Chinese attack in 1979 as, “We just ran into the mountains.”

Many folks have been up high for centuries. Unlike us effeminate or beer bellied lowland wimps, mountain men are seen as more savage and tougher. They’re better warriors, too, as testified by the legendary martial prowess of the Gurkhas, Highland Scots, Rifians, Swiss and Hmongs, etc.

Here’s Norman Lewis on the Hmongs, whom he encountered in Laos in 1950, “It was a long, slow climb up to the village, although the [Hmongs], as they skipped along by our side, seemed in no way to notice the slope, nor their huge burdens.” Though small, they’re strong, with incredible stamina, like other mountain men.

Like them, Hmongs also had a revulsion against alien rules, that bureaucratic jungle us more civilized tolerate in exchange for comforts and goods. Lewis, “They are utterly independent and quite fearless. Their passion for freedom compels them to live in the smallest of villages and, apart from such rare events as the invasion of 1860, they will not tolerate chiefs or leaders […] They are normally pacific, but if compelled to fight are apt to eat the livers of slain enemies.”

There’s a paradox here, of course. If these elevated wildmen were so powerful, they wouldn’t have been chased up dem hills in the first place, where everything is so difficult, from agriculture to just stumbling home (uphill) after a bout of drinking. Plus, there are only so many chicks available in your steeply inclined village, not that the lowland incels are getting any.

Mountain men have generally been historical losers, but history isn’t over. Only pompous goofballs can even think it has an end. There have been many paradigm shifts in six million years.

In any case, mountain men have been the least contaminated by any dominant culture throughout history. Byron, “No nation are so detested and dreaded by their neighbours as the Albanese; the Greeks hardly regard them as Christians, or the Turks as Moslems; and in fact they are a mixture of both, and sometimes neither.” Unlike others who had been better converted or assimilated, Albanians retained more of their stubborn native selves, and this core integrity would show up again, in their emergence from the harshest Communism.

[Gjirokaster, 5/25/21]

In six months in Albania, I barely heard prayer calls, and most times, only indistinctly, from a distance. Almost no women covered their hair, and most men drank, with cheap rakia a favorite, even in the morning. Albania’s Orthodox Archbishop is a Greek.

As for Covid rules, they mostly ignored them. Unmasked, I traveled on packed vans all over the country. In crowded restaurants, I ate grilled meat and drank beer while looking at all the beautiful people walking by.

Fringe populations, then, are less susceptible to prevailing strains, so if the entire world goes mad, like right now, they’re not as hypnotized into looniness. Consider Covid “vaccination.” The most jabbed countries are generally ones with the most byzantine rules, strictly enforced, thus the most civilized, loosely speaking.

As of 1/17/22, the 20 most jabbed nations include, as expected, higher-income, well-organized countries like Singapore, South Korea, Canada, Denmark, Australia, Qatar, United Arab Emirates, Iceland, Malta, Spain and Italy, but also totalitarian Cuba and China, though they’re only using homegrown jabs. Aberrations, thin-walleted Cambodia and Ecuador are also included.

In Germany, I would see a man standing alone at an intersection at 3AM, with no traffic in any direction, waiting for the light to turn green, so he could cross. Most likely, he’s jabbed and boostered. Germany’s Covid “vaccination” rate is 73%, compared to just 37% for Albania, one of the lowest in Europe.

Though the Covid scamdemic is a global assault, it has not hit all populations equally. Primarily a psychological operation, it terrifies the long domesticated, easily cowed or simply foolish into not just wrecking their own lives, but even killing themselves.

As the self-congratulating “civilized” do themselves in, the less correct survive by doing nothing.

[to be continued, of course and unfortunately]

[Klos, 6/8/21]

Covid Feuilleton #10

As published at SubStack, 1/15/22:

[Fier, 5/14/21]

By February of 2021, there weren’t just rumors of certain countries reopening soon, but online whispers the entire world might be locked down presently, thus stranding everyone indefinitely wherever. It wasn’t that farfetched. With hardly any flights in or out of most countries, hundreds of thousands of tourists had already been stuck, resulting in loss of jobs, unpaid mortgages and drained wallets, not to mention separation from family. Millions of third-worlders working abroad also couldn’t go home.

That dream Namibian safari which took so long to save up for suddenly turned into a sustained elopement with lions, hippos and wildebeests. It’s never too late to learn Khoekhoe. Endless summer in an Icelandic village at the end of the roughest road became the longest, darkest winter catching up on Bill Gates, Klaus Schwab and Yuval Noah Harrari.

Though there were repatriation flights arranged by governments, their announcements were usually abrupt, seats were limited and prices often too high. At least no one had to claw and kick compatriots out of the way to get onto a plane, while avoiding being sucker punched in the face by a stern captain.

Vietnamese working illegally in China simply trekked home, if they were close enough to the border. Hundreds of thousands, mostly legal, were stranded in South Korea and Japan, with many also losing their jobs in these Covid-ravaged economies. Out of food, they had to be fed by Buddhist temples.

There’s a 3/28/20 BBC video of two young English women living in a Sydney garage, and three more Brits stuffed into a camper at a Kiwi campsite, with their money quickly running out. A Brit working in China was traveling when Covid erupted, so ended up spending a year and a half in Tonga, a white-sanded paradise which quickly bored her, because no one likes to be stuck anywhere, she stressed.

Even if never taken advantage of, freedom of movement is essential to one’s well being and self-respect. Monotonous months cooped up in an office cubicle is made more bearable by the prospect of two weeks far away, or just weekend drives to nearby towns. As a teenaged worker at McDonald’s in northern Virginia, I’d treat myself to ballgames in Baltimore, an hour away in my used Mustang II. If carless, a grinding Greyhound trip to relatives means freedom. Even before conception, life is movement.

After five weeks in Egypt, I decided to fly to Albania, because it had no Covid-related entry requirements. Most crucially, Americans could stay there for up to a year. With adjacent North Macedonia and Montenegro still wide open, I could run around a bit without too much effort, and should Italy reopen, I could take a ferry to where I had spent the best two years of my life.

Every nation’s history is determined primarily by its geography. Though the Albanians are smack in the middle of Europe, they’re somehow seen as borderline Europeans, or not even European at all, by morons, obviously. Squeezed between Greece and Rome, they were often dismissed as just a bunch of mountainous, barely civilized tribesmen. With their mass conversion to Islam under the Ottomans, they became even more alien. (Keep in mind, though, that 17% of Albanians are still Christian.)

Though they’ve produced two Roman emperors, Diocletian (244-311) and Constantine the Great (272-337), and the founder of modern Egypt, Muhammad Ali (1769-1849), Albanians are still perceived as inferior and even stupid, an absurd judgement, frankly, for during my six months in Albania, I was surrounded by some of the most gracious people I’ve ever met. Gentle and intelligent, they’re simply beautiful. I saw better books sold on Tirana sidewalks than in most American bookstores. There was much that was eye-opening, and that’s why one travels. Nowhere is as expected.

[Sarande, 5/26/21]

In my Tirana building, a man said I shouldn’t hesitate to knock on his door, one floor up, if I ever needed help with anything, and he said this on our third encounter in the hallway, after only one conversation. In Gramsh, a town of less than 10,000, I wasn’t sure where to wait for a van to Korce, so I asked two passersby, in English then Italian. Scrupulous, the second even instructed a third man to look after me on the van itself, and none of them wanted anything from me. Before getting off in mountainous Moglice (pop. 1,000), this last man pointed forward then gave me a thumbs up, with a nod and a smile, to indicate I was fine moving forward. He even said something to the driver.

In early 1991, the Hoxha statue in Tirana’s Skanderbeg Square was finally toppled. In 1994, Paul Theroux landed in Durres to find a country that was still traumatized and beyond destitute, “My first sight, as I walked off the ship, was of a mob of ragged people, half of them beggars, the rest of them tearful relatives of the passengers, all of them howling.” Swarmed by beggars, Theroux finally made it to a bus station that resembled a junkyard. Approached by “a ragged young man,” Theroux assumed he just wanted money, but he was there to point the foreigner to the right bus. Theroux:

I climbed in and sat by the back door.

“It costs fifty leks,” the young man said, and seeing that I was confused, he took out a scrap of red rag that was a fifty-lek note and handed it to me. “You will need this.”

Before the door clapped shut I managed to give the young man some Italian lire in return, perhaps its equivalent […] He had given me, a stranger, what was in Albania a half-day’s pay, knowing that I would never see him again.

Visiting Durres a couple times in 2021, I’m happy to report it’s become a cheerful city again, with a wide seaside promenade where mothers push strollers, kids play and everyone can enjoy the soothing breezes from the Adriatic. Pleasant cafes, restaurants and hotels hug its coastline. The Covid plandemic has certainly put the kibosh on this recovery, however. Hopefully, it’s not reversed, or Greatly Reset.

[Gramsh, 6/29/21]

During Communist days, Albania’s secret police was called Sigurimi, or “Safety,” a nauseatingly sick name for a sinister outfit that terrorized so many Albanians. Arrested by the Safety goons, you could expect to be tortured, if not killed. Even if given a trial, you would have no chance to defend yourself, for its only purpose was to make a spectacle and lesson out of you. You were there to be condemned.

Visiting the former Sigurimi headquarters, now a museum, I was particularly haunted by a photo of the first Albanian female writer, Musine Kokalari. Though born in Turkey and educated in Italy, Kokalari was deeply attached to Gjirokaster, her ancestral city. Kokalari’s first book, published in 1941, was a collection of stories inspired by Gjirokaster folklore, and also its Tosk dialect. I mention this to stress that Kokalari was no internationalist (or globalist), despite her relatively cosmopolitan biography. A nationalist, Kokalari would risk everything for Albania.

Though Kokalari said in 1943 she only wanted to immerse herself in literature, and have nothing to do with politics, she had a change of heart a year later, when she cofounded the Albanian Social Democratic Party. The murder of her two brothers by Communists, and their threat to gain power, forced her off the sideline. Having lived in Italy under Mussolini, she was also anti-Fascist.

Political active for just two years, Kokalari would pay a monstrous price. After Communists gained power in 1946, they put Kokalari on trial as “a saboteur and enemy of the people,” then jailed her for 18 years, under the most barbaric conditions. Prevented from writing, of course, she had to perform back breaking labor day after day. Released, she had to live in tiny, out of the way Rrëshenm where she worked as a street sweeper for 19 years, until her death from untreated cancer.

Although already tortured and humiliated in jail, with her horrific fate sealed, Kokalari’s calm, nearly radiant face in the famous photo betrays an odd combination of strength and innocence, as if she could hardly believe she was being punished so sadistically, in a country she so loved, for loving her country. In the background, her cowed countrymen lurked.

Though individuals squashed by history is the most common plot, some populations are reminded of this constantly, while others are allowed to forget, for years on end. Smug, they laugh, until their house, too, collapses on their children’s heads.

It’s bad enough to be a little guy among giants, Albania is also located at a crucial junction. In the past, it was between Catholics and Orthodox, then Islam and Christianity. Now, it’s between Uncle Sam’s hushed puppies and the Slavic world, though much of the latter has been bribed, cajoled and seduced into Sammy’s pocket.

Fearful of Slavs, particularly Serbs, Albania embraces Uncle Sam unequivocally, so there’s a George W. Bush Street in Tirana, a Bush statue in Fushe-Kruje, a Donald J. Trump Boulevard in Kamez and even a George Soros Street in Gjirokaster. Visiting Obama in 2016, Prime Minister Rama declared, “Albania is a pro-American country [and] a serious NATO partner.” No less affectionate, Obama swooned, “Albania is an extraordinary ally. I wish to thank you for what you have done. Under your leadership, Albania is now a reference point in the Balkans and one of the most responsible actors in the region.”

As many countries have discovered, getting into bed with Uncle Sam is a risky proposition, and that’s before he lost control of most bodily functions.

Albanians don’t deserve another historical nightmare. None of us do, though with Americans, you can’t say they’re blameless. Having served empire and Jews for so long, to the detriment of so many millions, they’ll finally realize what it’s like to be on the gang banged end of such love.

[to be continued, of course and unfortunately]

[Kukes, 5/18/21]

 

Eating Pho in Saigon, At Last

As published at Unz Review and LewRockwell, 8/9/21:





After six months in Albania, it was time to move on.

Céline, “When you stay too long in the same place, things and people go to pot on you, they rot and start stinking for your special benefit.”

Actually, this did not happen to me in Albania. The longer I stayed, the more I loved the place and people, and during my last month, I even discovered an out-of-this-world seafood joint, right on my street, Mine Peza.

For just five bucks at Detari Fish, you can get octopus and mackerel drenched in olive oil, tagliatelle with shrimps or even a tub of clams plus a beer. Freshly caught, all the fish are deftly seasoned.

Saying goodbye to my landlady, I gave her a hug then tapped my heart three times, as if in penance. She chirped, “Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!” That’s her only English, besides “good morning.”

When I was sick with likely Covid in March, I really thought I had killed the cheerful old bird. After coming to my door to deliver a package, she disappeared for about a week. Hearing no sounds in the hallway each day, I felt terrible lying in bed.

Great, now I will always be remembered in this neighborhood as the Chinaman who came all the way from Wuhan to murder Mrs. Berisha! When she showed up again, I babbled my happiness, though she couldn’t understand a word of it.

A week before my departure, Emirates canceled my flight, so I had to book another with KLM. Instead of one layover, now I had two, and my ticket even cost $200 more! Such is traveling during Covid.

Granted, my destination wasn't exactly hot, or it’s hot in all the wrong ways. I imagined many folks were trying to get out, even for good.

The day before my flight, I went for my Covid test at 7AM, to get the result by 1PM. If it came back falsely positive, I could dash to another lab, I reasoned. I also had to make sure the entry rules at my destination hadn’t changed, and there was no new lockdown.

Since Covid started, I had been in South Korea, Serbia, North Macedonia, Lebanon, Egypt, Albania and Montenegro. In all these countries, life was practically normal, with restaurants and cafes all open, and public buses or trains packed.

Only in Lebanon was I subjected to a lockdown, lasting two weeks, but it was so loosely enforced, it barely bothered me. (The Lebanese government has not been in control of much for a while.) During this “lockdown,” I traveled to several villages, and had pizza then coffee at two places around Tyre.

Much of East Asia is experiencing new Covid restrictions, as triggered by the “Delta variant.” In Vietnam, the surge in Covid deaths coincided with the introduction of foreign vaccines, starting this July. Saigon is in the midst of a five-week lockdown.

Two weeks ago, a Saigon friend emailed me a video of Cho Ray Hospital, with Covid patients lying immobile, and there’s even a corpse covered by a reed mat, with just his bony brown feet sticking out.

I’m familiar with that stiff posture (of the still living). Sick, I had to think for maybe an hour before daring to shift positions, and even worse, I could never really sleep. My extreme discomfort was constant for a month, with a two week span truly hellish.

In the video, a male voice narrates, “Oh God, I can’t even find a doctor at this hospital since this morning. They’re all hiding. There’s a dead body lying here since this morning, with no one to remove him to be cremated or be buried.

“Give the old man some oxygen! He’s about to die and there’s no doctor around. He probably won’t make it. All the doctors are hiding somewhere. The doctors don’t even dare to be here. There’s a corpse lying here since this morning. No one's coming, for real. There’s not a shadow of any medical personnel or doctor. Oh God, there’s an old man who’s about to die and there’s no doctor to save him.”

I was also emailed photos of a completely dead Saigon, including Trung Sisters Street in downtown at 6:34PM on July 26th.

Normally, there’s always some traffic on every Saigon street, even at 3AM, and a Saigon day starts at 5AM. In the middle of the night, farm produce is brought to wet markets all over the city, and there’s always a cafe that’s open wherever you are.

In Tirana, I was downing beer and seafood at Detari Fish, among laughing diners, with no social distancing whatsoever. Almost no Albanians wear masks anymore.

Just hours before my flight, I went to my neighborhood café, Lami’s, for the last time. Hearing, again, some rather schlocky Italian pop actually teared me up. Deep down, I’m just a total pussy. Adriano Celentano, “Io non so parlar d’amore / L’emozione non ha voce / E mi manca un po’ il respiro / Se ci sei c’è troppa luce.”

Just before taking the bus to the airport, I had my last Tirana meal at Chinese Garden, mostly to say goodbye to the Albanian waiter.

Like the two young ladies at Lami’s, he worked each day, and hadn’t had a day off in over four months. In fact, he had told me he worked 16 hours a day.

“No way, man! So when do you sleep?!”

“I barely sleep.”

“When do you see your girlfriend?”

“What girlfriend?! I don’t even have friends.”

But it’s OK, he said, for he was saving to buy an old car. “In Albania, they don’t appreciate these classic cars, but I want one. I’ll get one in five years.”

As a child, he had spent a decade in Greece, but he’s happy to be home, “Too many Albanians become criminals overseas, or they have dirty jobs. Yes, I’m a waiter, but my job is clean.”

Chinese Garden has a Chinese cook. In Tirana for five years, he’d work every day for 11 months, then fly home to see his wife and kids for a month. With Covid, airfares have jacked up and there’s a two-week quarantine, so he hasn’t been home in two years. Once, I heard him screaming for about half a minute in the kitchen. It must be terrible, his stress and loneliness.

As I walked out of the restaurant with my luggage, the waiter said, “Good luck, sir.”

“Maybe they’ll kill me,” I joked.

My first stop was Rome. With more than nine hours at Fiumicino, I lay on the floor in an empty section of Terminal 3, to await my 6:10AM flight. Slipping briefly into sleep, I heard footsteps all around me, but there was no one.

During boarding for Amsterdam, six Latin American women and an African nun cut into line, but no one said anything. As the nun tried to inch ahead of me, I stood my ground. I didn’t need that nonsense.

If you had to be trapped inside one airport until death, Schiphol wouldn’t be a bad choice. Except for the masks, it was as bustling, civilized and well-appointed as ever. Flying from there, I still had 11 more hours in the air.

Though masks were mandatory on all three planes of my long trip, we took them off each time food or drinks were served, so it was a farce, really. At each airport, almost no social distancing was observed.

So I’ve arrived at my new base, where I will be for at least a month. I went from summer to winter, but it’s mild here. Today’s low is 44 Fahrenheit, and the high is 59.

Yesterday in Saigon, I had an excellent bowl of pho, just about every Vietnamese’ favorite comfort food. Walking in, I was greeted by a colored man, then seated and served by a black waiter. Looking towards the kitchen, I spotted a masked man who was almost certainly Vietnamese. He was rolling sushi, though.

Just to make sure, I asked my waiter, “Are your cooks Vietnamese?”

“Yes,” and he pointed to the sushi chef, so I walked over to introduce myself.

I was living in Vietnam, I said, but because of Covid, I have been locked out for a year and a half. I’ve been all over. I have just arrived in Cape Town.

“You must have a bowl of pho then,” he smiled.

“I already ordered that.”

“I’ll make it special!”

Returning to my table, I looked out at the handsome, three-story Hoërskool Jan van Riebeeck, with its steep roof, dignified gables and rows of stately windows. Behind it rose the magnificent Table Mountain, with a tiny cable car, just a red speck, really, barely moving towards its top.

When my pho arrived, it, too, was almost too much. I was given a second bowl with fatty broth, brisket and a soup bone, complete with marrow. With its hoisin sauce, sriracha sauce and bean sprouts, this was definitely Saigon pho, which I find much better than anything I’ve had in Hanoi, pho’s birthplace.

Taking a break, the chef/owner came over to my table for a chat.

Fifty-six-years-old, he has been in South Africa for 24 years, with eight years in Germany before that. He also had a brief spell in New York City. His mother is still in Vietnam, so you can be sure he’s sending her money, but he hasn’t returned home in more than a decade, and no, he doesn’t miss Vietnam at all.

One of his sons went to an English school, while the other attended a German one. South African born, they can hardly speak Vietnamese.

Before Covid, he had a couple of Vietnamese kitchen employees, but they have gone home, so South Africans had to replace them. Because of the pandemic, his income has been reduced by more than half. He thinks this dire situation will last three or four more years.

This is said to be Africa’s most beautiful and cosmopolitan city. I believe it. Walking for two miles towards downtown, I pass all sorts of trendy restaurants, bars and cafes, with a rather astounding selection of international cuisines, Portuguese, Ethiopian, Mozambican, Cuban, Thai, Italian and, of course, Indian and Chinese, which are everywhere.

At Sweeties Beer Hall on Long Street, I met a German from Cologne, here to study law. “I taught for five months in Leipzig,” I told him. I talked to the brother of novelist Dominique Botha. Since he’s a foodie, we compared cheese steaks to banh mi, and discussed the art of rinsing rice.

I chattered with a South African who’s about to emigrate to the UK with his British wife. (When I admitted to her I had spent nine months in Norwich, she broke out laughing, as expected.) The recent riots were the final straw. When he told his wife they should leave, she packed in record time.

I also talked for a long time with his sister. In England for 11 years, the 34-year-old was only back in Cape Town to take care of her ill father. In December, she will return to London, where she’s a pastry chef.

We shared an appreciation for Max Normal, the legendary Cape Town band. She hung out with them during her wild youth. As if to prove this, she showed me her colorfully tattooed forearms. Back then, she also got lots of attention as a graffiti artist. Max Normal would become internationally famous as Die Antwoord.

Half British and half Norwegian, she realized she was a misfit from the time she was eight, she said, and she didn’t feel at home in England either.

“But you are African!” I protested. “Many white South Africans have been here for centuries.”

“Maybe we shouldn’t be here. We invaded someone else’s land.”

“Everyone has invaded other people’s land. Blacks have, too, and Vietnamese… If whites don’t belong in Africa, what about whites in America?”

“They’re probably even worse.”

“I don’t know. I don’t think you should feel ashamed of being a white South African. There’s a very distinctive culture here. Already, I can see it in the architecture, and look at all the writers you’ve produced,” as in Coetzee, Gordimer, Breytenbach and Brink, etc. “There’s a lot to be proud of.”

It won’t matter much, however, if you’re being murdered, dispossessed or chased out, with your history erased.

First of, this is an extremely violent country, with nearly all of the crimes, surprise, surprise, committed by blacks, just like in, well, American cities.

In her harrowing Into the Cannibal’s Pot, Cape Town native Ilana Mercer relates:

Ordinarily, case studies do not a rule make, but you’d be hard pressed to find a family in democratic South Africa whose members have not been brutalized. The travails of this writer’s extended family are fairly typical. They tell of the lives of good people ruined by rubbish: A sister’s partner suffering permanent neurological damage after being brutally assaulted by five Africans; a brother burglarized and beaten in his suburban fortress at two in the morning by an African gang (his wife and infant son were miraculously spared); a father whose neighbor was shot point-blank in front of his little girls as he exited his car to open the garage gates; a spouse, two of whose colleagues were murdered (one shot by African taxi drivers in broad daylight, left to bleed to death on the pavement near his girlfriend’s place), and whose cousin and uncle were hijacked, aunt raped and beaten within an inch of her life. Sean Mercer, Ph.D., found out recently that a fondly remembered professor at his alma mater had been beaten to death with an umbrella by an angry African student.

OK, so Mercer is a paleolibertarian and Trump fan, thus a “right winger,” but here’s a similar account from liberal Henry Trotter, an American professor at the University of Cape Town, and a long-time resident here:

[…] no one who lives in Cape Town has been untouched by some shocking or banal act of personal violation. Almost everyone has a horror story.

In my family alone, my sister-in-law was tied up and held at gunpoint while criminals robbed her house. My brother-in-law was shot in the stomach while sitting in his car in front of his house. Another brother-in-law lost all of his worldly possessions to a gang of thieves who had been targeting his neighborhood. My wife had her purse snatched off her shoulder while riding the train. And I had my cellphone grabbed out of my hand while walking down the street.

But this is nothing. We’ve been quite fortunate. We personally know—as does every Capetonian—people who have been raped, murdered, stabbed, or kidnapped. Parents who have lost children to stray bullets shot from a teenage gangster’s gun. Mothers who have had their newborns snatched from their arms while sleeping at the maternity ward.

And many of us know perpetrators of these terrible acts. Indeed, we often know them as our kin and loved ones.

The normalcy of all of this means that we live in a constant state of vigilance and…well…fear.

Much of this barbarity defies belief. Mercer, “Roughly ten percent of all rapes in the country—52,425 a year—are committed against children under three years of age.” Many South African men, you see, believe that raping an infant will cure them of AIDS.

As for murder, Mercer provides a useful perspective, “Between April 2004 and March 2005, 18,793 people were murdered in South Africa (population 43 million). In comparison, the ‘high-crime’ United States (population 299,398,00016) suffered 16,740 murders.” With nearly seven times more people, the US has less murders than South Africa!

The main reason for this is its lower percentage of blacks, one might deduct. Another is its conviction rate is much higher than South Africa’s abysmal 8%, though if George Soros has his way, America will soon catch up.

Most South African murderers, then, are free to kill again and again, and with whites politically powerless and practically disarmed, black thugs can zero in on them. Outside South Africa, liberal whites are either indifferent to this butchery, or they think it’s justified, as payback for past injustice, but their turn, too, will come.

Sneeringly smug in their suburbs, these are the righteous hypocrites who support Black Lives Matter and defunding the police, but can only count their black acquaintances with one hand, if that. They have never sat in a black bar or restaurant, never entered a black home. To make up for their aversion to blacks, they defend blacks even more fiercely, but from a thousand miles away.

Those who live near many blacks, however, must come up with sane solutions to safeguard their homes and ensure that their kids are educated in a safe and non disruptive environment. To avoid assaults, they may have to adjust their routines or impose their own curfew.

One morning, I took a random bus, thus ended up in upscale Sea Point, but I could easily have been dumped into a township. Maybe next time…

Along the way, I saw many fine houses behind tall walls topped by spikes, barbed wires or, most pleasing aesthetically, electric fencing. Everywhere, there were warning signs posted by security services, with Avenue Response Team the most prevalent. In my neighborhood, Gardens, and downtown, I had already seen plenty of private security guards on sidewalks.

In Albania, there were none of these extreme security measures, needless to say, but I have spent decades in Philadelphia, plus time in Camden, Detroit, Gary and Jackson, etc., so this wasn’t a shock.

With the state unable to provide adequate security, many South Africans have to turn their homes, schools and offices into fortresses, and to pay private cops to maintain peace in their neighborhoods. Should the state fail, however, no South African oasis will be safe.

In Sea Point, I ran into two middle-aged white American expatriates, painting on the sidewalk. One, Michael Durst, has a piece that’s advertised online:

In honor of a great man, The Gift of Love is an inspirational painting with a message of brotherhood and love.

This work, by artist, Dr. Michael Durst, shows Nelson Mandela being crowned with a halo of love by Afra, the first Black Ascended Master.

This highly emotional piece displays the respect and honoring of a great man, who has brought love and peace to people the world over.

In South Africa for more than two decades, they’re here to stay. Their grown children, though, have returned to North America.

I also met a Chinese couple who had a small eatery, Hakka, plus four Airbnb rooms. She was born in South Africa. He arrived in 1995. They had emigrated to Australia, but after eight years, had returned to Cape Town, for they loved it so much.

The husband believes South Africa actually has a better future than China, for it has a younger, more ready to work population. With relatively few people, it has lots of resources. Also, when war breaks out between the US and China, South Africa will be distant from that conflagration, so will benefit from the destruction of both societies.

Hakka doesn’t serve pork, for most of its customers are Jews. On a table, there’s this piece of cloth with a long text that begins, “Manna. This miraculous food fell from the skies every morning for the forty years we wandered through the desert after God took us out of Egypt.” The Chinese couple’s two lovely kids attend a Jewish school. Well-mannered, they made sure to greet me as they walked by.

After Hakka, I eased into the Corner Bar, for I could see that it was a dive where I would fit right in. A beefy black man greeted me with a fist bump. Later, he said, “You look like a kung fu master!”

“No man, I’d get killed within the first second!”

I told a white man in his 60’s I was glad there was no lockdown in South Africa, “We’re all sitting here drinking beer. There’s no social distancing, and no problems. This is normal, man. This is how it should be.”

“But Covid is real.”

“I know, but don’t overreact! There are no needs for lockdowns.”

“I’m not sure about that. Covid is real enough. I lost my wife in January. We were married for 44 years.”

“Oh.”

“They had put her on a ventilator, and I also got sick. I was in hospital for eight days.”

Wandering down Main Road, I noticed all these informal vans picking up passengers. Since they were headed towards downtown, roughly, I decided to hop onto one. Inside, everyone was black.

I saw people paying by passing bills to those in front of them, so I did the same. “It’s my first time,” I said to the lady next to me.

“There’s a first time for everything,” she cheerfully replied.

As we entered downtown, she asked me, “What stop do you want to get off at?” This lovely lady with such a gentle voice wanted to make sure I knew where I was going.

Black, white, colored, Asian or foreign, everyone I’ve encountered in Cape Town has been extremely pleasant, but that’s not so unusual, really, until something horrible happens, of course, as authored by God, beast or, most likely, man, especially in a place like South Africa.

.

.

.

.

.

[last Tirana photo]


.

.

$5 at Detari Fish, also on Mine Peza. Eat here when you're in Tirana!

Albania is wide open. Almost no one wears a mask. Cafes, restaurants and buses are full. There is no Covid hysteria whatsoever. Life is normal here!


.

.

$4 combo at Taverna King Pils on Mine Peza. This is my last full day in Albania. I fly out at 7PM tomorrow. At 7AM this morning, I'll go do my Covid test.


.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

Although vaccinated, US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin stepped off the plane in Manila wearing a mask and a plastic face shield! Seeing this absurdity, I decided to take some photos of maskless people in Tirana. Again, Albania is the freest and sanest country right now.


.

.

Grandma's Bread for 60 cents at Lami's, my neighborhood cafe. In Albania, there's also Grandpa's Fried Dough.


.

When you surf English-language sites from Albania,

these are the kinds of ads you get:

On July 20th, I bought a one-way ticket to my new destination, to fly out on August 4th. On July 24th, I booked a cheap apartment for a month, for a lot less than what I would pay in Philly, for example. On July 27th, I booked a taxi from the airport. Everything was lined up, so I was ready to go. On the afternoon of August 2nd, I would take my Covid test, to get the result the next morning.

Yesterday, July 28th, the airline suddenly canceled my flight! Immediately, I had to book another flight with a different company, to arrive on the same day, but 10 hours later. There are also two layovers instead of one, and this ticket costs me nearly $200 more. I also had to file for a refund from the first airline, Emirates.

That's traveling during Covid for you. Plus, my destination is not exactly hot right now. I imagine many people have canceled their flights to avoid going there.


.

.

Very tasty tagliatelle with four large shrimps, plus some tiny ones, for just $5 at Detari Fish on Mine Peza, near where I'm staying. There's no menu of any kind, much less an English one. It's attached to a fish market, so you just choose your very fresh seafood, then ask for risotto, makarona [spaghetti] or bukë [bread], if so desired. One of the workers does speak some English. This morning, I had a large bowl of clams in an excellent broth for $4!


.