A BUNNY & A BARISTA

The red line shows the route takebn by an Italian soldier crossing

Albania in 1941 during Mussolini's invasion of Greece

Having been successively occupied by The Ottomans (for several centuries), the Italians  and then the Germans, it is not at all surprising that the traditionally hospitable Albanians became somewhat suspicious of foreigners by the end of the Second World War. This xenophobia , which was exploited by Albania's dictator Enver Hoxha, led to Albania adopting an isolationist approach rivalled only by countries like Mongolia (until recently) and North Korea (still today). The following is a brief introduction to Adam Yamey's new book Albania on my Mind. It includes quotes from the book.

 When I became a dentist in 1982, the idea of ever treating a patient from Albania would have seemed almost as unlikely as meeting someone from Mongolia. Both were places that hardly anyone visited from the West, and from which visitors to the West were few and far between. Well, 30 years later, everything has changed. Almost daily I treat Mongolians and Albanians (both from Albania itself and also from Kosovo). Whilst I have never set foot in Mongolia, I have visited Albania.

I visited the country in 1984 when it was even more isolated from the rest of the world than North Korea is today. In those days, Albania was firmly under the control of Enver Hoxha, a dictator who counted Josef Stalin as his friend and inspirer.

Occasionally, when chatting to my patients from Albania (in English), I relate curious incidents that I recall from my short, but illuminating visit to Hoxha’s heavily guarded stronghold. Some of my audience are too young to remember life under the dictatorship, but those who are old enough say that what I relate is only too painfully true. One gentleman, aged about 45 and brought up in Albania, said after hearing one or two of my anecdotes:

“You must write these things down. No one believes me when I tell about how terrible it was living in Albania in those times, but they will believe you, an observer from the outside world.”

And, that is exactly what I’ve done in my book Albania on my Mind.

My book is divided into two main sections. The first deals with how I became obsessed with Albania, and the second contains a collection of memories of the trip I made there in 1984.

My interest in the country began when I used to spend,

 “…much of my spare time during my mid-teens haunting second-hand bookshops.

In the second half of the 1960s, Hampstead Village, which was in easy walking distance of my family home, had at least 5 such establishments. My favourite store… was run by a scholarly old man. He sat reading in his untidy shop, surrounded by books, which were scattered disorderly on every available surface including the floor. Every now and then, he used to burst out laughing and would then read aloud, often in Latin, to whoever was in his shop. …I found and bought a number of old world atlases in his shop. Most of them were published between the two World Wars. I used to spend hours leafing through them, admiring their beautifully drawn maps. … One day, whilst examining one of my atlases, I saw a country, which I had not noticed before. It was Albania.”

My curiosity about Albania was aroused. I needed to know more about this place, about which so little information was available in the 1960s. Even today, not many people know much about it.

As the years passed, I made numerous trips to places in the Balkans from where I could catch a glimpse of the country which was beginning to tantalise me. On one trip, I took a bus over the Cakor Pass which links Kosovo with Montenegro. It traverses the mountains shared by these places and Albania. When the bus stopped at the top of the pass,

“…a grubby little boy approached me. He said something to me in a language, which I did not recognise as being Serbo-Croat. It was probably Albanian. Somehow, he made it clear to me that he wanted foreign coins. I thought that he was either a beggar, or more likely, just a curious youngster pleased to have chanced upon a foreigner. I gave him a few British coins, and then he rummaged around in his pocket.  After a moment, he handed me a few Yugoslav Dinar coins, and left. He was no beggar, after all, but simply a young fellow with a well-developed sense of fairness.”

Although it was impossible to speak with Albanians in Albania - contact between them and foreigners was strictly discouraged by the authorities - I did manage to discover how friendly they are when I stayed in Kosovo, the part of Serbia which has an enormous Albanian population. When I disembarked at the bus station in the Kosovan town of Prizren sometime in the 1970s,

“…I was immediately surrounded by people, mostly young men. Everyone wanted to know my name, rather than my nationality or where I had come from. When I said it was ‘Adam’, they then asked me whether I was a Moslem. The answer did not seem to matter to them; they were just pleased to meet a stranger.”

Contrast this with what happened within 12 hours of my arrival in Albania in 1984:

“After lunch, the Australian, who was travelling with us, called me aside, looking shocked.  He told me that when he was in the hotel’s lift, an Albanian couple began to strike up a conversation with him, but stopped abruptly mid-sentence. It was, he felt, as if they were keen to speak to an outsider, but became scared of the consequences of being caught doing so. Maybe, they had been worried, not without reason, that the lift might have been fitted with a hidden microphone.”

In fact, whenever anyone wanted to try to talk to us in the country, they were warned against doing so by others standing nearby. Even our Albanian guides were wary of what they said to us. We, the foreign tourists, were regarded not only as guests (the guest is held sacred by traditional Albanians), but also as potentially dangerous intruders from the hostile world beyond Albania’s hermetically sealed borders. They were constantly keeping an eye on each other as well as us.

My trip to Albania was a truly remarkable experience. I am certain,

“…that the Albanians did not regard us as being simple tourists, but rather as potential messengers. We were being shown the country with a view, so our hosts hoped, to providing us with information that we could use to broadcast to the world how well Albania was progressing along the isolationist path it had chosen to take.”

I am not sure that the message we took home was quite what the Albanians had hoped. We were taken around a factory, of which our hosts were very proud. It purported to make precision instruments, but, 

“… the sliding (Vernier) calliper, which had been made in the factory… was a crude object, whose jaw slid jerkily rather than smoothly. The markings were badly scored and looked a little irregular.” ‘Precision’ it was not!

And, although the Albanian-built tractor on display at an exhibition of Albanian industrial products in Tirana,

“… differed in design from the Chinese tractors that we had seen on our travels, we had not seen even one of these home-made machines anywhere outside the exhibition.”

Nor, could I find outside the exhibition any samples of the

“…yellow plastic bunny rabbit holding a rifle in exactly the same pose as the soldier, who had watched our arrival at the Albanian frontier.”

I would have loved to have bought one of these to protect my garden.

It is easy to criticise, but one must not forget to praise. Even if I was unable to meet many Albanians on the tour I made in 1984, I cannot fault our hosts on the care that they took to make sure that we were comfortable and well-fed. Although their main interest appeared to be to ply us with propaganda and to show us what they wanted us to see, they showed us a great cross-section of their beautiful country.

I have not revisited Albania since 1984, but would like to do so. Never in my wildest dreams in my younger days did I imagine that I would now be able to slip out of my surgery, enter a neighbourhood café, and then order a cappuccino from an Albanian barista. And, the smile of gratitude, which I receive when I thank him by saying ‘faleminderit’ and shout ‘mir u pafshim’ when I leave, melts my heart. Even as I write this piece, I realise that although many years have passed, I still have Albania on my mind.

ALBANIA ON MY MIND is available in  Kindle on Amazon web-sites

&

in paperback by clicking HERE

AIRLINES

I first visited Bangalore in southern India in January 1994. Much of the first week of my stay was taken up with preparations for the very colourful and quite complicated Hindu wedding ceremony, in which I was to play a starring role. After the three days of proceedings were over, my wife and I spent a fortnight away from the city on our honeymoon, visiting Ootacamund and then Kerala. When we returned from this enjoyable trip, my first in India, we spent a few weeks in Bangalore, during which I was introduced to some of its attractions.

The Bangalore Club was one of these. In the days when the British controlled India, this was known as the ‘Bangalore United Services Club’ and its members were selected from the higher ranks of the armed forces. Today, it is still considered to be highly distinguished amongst the many social clubs of India, and its members, including myself, are very much aware of being considered by others, maybe without much justification, as being privileged people. In any case, the Club is located in its own delightful park-like grounds, an oasis in the heart of the ever increasing mayhem of everyday life in the city.

One of the Club’s two main entrances is located on Lavelle Road, which was named after Michael Lavelle who made his fortune in the 1870s by selling his mining concession in the Kolar Gold Fields. In 1994, most of the buildings along Lavelle Road were old bungalows, private residences set well back from the leafy street and surrounded by luxuriant gardens. Today, few of these remain, many of them having been replaced by modern blocks conceived by architects who appear to have little or no aesthetic sense. The road winds northwards from the Club until it reaches the grounds of St Mark’s Church, an elegant structure containing many memorials to Britons who fell during some of the many military campaigns, which they undertook to control their unruly subjects, such as, for example, the suppression of the Mopla Rebellion in Malabar in 1921. Before Lavelle Road reaches this point, it meets the eastern end of Madras Bank Road. In 1994, the southern corner plot where the two roads met was occupied by the open air café of the Airlines Hotel (‘Airlines’).

I don’t know exactly when Airlines first opened, but my wife, who lived as a small child in Bangalore the middle of the 1950s, has vague recollections of visiting it then. Other people, with whom I have spoken, feel that it first opened later, in the early 1960s. The exact date is unimportant, but it was during an era when air travel was considered new and exciting, and was definitely something that the vast majority of Indians would have never even dreamt of experiencing. The closest that even most relatively affluent Indians would ever get to flying was by driving out to an airport, and having a tea or coffee at its café. My wife remembers this is as being one of the treats she enjoyed during her schooldays in Calcutta, where her family moved to in 1958 from Bangalore. So, ‘Airlines’ - a name that suggested exoticism, modernity, and the latest mode of transport - was a clever choice for a new establishment opening in the late 1950s or the early 1960s. Furthermore, it had a drive-in, just like something that  Bangaloreans would only have seen in American films. One could, and still can, sit in the car park and have refreshments served on a stainless steel tray that clips on to the window of the car door.

Squirrels mating high above Airlines Café

My wife introduced me to Airlines for several reasons. Firstly, it is full of good memories of her childhood. It was a place that her parents visited as a treat. Secondly, it is a place that one can sit peacefully in the open-air, shaded from the sun by umbrellas of fern-like foliage growing from the branches of the huge trees that surround the open-air café. Thirdly, the coffee served there is good. Waiters dressed in stained white uniforms deliver large glasses of good quality milky south Indian filter coffee from the main building of the hotel. The coffee at Airlines may not be the best available in a city overflowing with coffee outlets, but it is way above average, and few places can compete with the café’s leafy ambience.

A few years ago, long after my first visit to Bangalore, we arrived at Airlines and were shocked to see that it had shrunk in size. No longer did the open-air café extend as far as Lavelle Road. A high, unadorned, breezeblock wall had bisected not only the open air section of Airlines, but also the main building of the hotel. The eastern half the building still functioned, but its western half had been demolished. This section of the hotel ended abruptly at the new wall.  Beyond this wall, which made me recall the Berlin Wall that fell more or less the same time as this one was erected, there was a building site. Today, this is occupied by another tasteless modern office block.

The land, on which Airlines stands, is leased from a waqf, a charitable trust maintained by Muslims. When the trust needed to realise more cash, it reclaimed some of the land and built the more profitable office block on it. The division of Airlines resulted. Today, if one sits with one’s back to the ugly wall, the café looks unchanged. In its reduced form it is now bounded at each end by huge banyan trees. 

One of these, the banyan nearest the new wall, grows next to an area where glasses and plates are rinsed before being returned to the indoor kitchen across the car park. A basin with one tap, used for handwashing, is precariously attached to the trunk of this tree. The dangling tendrils of the banyan at the other end of the café gently caress the roof of a dilapidated hut in which fresh jilebis are fried in ghee at certain times of the day. Other equally dilapidated huts, half hidden by unruly vegetation, line the the café along its edge closest to Madras Bank Road. These buildings, which look as if they are about to collapse are used to prepare treats such as delicious fruit juices freshly prepared from pineapples, apples, mosambis, and whatever else is available that day. Although these huts look as though they cannot possibly be hygienic, I have never suffered any problems after drinking juices prepared in them.

The careful observer will notice a children’s slide hidden amongst the jungle growing alongside these huts. This is all that remains of the children’s playground that was demolished when the ‘wall’ went up. Today there is a new playground located near to the main entrance of the grounds of the hotel.

A small humped footbridge leads from the car park across a dried up gully into the café, passing below a faded metal sign on which the word ‘Tivoli’ can just be discerned. Is this a reference to the well-known identically named pleasure park in Copenhagen? If so, the resemblance ends there. Until recently, when a layer of cement was laid down, the floor of the open-air café was bare earth. Uneven, it was difficult to locate the four legs of the plastic chairs and the white marble-topped tables so that they did not wobble continuously, and in the rainy season it was muddy as well. The concrete is equally uneven, but will probably be less messy during the monsoon rains.

Drinking coffee can make one need to visit the toilet. At Airlines, this is an interesting experience. The lavatories are located within the main building of the hotel, a single storied structure, now dissected by the wall erected by the waqf.  To reach them, it is necessary to walk through the indoor café.  At any time of the day, however bright the sun may be, this must be one of the gloomiest places in Bangalore. At first, you will see nothing. When your pupils dilate sufficiently, and your eyes have adapted, you will notice that the long rectangular hall is filled with tables at which people, mostly men, are sitting nursing coffees or eating idlis and dosas. Its grimy walls and ceiling look as if they have remained untouched since the day that the first customer was served in here.  The door leading to the toilets is at the end of this dingy room. Even the extremely basic men’s toilet seems more cheerful than the indoor café.

A stranger to Bangalore might take one quick glimpse at the ancient yellow and blue sign at the entrance to the Airline’s compound, and walk on in search of somewhere that looked more salubrious to take refreshment. And, as I have already mentioned, there is no shortage of these in the city. UB City, the outrageously swanky mall, is not far away, nor is the smart Café Coffee Day opposite Cubbon Park. And, on MG Road, there are a number of coffee joints that make Airlines seem like a poor relative in comparison. Yet, Airlines is frequently overflowing with customers.

At weekends, only the courageous would consider visiting the drive-in. The car park is filled with cars packed so closely that the waiters can barely squeeze between them to deliver their offerings. You may easily hunt in vain for an empty table under the trees. From early morning to late in the evening Airlines is often seething with customers. The place is not much cheaper than other fancier, trendier places. So, it is not parsimony that attracts people there. It is not filled with people, like my wife, who remember it nostalgically. Many of the customers enjoying their beverages and eating vegetarian dishes are young. Many off them look like school kids or college students. Most of them are equipped with the latest mobile telephones and dressed in stylish casual clothes.

I am often tempted to think of Bangalore as being a yuppie city, where only the newest is acceptable, and the old is rejected as is the case with so many of the city’s older buildings.  The Airlines Hotel, decrepit as it undoubtedly is, makes me resist the temptation, and gives me some hopes for a place, which I love, and which often seems determined to self-destruct.