Tag: cultural-bridge

The Albanian-Italian Couple Who Argued in the Waiting Room

The Albanian-Italian Couple Who Argued in the Waiting Room

Posted on by Yang Wang

A couple came in on a Saturday afternoon last spring, late. They had booked a couples session for two o’clock and they arrived at two-twenty, visibly mid-argument. He was Italian, in his late thirties, working in Tirana for an Italian company that had recently opened a regional office. She was Albanian, his same age, working as a project manager for a hospitality group. They had been together for about a year and a half, living together for six months. They had booked the session as a gift to themselves for what she later described, slightly ironically, as “trying to do nice things together.”

The argument when they arrived was about parking. He had wanted to park in a particular spot near the parlour; she had insisted on a different spot two streets away. In Tirana, a parking space is rarely only a parking space; it tends to arrive carrying everything else a couple has not said that week. The disagreement had taken on the disproportionate weight that small disagreements take on when there is something larger underneath them. By the time they came up the stairs, the parking was no longer the topic. They were arguing about something else, and they were not sure exactly what.

This is the kind of arrival that requires a particular delicacy from the parlour staff. The temptation, in such moments, is to pretend not to notice. The better response, I have learned over the years, is to acknowledge the obvious without making it a topic, and then to let the session do its work. (For the broader context of why couples in Tirana book the session at all, there is an earlier piece on the growing trend of couples discovering Chinese massage together.)

I gave them each a small cup of water and told them, in the way we do with all couples, that we would do the intake conversations separately. He went first, into one consultation room with his therapist. She came with me to a second room.

The two intakes

In my intake with her, I went through the standard questions about her physical complaints, her history with massage, her preferences for pressure. She answered briefly, not really focused on the questions. I waited a moment after the formal questions ended, in case she wanted to say anything more.

She said, “We are having a difficult month. I am sorry we were late.”

I told her there was no need to apologise. I asked whether she still wanted to do the session.

She said, “Yes. We need it. We do not know how to stop arguing about parking.”

I told her that the session would do its work whether they were arguing or not, and that she did not need to perform any particular emotional state on the table. She could simply lie down and let the work happen. She nodded. I think she had been worried that the argument would somehow disqualify them from receiving the session.

His intake, I learned later from his therapist, had been similar. He had also apologised for the lateness and the visible mood. He had also been told that the session would proceed regardless.

What the session was like

The session itself was, for the first thirty minutes, quieter than most couples sessions. The two of them were lying side by side, both clearly still inside the residue of the argument they had brought in. The work began with the standard opening protocol — long sweeping strokes, slow and predictable, the rhythm meant to signal safety to the nervous system.

By the twenty-minute mark, I saw her shoulders drop into the table for the first time. About five minutes later, his breathing audibly deepened. By the thirty-minute mark, both of them had entered the parasympathetic shift, though they had entered it slightly out of phase with each other.

The middle portion of the session continued without anything dramatic happening. Both clients seemed to be sleeping by the forty-five-minute mark. The therapists worked their respective protocols. The room was quiet.

In the last twenty minutes — the integration portion of the session — something I did not expect happened. The two breathing rhythms in the room began to synchronise. Not dramatically; subtly. Within a few minutes, both clients were breathing at the same rate.

I noticed this. I caught my colleague’s eye. We both saw it. We adjusted our work very slightly slower, to match the slower rhythm both clients had settled into. The synchronisation held for the remainder of the session.

What happened in the front room

When the session ended, both clients took longer than usual to get up. The therapists left them on their tables with warm blankets and stepped out to give them time to integrate. After about ten minutes, both clients changed and came out separately to the front room.

They sat next to each other on the small sofa we have near the entrance. Neither of them spoke for several minutes. Then she put her hand on his arm. He put his hand over hers.

I was in the next room finishing notes from another client’s session. I could hear them quietly, not the words but the tone. They were talking, slowly and without urgency, about something that was no longer about parking. Whatever it was, the conversation was gentle in a way that the conversation they had brought in had not been.

They paid, said goodbye, and left. They walked out together without arguing about which way to go.

I did not see them again for about three months. When they came back, they booked a couples session as their first appointment, and they have been semi-regular couples-session clients since.

What this experience taught me about the modality

I want to be careful about the story I just told. I do not want to oversell what one couples massage session can do. They came in arguing. They left having had a calmer conversation. This is, in itself, a useful outcome for an afternoon. It is not, by any stretch, evidence that couples massage solves relationship problems. The argument they had brought in was not resolved by the session; at most, it was set aside long enough for them to have a different kind of conversation.

But the experience did clarify something for me about what the format can offer, in particular contexts, that I had not fully appreciated before.

A couples session can interrupt a stuck pattern of interaction between two people. The two partners are in a difficult feedback loop. They are each reacting to the other’s reactions. The conflict is not really about whatever they think it is about; it is about the loop itself. The couples session removes them, for ninety minutes, from the conditions in which the loop runs. By the end of the session, the loop has not been broken — it can resume immediately afterwards — but it has been interrupted long enough for them to encounter each other from a slightly different state.

This is not a therapeutic effect in the strict sense. We are not couples therapists. We do not work on the relationship. But the session creates a particular kind of pause — both partners simultaneously dropping out of the activated state that the conflict had produced — that occasionally allows a different conversation to begin afterwards.

Whether this is useful for any given couple depends on what is happening between them. For couples whose difficulties are large and structural, the pause does not produce lasting change. For couples whose difficulties are smaller and more reactive, the pause can be enough.

The Albanian-Italian context specifically

I want to add a small observation about the specific cultural context this couple represented.

The Italian-Albanian cross-cultural couple is a particular configuration we see often in Tirana now. The Adriatic connection has been deep for centuries — Italian was the second language for many Albanians during the communist era, the cultural exchange across the strait has been continuous for generations, the diaspora pattern of Albanians in Italy and the smaller pattern of Italians in Albania have produced many couples in the modern era.

There is, in my observation, a particular pattern of tension that can show up in these couples. The Italian partner often brings a particular relational style — voluble, expressive, comfortable with high-emotional-volume interaction. The Albanian partner often brings a different style — more reserved, more interior, less comfortable with extended emotional display. The styles are not better or worse than each other, but they can collide in ways that produce arguments that feel disproportionate to both partners.

The Italian-Albanian couple I am describing here was, I think, in a particular phase of working out the friction between these styles. The argument about parking was, in some sense, a small expression of a larger negotiation. Where they ended up — at the calmer conversation on the sofa in our front room — was, I think, a step forward in that larger negotiation.

I do not want to overdraw the cultural psychology. Every couple is its own situation. But the pattern is real, and the session worked in a way that perhaps spoke to something specific in their dynamic. The shared parasympathetic state, the matched breathing, the brief synchronisation — these may be especially useful for couples whose styles of relating are otherwise asymmetric.

A practical note

For couples reading this who are in a stressed period and considering whether a couples session might help: it can sometimes help, modestly and briefly. It is not a fix. It is, at best, a small intervention that creates conditions for a different kind of conversation afterwards.

If you are arguing on the way to the session, do not cancel. Come anyway. The session will do what it can do regardless of how you arrived. Do not perform a state you do not feel. Simply lie down and let the work proceed.

Afterwards, do not try to have a difficult conversation immediately. The post-session state is fragile in the first hour. Let it settle. A meal, a walk, a quiet time. If a conversation arises in this period, let it arise; do not force it.

The marriage or partnership is built across many small moments of attention. The session is, at most, one of them. We are happy to provide it when it helps. We are honest about what it does and does not do.

For the couple in this piece, it did exactly what it could on a difficult Saturday afternoon. That was useful. They came back. The relationship continues. The arguments are still going to happen sometimes. Some of them will resolve more easily because of the small islands of mutual ease the practice has built into their year. Others will resolve in their own time, through their own work.

This is the realistic accounting.

Yang Wang practises Chinese medicine at Chinese Massage – Tai Chi Tirana. Details have been altered to protect client privacy.

When Liaoning Mothers Used Mud Cakes in Winter

When Liaoning Mothers Used Mud Cakes in Winter

Posted on by Yang Wang

Liaoning province, in the northeast of China, is cold. Not the Mediterranean kind of cold that Tirana has in February, where you can walk outdoors in a wool coat and feel pleasantly chilled. The Liaoning winter is a serious matter. Temperatures drop to minus twenty in January. The wind off the sea finds every gap in every wall. For most of the year, daily life is built around the management of cold.

In the village where my grandmother lived — about an hour outside Tieling — winter preparation began in October. The cellar filled with cabbage, daikon, sweet potatoes, dried mushrooms. The thick quilted bedding came out of the storage chests. The braziers were checked. And, in many households, the mud cakes were prepared.

I want to write about this practice because I think it explains something important about how a treatment we now offer in our parlour in Tirana originally lived in ordinary kitchens, ordinary winters, ordinary families — long before anyone thought to put it on a price list.

How the mud cakes came to be in the house

My grandmother’s mud cakes — the ones she used on my mother every December when her winter belly started — were not bought. They were made.

The recipe had been passed down in the family from at least my great-grandmother, possibly earlier. The ingredients were ordinary, mostly local, and combined according to a sequence my grandmother performed without thinking, the way an experienced cook makes dumplings.

The base was a particular kind of clay sourced from a river bank about twenty kilometres from the village. Once a year, in late summer, one of my uncles would drive out with a shovel and a few canvas sacks to collect the year’s supply. The clay was washed several times, dried on flat boards in the sun, ground in a stone mill, and stored in a sealed jar in the pantry.

In autumn, the mugwort was harvested from the hills above the village. The plants were cut, hung upside down in bundles in the attic, dried for a month, and the leaves were then stripped from the stems and ground to a coarse powder.

When the cakes were to be made — usually in late November, in time for the coldest months — the powdered clay was mixed with the mugwort, with cinnamon bark purchased from the herbalist in town, with a little dried ginger, and with one or two other ingredients I never fully learned because the recipe was somewhat closely held even within the family. The mixture was moistened with warm water, kneaded like a dough, and formed into flat cakes about the size of a hand and half a centimetre thick. The cakes were dried slowly on a warm stone near the stove, then wrapped in cloth and stored in a wooden box near the chimney.

By the time the winter cold-belly season arrived, the cakes were ready.

Who used them, and how

My grandmother used them on my mother, her daughter-in-law, when the winter belly came on her every year. She also used them on herself, on her own lower back, when the cold weather brought out the joint pain she had developed in her sixties.

The cake was warmed on the stove — never directly on the heat, but on a metal tray placed above the heat, slowly, until it was warm to the touch but not hot. It was then placed on the affected area, and a small bundle of moxa was lit above it. The treatment took about half an hour. My grandmother would sit in the chair next to the bed, knitting or talking quietly, watching the moxa carefully so that the heat was always the right intensity.

When the treatment was over, the cake was wrapped back in its cloth and returned to the box. The same cake could be used many times over the winter — only when it had crumbled and lost integrity would a new one be made.

This was not, in our family, a medical treatment in the modern sense. It was a household practice. It was as ordinary as making chicken broth for a cold or applying a hot compress to a stiff neck. The grandmothers did it. The mothers learned to do it. The daughters watched, and eventually learned themselves.

That this practice corresponds, almost exactly, to a treatment described in the Huangdi Neijing — the foundational text of Chinese medicine, compiled around the second century BCE — is something I only learned much later, in medical school. The connection between my grandmother’s hands and an ancient text was not something she would have considered relevant. She knew what she was doing because her mother had shown her.

From a village kitchen to a treatment room

I moved to Tirana in 2020, carrying this memory of my grandmother’s kitchen with me. What struck me, over the years since, was how strange it felt to take something that had simply been there — as ordinary in our house as a pot of broth on the stove — and one day write it on a treatment menu with a duration and a price beside it.

There is a particular Tirana feeling I have come to know well: the friend who hears what I do for a living, waves a hand, and says her cousin “knows someone” for everything. A plumber, a notary, a man with a van, and now, apparently, mud and moxa. The instinct to keep these things in the family, off the books, between people who trust each other, is not so different from how my grandmother kept her recipe — somewhat closely held, passed by hand rather than written down. (I have written elsewhere about the year of the Fire Horse and the small Chinese-calendar markers of my year — these family practices live alongside that bigger seasonal rhythm.)

Why this still matters

I do not bring up these old practices because I want to romanticise them. There are things modern medicine does that traditional practices cannot. Insulin saves lives. Antibiotics save lives. The MRI scanner sees inside the body in ways no pair of hands ever could.

But there are also things that modern medicine, in its rush toward measurement and intervention, has stopped being good at. The slow work of restoring a body that has been chronically depleted. The treatment of patterns rather than single diagnostic codes. The understanding that warmth, applied thoughtfully and over time, changes the body in ways that no pill can replicate.

Mud moxibustion is one of those slow treatments. We offer it in our parlour in Tirana because it works for the patterns it is designed to address — patterns my grandmother in Liaoning would have recognised at a glance, and which she certainly never needed a research trial to confirm.

When I prepare a mud cake for a client now — using mud and herbs imported from a producer in Shandong rather than collected from a river bank, prepared in our treatment room rather than a kitchen — I am performing, with small adjustments, the same intervention my grandmother performed decades ago in a village in Liaoning. The technology has not changed. The body has not changed. What works still works.

A small ritual I have started

I have begun, with first-time mud moxibustion clients, mentioning this history briefly during the intake. Not as a sales pitch — the treatment will work or not work on its own merits — but as context. Several clients have told me afterwards that knowing the treatment came from grandmothers, in real homes, made it feel more meaningful to them than something handed over in a cold consulting room.

I think they are right. Some kinds of healing belong to a longer tradition than a single profession or a single century. To offer them well, we have to remember where they came from.

That is part of why we offer this treatment in Tirana. Not because it is exotic, but because it is, in its origins, much closer to home than people might think.

Yang Wang practises mud moxibustion and other Chinese medicine modalities at Chinese Massage – Tai Chi Tirana. The parlour is in central Tirana, a short walk from Bulevardi Myslym Shyri.

Homemade Jiao Zi and a Long Day Well Spent

Homemade Jiao Zi and a Long Day Well Spent

Posted on by Yang Wang

Some evenings the parlour empties slowly. The last client leaves, the sheets are folded, and the four of us — Ying, Xiao, Wei, and I — stand there for a moment in that particular silence that only comes at the end of a day when you have used your hands without stopping. Someone says jiao zi? and the answer is always yes.

Tonight it is Xiao’s turn to lead, which means we are all in luck.

Xiao’s Dumplings Are Not a Democracy

Xiao makes jiao zi the way her grandmother made them in Liaoning: the filling first, then the dough rested for exactly as long as it takes to argue about the filling. The ratio of pork to cabbage is a matter she does not discuss. When Ying once suggested more ginger, Xiao looked at her the way you look at someone who has said something technically in Chinese but somehow wrong.

The rest of us are allowed to fold. This is the generous part. Ying folds quickly and her pleats are even. Wei folds slowly and his are — well, they hold together, which is the main thing. My own folds look like I am attempting origami for the first time after a twelve-hour shift. Xiao says nothing, but she refolds mine when she thinks I am not watching.

!Homemade Jiao Zi and a Long Day Well Spent

The Conversation That Happens Every Time

While we fold, we talk about home. This is not a sad conversation — it is a warm, slightly chaotic one that jumps between Mandarin and whatever Albanian word someone picked up from a client that day. Someone mentions their mother’s version of the filling. Someone else says their father would boil half and pan-fry half, and this produces a heated debate about which method is correct (it is pan-fried, obviously, but we let Wei have his opinion).

Wei pulls up a voice message from his family on his phone and plays it without warning, filling the kitchen with his aunt’s rapid northern Chinese, which none of us can quite follow because she speaks faster than anyone should. We laugh. The dumplings keep coming.

What Tirana Has That Home Did Not

Here is something I did not expect when I arrived: Tirana does not slow down in the evenings — it is a lively capital city that hums on into the night. But something in us needs to slow down, to step out of the day and reflect. That is harder to find when you are far from home. Here, after the parlour closes, we give ourselves that pause.

A neighbour knocked on our door once to bring us peppers from her balcony garden and stayed for forty minutes. We did not share a language, but we shared the peppers, and somehow that was enough.

The jiao zi fit into that pause perfectly. You cannot rush them. The folding takes time, and the talking fills the time, and by the end of it you have forgotten to be tired.

The Boiling Is the Dramatic Part

Xiao drops them into the pot in batches, and we all crowd around like it is a sporting event. When they float to the surface she counts to thirty in her head — she says this out loud every time as if reminding herself — and then fishes them out. The ones that split open are the cook’s privilege. Xiao eats these without ceremony, standing at the stove, which feels exactly right.

We eat with black vinegar and a little chilli oil. Wei insists on soy sauce as well, which Xiao permits but does not endorse. The kitchen window fogs up. Someone’s phone plays a playlist that is half Jay Chou and half, inexplicably, an Albanian iso-polyphony recording that Ying found and thought was beautiful, which it genuinely is.

Not a Recipe, Just an Invitation

I am not going to give you the recipe. That belongs to Xiao and her grandmother. What I will say is that if you ever find yourself in Tirana, far from home, with flour on your hands and your colleagues arguing cheerfully about ginger — you are probably right where you should be.

If you want to find us before the jiao zi hour, we are at the parlour most days, using those same hands for something slightly different.

Yang Wang practises Traditional Chinese Massage at Chinese Massage – Tai Chi Tirana. The parlour is in central Tirana, a short walk from Bulevardi Myslym Shyri. Names in team stories appear with permission and affection.

The Zgara at Liqeni: A Saturday Ritual

The Zgara at Liqeni: A Saturday Ritual

Posted on by Yang Wang

There is a small Saturday ritual I have built into my life in Tirana that I do not often write about because it feels too ordinary to constitute material. But after years of being asked, by clients and by friends, what my favourite parts of the city are, I have come to realise that the ordinary is the most interesting thing I have to say.

This piece is about the walk I take down to Liqeni Artificial after a long Saturday at the parlour, the grilled food I eat at Zgara Korçare Liqeni, the grill house by the lake, and the small accumulated wisdom of a regular table at a working-class restaurant where the cook has known what I order before I sit down for a few years now.

How the ritual began

I did not start this ritual deliberately. It built itself over time, the way most enduring practices do.

When I first moved to Tirana in 2020, I worked long hours building up my practice here, with a particular intensity on weekends when the calendar was fullest. I would finish a Saturday’s work — usually four or five sessions, ending around eight in the evening — and find myself too tired to cook and too restless to simply go home and sleep. I needed a transition.

I tried various restaurants in the first year. The fashionable spots in Bllok. The newer Italian places on the boulevards. The Turkish kebab stands near the centre. None of them quite worked for the kind of decompression my body needed after a working day. They were either too loud, too curated, or too aimed at being a destination rather than a routine.

The walk down to Liqeni Artificial — a little over twenty minutes from the parlour — became the part of the evening that worked. The lake is one of Tirana’s quieter areas in the late evening, particularly in the cooler months. The walk down through the residential streets, the wide path around the water, the changing light on the surface — these were what my body needed after a day of being indoors.

The Zgara Korçare came into the ritual later, almost by accident. I was walking past one Saturday evening and saw an older man eating alone at one of the outdoor tables, looking content in a way that struck me. I went in, ordered what he was eating, and sat at the table next to his. He nodded at me without speaking. I ate the meal and discovered that this was what I had been looking for without knowing it.

That was a couple of years ago now. I have eaten there nearly every Saturday since.

What the cook knows

The cook at Zgara Korçare is a man in his late fifties who has been at the restaurant for many years. He is from Korça originally — hence the restaurant’s name — and he came to Tirana in the late 1990s as part of the post-communist migration from the south. His grill technique is specific to the Korça region: high heat, simple seasoning, particular cuts of meat selected for their behaviour under direct flame.

What he makes for me, almost without consultation, is a small plate of grilled lamb with the bone in, a piece of fresh bread, a small side of seasonal pickled vegetables, a glass of water, and — if it is winter — a small cup of çaj mali. He brings these to the table without my having to specify anything. I sit, eat slowly, sometimes nod to other regulars, and leave after about forty minutes.

The ritual takes a particular form. I do not bring work. I do not bring my phone unless I am expecting a specific call. I do not read. I simply sit and eat, and let the cumulative weight of the working week move out of my shoulders.

The cook has, across these years, gradually learned things about me that we have never discussed in detail. He knows I work at the parlour up the hill. He knows I am Chinese, originally from Liaoning. He knows I have a quiet preference for being alone at the meal rather than making conversation. He respects these preferences without making them a topic.

In return, I have learned things about him. His daughter studied in Italy and now works in Milan. He has not been back to Korça in two years because he cannot easily leave the restaurant. He has a particular pride in the lamb he sources from a specific shepherd outside Pogradec. He has been working in restaurants since he was fifteen, and he intends, he told me once, to keep working until his hands stop functioning.

We are not friends in any conventional sense. We have an arrangement, sustained over these years, in which he prepares food I have come to depend on and I appear reliably on Saturday evenings to receive it. The arrangement has its own form of warmth.

The Liaoning parallel I did not expect

It took me a while to notice something about this ritual that, in retrospect, should have been obvious from the start.

In my hometown in Liaoning, my father had a similar weekly ritual. He worked as a foreman at a small factory near the village. On Saturday evenings, he would walk about fifteen minutes from the factory to a small restaurant near the river that served a particular kind of grilled fish. He would eat there alone, return home after dinner, and spend the rest of the evening reading or talking quietly with my mother.

The cook at the restaurant in Liaoning, like the cook at Zgara Korçare, had known my father’s preferences without his having to ask. The cook brought the same fish, the same accompaniments, the same small cup of strong tea. My father ate slowly, paid, and walked home.

I did not know, when I came to Tirana, that I would eventually build a similar ritual on the other side of the world. I did not consciously model it on my father’s. But the pattern — a regular Saturday evening, a small working-class restaurant, a cook who knew the order, a quiet solo meal as the transition from working week to rest — turned out to be something I needed in a way I had not articulated to myself.

There is something my mother said once about my father, after his death, that I have come to understand only recently. She said that the weekly meal at the riverside restaurant had been, for him, the meal that “kept him being himself.” His work was demanding. Family life had its own demands. The hour alone at the restaurant, with food prepared by someone who knew him without needing him to perform, was the hour in which he simply was himself, with no other demand on the experience.

I now think this is part of what the Saturday evening at Zgara Korçare does for me. It keeps me being myself. (I have written elsewhere about the year of the Fire Horse and other small Chinese-calendar pieces of my year, if you want a sense of how I mark time.)

What this has to do with the work

I sometimes wonder why I find this kind of small ritual so important when I work in a profession that exists, in some sense, to provide similar experiences to other people. We do, after all, offer ninety-minute sessions in which clients are cared for without being asked to perform anything. We provide much of what I describe in this Saturday ritual at the restaurant — predictable warmth, attentive care, no requirement to be impressive.

But the parlour, for me, is the place where I provide this kind of care. The Saturday ritual at Zgara Korçare is the place where I receive it.

This is, I have come to believe, an important asymmetry to maintain. People in care-giving professions — therapists, doctors, teachers, parents of small children — need to receive care in some form that is not just their own profession reflected back at them. The receiving needs to come from a different domain entirely. The cook at the grill restaurant, who has never been to my parlour and has only a vague idea of what I do, can offer me a kind of care that my own colleagues cannot, precisely because his care has no professional resemblance to my own work.

This is also part of why I encourage clients of the parlour, when the conversation turns this way, to find their own version of this ritual. Whatever they receive at the parlour, they also need somewhere else — somewhere that does not look like the parlour — where they are simply allowed to be themselves and receive care from someone who does not require them to be anyone in particular.

For some clients, this is a coffee at the same café every morning. For others, it is a small fishmonger at Pazari i Ri who has known them for years. For others, it is the woman at a particular bakery who saves them a specific loaf if they are late. For others, it is a tailor, a barber, a flower seller, a cobbler. The form does not matter. The function does.

A note on the diaspora

For clients who are returning to Tirana after years in the diaspora — Italy, Germany, Greece, the UK — I sometimes think this kind of ritual is particularly important to rebuild. The diaspora life often involves a kind of perpetual transit, in which the small consistent presences of a stable life are interrupted. Coming back to Tirana is not just coming back to a city; it is coming back to the possibility of small stable presences. The cook who knows your order. The waiter who saves your table. The flower seller who asks about your mother.

These presences are part of what makes a place feel like a home rather than a temporary stop. Many diaspora returnees, in my observation, underestimate how much they have missed these small stabilities until they begin rebuilding them. The first time the cook at a regular restaurant remembers your face after several visits, the relief is unexpectedly large. You had not realised, in the diaspora years, that the small recognitions were a kind of nourishment.

For my own settling into Tirana over these years, the Saturday evening at Zgara Korçare has been one of the structures that have made the city feel like home rather than a place I am working in. I do not know whether the cook there has thought about it in similar terms. I suspect he has. The arrangements we sustain, even silently, are usually understood by both parties.

This is one of the small wisdoms that my life in Tirana has slowly taught me. The big sustaining structures of a life are not the dramatic ones. They are the boring weekly ones. The walk down to the lake. The grill restaurant. The cup of çaj mali in the winter. The nod from the cook. The slow walk home.

These are what keep us being ourselves.

Yang Wang practises Chinese medicine at Chinese Massage – Tai Chi Tirana. The parlour is in central Tirana, a short walk from Bulevardi Myslym Shyri.