Who want's to be an Albanian Millionaire...

So for some reason every Albanian makes the same joke when the find out I moved to Albania voluntarily. "Oh you came here for work? Ok gimme your Passport and I'll go back to Canada..." ha ha. Never heard that.

So one time I was joking around with a friend of mine and said "fine, gimme a million leke ($10,000) and its yours." Granted I think he knew I was joking but he said fine, done lets go to the bank machine (There's bank machines everywhere now but there was one that I knew of in all Albania six years ago.) I was a little surprised that he had that kind of money sitting around, until I realized he was talking in "old lek." Even though he'd served a mission in England, and we were having the conversation in English, he's a very bright worldy business-type guy he still thinks like every other Albanian in "old lek." To get old lek you just add a zero so he thought I meant 1000 dollars. Despite the fact that it's almost been fifty years since they revalued the Lek to keep it pegged with the Soviet Ruble, which had been revalued by the USSR and had dropped a zero from it's own currency, they still like to about everything by adding an extra zero to the price. So a bottle of pop (say one dollar) becomes 1000 leke. And EVERYBODY does this! Whenever I ask someone why they do this they say either because our parents did it, or because Albanians want to feel like they have more money then they actually do. You get used to it, especially when you know approximately what something is going to cost, but it's extremely frustrating when someones throwing numbers around,(because knowing that I'm foreign they'll usually quote both prices when I look confused,) about something your not to sure about.

Sample conversation.

Andrew - How much is this pot?

Albanian - 18000, I mean 1800 ( slighty confused look on Andrew's face as he's trying to do the math in my head to dollars. It doesn't help that these two numbers sound a lot alike. If I'm super lucky [sarcasm] he'll then say)

Albanian - 18 dollare (This never really helps because I'm still thinking about what he just said and all three numbers sound very similar.)

At this point he'll usually get frustrated when I don't understand right away and start calling to his nephew who speaks a little english.

At this point I'm feeling more comfortable with my Albanian but during the first few days when I was renting an apartment and buying a whole bunch of stuff i was severely doubting my language skills.

Funny side bar anecdote. So I wen't to the big Tirana market to buy some stuff for the apartment. Silly me, I forgot that everything shuts down at 2:00pm for the siesta nap. The first picture is the market at like 2:05pm (ghost town) on a wenesday afternoon. The next is the same market at 12:30pm the next day.