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| BBC ALBANIAN.com | BBC WORLD SERVICE | LEARNING ENGLISH | ||
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Lesson 4 "All these people I knew at that time, they wanted to learn English because they wanted to understand what Elvis is [was] singing about - so they felt what it was all about, but they wanted to really understand the words. That was something I can't even describe. That was one word, maybe, freedom. Because he was free - he was just telling us what he feels [felt], and this comes straight to your heart. All these people I knew at that time, they wanted to learn English because they wanted to understand what Elvis is [was] singing about. That's how the whole thing started in the Soviet Union. It was like an underground thing and people could be really penalised for this, even arrested maybe for some months. … They risked, but they had it. We had all these tapes - we couldn't afford a record. The cost of a record, the price for it in Russia, you couldn't buy it at that time, let's say in 1977-78, so it was about 60 roubles for one record. The monthly wages for an average engineer was 120 per month, so two records per month and nothing to eat. But that was a great time, that was a really great time - my teenage years. There was a small article in a Soviet newspaper at that time - just a very small column with a photo - one of the worst ones, I think, when he was really out of his usual shape. Somebody who wrote this article, he was just joking about it, about his death. So he said:' Oh, the so-called King of Rock and Roll finally died in his huge mansion.' It was like a day of mourning for all of us. We couldn't believe it, because he was so young, always, he was so full of energy and we hadn't seen him in the years of decline, you know, the last two years we hadn't seen him. |
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