If you stay in a place long enough you eventually start picking up local lingo whether you try to or not. Usually you learn the bad stuff first. I think that’s just the international unwritten law. Teach the foreigner the “good shit” and have a laugh.
I’ve been in Albania long enough to have progressed beyond that, like I can order a beer and coffee and have very basic introduction greetings with perfect strangers. But that’s where it becomes complicated. If I don’t have Puccino around to translate it gets out of hand very quickly! You can either be the foreign prick that walks into a place saying “Hellloooo” as loudly and clearly as possible in the hopes that someone will understand you and return the greeting in English, or you can try and be courteous and utilize the sliver of local dialect you have learned to greet people politely. The latter usually opens a barrage of sounds that make absolutely no sense what-so-ever. Even if you try to kerb it a little with a well placed “ Shume mafal, jo Shqiptar” which roughly translated means “Very sorry, no Albanian”. I think that because you said that in Albanian they assume you are just a lying foreigner and reckon you can communicate perfectly with them and that increases the barrage of strange sounds!
It really reminds me of an episode of the Simpsons when Bart is sent to France as an exchange student! You know it? Crazy I tell you!
