Day 5 First official program day

Our first breakfast together in glorious Albania.

 Today marked the first official day of the AAUS program through the Albania Center for Marine Research here in Saranda, Albania.  Every morning the students all meet in the courtyard of our housing for breakfast, provided by Alma, it is ever changing and delicious. 

Our beautiful and always cheerful host Alma.

After breakfast Derek, Chris, Lee and Michael show up and we have a daily short briefing, language lesson, knot tying instruction, and some team building exercises. We learned how to tie a bowline (pronounced bow-lin) knot, and a dragon bowline, which is a bad joke.  Our Albanian for the day was I’m sorry: me fal.  We then grabbed swimsuits and goggles and headed into town to the waterfront beach.  When Albania had Olympic swimmers an Olympic pool sized area was built with blocks and such right on the shoreline in town.  Today it is a popular swimming area for the local children and serves as our swim test pool. 

The swim test area in the ocean.

The program has three skills to achieve, 25 meters on a single breath, 400 meters in 12 minutes and a 10 minute water tread. Though we attempted the skills today, they must be achieved successfully by the end of the program.  The single breath swim was the first skill and I missed it shortly on my first attempt, I tried three times and called it a day.  I do have a partner to retest with later though.  We all completed the rest of our skills crowded around by many local boys who were very curious, cheering, and trying to trade goggle with us.  Michael let one little boy probably around 6, swimming in his whitey tidies, to take some pictures with his camera. Not only was it the cutest thing ever the kid has a really good eye.  On our return home from swim tests we picnicked on crepes on the stairs right off the beach, rounded out with fruit, cookies and chips from the market.  We then went to the farmers market to get fruits and vegetables for our lunches.  So much great stuff, all fresh and in season.  Everyone was happy to give you samples, often no matter how polite you tried to be and refuse you ended up eating an apricot, or little cucumber. 

Farmers market offerings.

After the market we headed up the street to the market for the rest of our supplies.  I’m gad we had experienced people with us to help with the meat and cheese counter and to steer us away from certain items. After shopping was finished and we settled in back at home we had our first lectures.  Today we focused on the history of AAUS, and the history of the knowledge of decompression illness leading to prevention and treatment, as well as recompression history. After lecture we headed in to town for dinner at the Eagle’s something, what that something is can be of debate, possible claw or leg.  Along the way we ran into an Albanian family that people from the program knew with their son and his band from the American south, Sunny Farlund. (So I thought they said, I can’t find them online.) When we arrived at the restaurant as usual Derek, Howard, Lee and the rest of us by association were warmly remembered and heartily welcomed. The food was delicious, group salads with many tomatoes, cucumbers, and onions with a light vinaigrette, tzatziki, delicious melted cheese, bread, then your main course.  All that eating leads to after dinner wandering on the waterfront and eventual gelato eating, followed by a good nights sleep.