People & Places Part Two: Auto Issues

No pictures in this post -- sorry! But I think I fixed the pictures in the previous post AND I promise lots of pictures in the next!

As will become apparent in the next post, last week I went to two towns to do presentations to local government officials. The first trip, on Tuesday, was to Krujë, a small mountain town just northwest of Tirana – no more than 40km (about 25 miles) away.

My colleagues picked me up about 8AM in what looked like a new red Peugeot, maybe a 2012 or 2013 model, and we headed out of town.

Or we inched our way out of town.

The traffic was very heavy on the street that led to the highway we would take to Krujë – partly because K-12 schools had just started that week and parents were driving their kids to schools and partly because, well, the traffic in Tirana can just be heavy.

General access to automobiles in Albania is a fairly new phenomenon. During communist rule, the only people with cars were government officials, but with democracy came the freedom to own a car, and lots and lots of people have embraced that freedom with fervor.

As we were sitting in traffic, I started looking out the window at the signs – this is something I learned from my dad – looking at signs and pronouncing the words on them. It is a great way to teach children how to read or at least recognize what symbols are.

Anyway, while I didn’t pronounce the words out loud I did start to notice certain words appeared again and again. One was “qera,” which means “rent” or “for rent,” one was "shitet," which means “sell” or “for sell,” and another was “lavazh.” It is “lavazh” that will be one of the focuses of my musings here about the car culture in Albania.

Here A Lavazh, There a Lavazh, Just about Everywhere a Lavazh

The “for sell” and “for rent” signs were rather easy to decipher as they mostly appeared in empty store fronts or on the backs of parked cars, but “lavazh” was a mystery to me.

It seemed like every time we came to a standstill, I’d spy a “lavazh” sign – some were handmade, some were printed, some had women in bathing suits on them – and they all seemed to be near nothing I could recognize – except when I saw them on gasoline station signs, but then I still couldn’t figure out what the word referred to.

So I asked my colleague what the word meant: “Carwash” was the answer.

Of course! Carwash! With the proliferation of cars came a proliferation of carwashes. And I do mean proliferation – I doubt I am exaggerating too much when I say we saw at least forty (4-0!) carwashes on our way to Krujë.

Every several kilometers on the highway before we got to the mountain roads: a “Lavazh” sign with a (usually young) man or woman waiting (sometimes under a canopy, sometime not) with a bucket and a hose.

Once we got to mountain roads with hairpin turns (switchbacks?), I swear a “Lavazh” sign would appear at least every other turn.

This got me thinking about how the introduction of any consumer product gives rise to new industries. Yes, I knew this in the abstract, but I had never actually seen it.

It seems to me, though, the lavazh business may be at a tipping point here in Albania – none of the places we passed was busy and most were without business at all. One has to wonder how many carwashes does Albania actually need?

While the lavazh business may be on the down swing, I predict the rise of another auto-related business: the rise of the mekanik (and the rise of the tow truck operator but that will probably come later, but my hope that it [the tow truck business] never becomes to prosperpous).

Mekanik to the Rescue!

Soon after my colleagues and I left the city of Tirana, we heard a muted “pop,” something like the sound a bird makes when it hits your car or the sound mud makes when you drive on a dirt road after a rain, coming from somewhere indistinct – it was difficult to tell if it was from under a wheel or the trunk or the hood.

We pulled over and the two professors (both men) I was accompanying got out and looked around the car but could see nothing wrong. So we started back up and were on our way.

We drove through persimmon groves and past the airport. My colleagues joked that they had had enough of me and were putting me back on a plane to America. (Such joking seems to be common here – it is all good-natured and fun—and often quite self-deprecating, but that’s a story for another time.)

As we entered a two lane highway (State Highway 1, by the way), my colleague who was driving noted that Albanian drivers are not exactly the most careful drivers one encounters; or as he put it: “It is the car that does crazy things, of course, it is not the driver!”

Soon after his remark, we saw in the near distance a car coming in the opposite direction passing another car on a bridge barely missing traffic going in the opposite direction.

“See?” he said, “It was the car. Of course, it was not the driver!”

Thank heavens, my colleague was a very careful driver. I felt completely safe even as we turned off State Highway 1 in Fushë Krujë (Foothills or Field of Krujë) to take the winding road up to Krujë.

We did our training, had lunch, made a brief walk through the bazaar, then headed back down the mountain. (Of course, it was much more than that, but that is the topic for another story.)

As we made our second hairpin turn, my colleagues started to notice the interior overhead light was flashing. They fiddled with the various knobs and buttons. We even stopped the car for a while, but when we started back up, the flashing started again.

After awhile we decided to ignore it. Then, as we neared Fushë Krujë, we heard another muted “pop,” similar to the one we had heard near the beginning of our journey. This time, we just kept going.

We were in a roundabout in Fushë Krujë when the car just stopped. It wouldn’t go.

Turn the key, nothing happened.

Dead as a doornail (how dead is that exactly?).

So, the two guys got out of the car, walked around it, and couldn’t see anything wrong.

We then embarked on the adventure of opening the hood. My colleagues are university professor, so I figured their knowledge of automobiles was about the same as mine (which isn’t much). They couldn’t figure out how to open the hood.

Then a policeman came up. He couldn’t open the hood.

And then a man who was blocked in because of where our car stopped tried  -- he couldn’t open the hood.

Somewhere in the midst of all this, someone called a mekanik (who by the way arrived in a horse drawn cart). He couldn’t open the hood either.

I am not quite sure what else took place before the mekanik who actually fixed the car arrived. I do know that one of my colleagues telephoned the person who usually drove this school vehicle and that person indicated, “Hmmm. Yes, I thought something might be wrong.” And inquiries were made about oil changes, maintenance, etc., but no satisfactory answers were provided.

At some point during all this, the car was pushed a few feet so the man in the blocked car could leave. Then the mekanik who would eventually fix the car arrived – in a cab (or maybe with a friend, anyway, in someone else’s vehicle who then drove off).

He figured out how to open the hood, inspected the car and apparently told my colleagues the problem was that we had lost the transmission belt!

They searched for the belt on the street but to no avail.

The mekanik then left for a while to find a belt, but the one he came back with was not the right size. He then hooked the car up to some “magical battery” (I don’t know how else to describe it! I was thinking, “This won’t work. How will this battery make the car work?” But it did!!)

He directed us to an alley and then to a building that he unlocked. We drove in.

The building was fairly vast, mainly empty. Beautiful wooden rafters. On the walls hung various belts and other auto parts. On a small table near the entrance were an espresso machine and a TV.

The mekanik turned on the TV, offered me and my colleagues a seat (one of which was a bucket seat out of a sports car), and went to change his shirt in a back corner of the room.

My colleagues made small talk with him and related to me that the building had been a warehouse during communist times and that the mekanik now rented it for about $100USD a month.

As we were talking and he was inspecting the car more, another man came in. Apparently he needed something fixed on his car. He basically just hung out until the mekanik was finished with our car.

The mekanik sent one of my colleagues to the auto parts store near the roundabout where we had stalled out to buy a belt.

When my colleague came back with the belt, the mekanik jacked up the car on one side, slid a tree stump under the car so it wouldn’t fall on him if the jack didn’t hold, got a piece of long wood to slide under the car on, and then went to work under the car.

In less than ten minutes, he had replaced the belt.

He then instructed my colleague to start the engine – it started right up! But the mekanik didn’t seem satisfied as lights were still flashing on the instrument panel within the car.

The mekanik did a few more adjustments, removed the “magical” battery replacing it with the car’s original battery, asked my colleague to rev the engine, then turn it off, and then turn it back on.

All seemed to work perfectly! We were ready to go! (in fact, it all did work perfectly – we made it back to Tirana with no problems whatsoever.)

Now it was time to pay. The bill came to less than $50.00 USD, including the price of the belt (which, btw, my colleagues had to pay for separately. They went back to the auto parts store near the roundabout to settle that bill. Another case of a merchant extending credit to someone s/he didn’t really know.)

I told my travelling companions that in the US it would have cost five times that much just to have the car towed somewhere and then you would have to wait 1-2 days for the garage to fix the car.

As I reflect on this whole car breaking down story, two things come to mind:

One has to do with the concept of efficiency. Similar to my thoughts in FCO as I tried to figure out “where the line was” to go through security, my first thoughts at the breakdown were “where is the tow truck? How will this ever work?” But really it worked much, much better than it would have at home and it cost a fraction of the price.

The mekanik who is willing to make a “car call,” lead you patiently to his (or her!) garage, send you for the part that is needed, and replace the broken part as soon as possible is far more efficient than a chain garage with a plethora of computers and hourly employees.

I sincerely hope as the automobile culture continues to grow in Albania, the mekaniks continue to be people willing to make “car calls” and get you on your way as soon as possible.

My second thought is about car maintenance. Regular oil changes and scheduled maintenance appointments are something I think (even as a girly girl!) I grew up knowing about. How are those things learned when a culture has had no ready access to automobiles for decades?

I don’t know, perhaps you do . . .if you do, let me know . . .

Oh, and one more thing. As you might suspect, there are no “jiffy lubes” here J

Mirembrema!

Tales of field trips to Krujë and Shushicë coming soon – with lots and lots of pictures J