I started another blog entry today on soccer, wrote way too much and got bored... maybe ill firm it up tomorrow.
So I was out tonight with some friends, walked by a real estate agency with a bunch of postings for rent and sale. I notcied they hadn't changed since I walked past a couple of weeks ago. So I thought to myself, well, besides foreigners, who's looking for apartments that much. Then it dawned on me that, with at least the last generation, everybody in Albania owns some piece of land. I can't beleive that I never thought of this before, especially being a bit of a history buff. You always here about these Russian oligarchs who, smartly you gotta say, bought up all this land and enterprises after the fall of communism, and are now kabillionaires. Fine great, but for some reason it never occurred to me that because the in the transition form the-state-owns-everything communism to the-state-owns-practically-nothing democracy everyone got a free house. Which you got to say is an incredibly interesting concept. Considering the scope and size of the communist Eastern European states that kind of land transfer is unprecedented. Every citizen, every farmer, every son of a former landless serf all of a sudden got his forty acres so to speak(well probably way less). No mortgages though. No rent. Overnight you go from owning nothing to having an even share of the country. More over if your piece of land happens to be prime real estate than ka-ching, they build an apartment, and you're nouveau riche. 50 years of communism and the slate gets wiped clean and the country hits the reset button.
Of course the people who get screwed over are the former landowners who had more than their share prior to communism, but, well, they were probably jerk landlords to begin with so who cares about them. lol
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