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Published: September 13th 2010
ALBANIA
Mother Theresa... Agnes Gonxhe Bojaxhiu... Location: Berat, Gjirokastra, Korce, Saranda, Tirane
Length of Stay: 5 Days
Cost per Day: $57
You will absolutely love the Albanians... what a gentle hearted, kind and sweet race of people they are...
This explains why I found the Kosovars a nice lot... Approx 90% of Kosovars are of Albanian heritage...
Not a great deal of English spoken, but its amazing how one can communicate and be understood with sign language when both parties are making a concerted effort...
And of course one must not forget the very notable woman of which this country is very proud... while dear Mother Theresa was born in neighbouring Macedonia, she was in fact of Albanian descent...
A curious thing here is the incredible number of Mercedes vehicles that one sees... an inordinate # in fact... Albania was car-free until 1991 and then when communism ended in 1992, they say that stolen Mercs from all over were brought into the country... quite possibly true as I would hazard that maybe around 70% of the cars you see on the roads are the 3 pointed star variety... obviously a big portion of them are old rattleboxes... still there's lots of newbies as well... so
ALBANIA
with the gorgeous Princess Di... people are doing well...
Something else quite interesting... alot of properties - new, old, and under construction had a stuffed animal and in some cases big plastic toy dolls attached to either their roof or top balcony... Apparently, they are placed in order to ward off the 'evil eye'... they take it quite seriously...
Oops... and we had another leakage in the hull of the bus... Somebody lost a very big bottle of Raki... a number of bags were quite saturated... pure anise spirit... my backpack reaked... I imagine the owner would have been far from impressed when he finally disembarked and discovered that his precious Raki had evaporated...
Newsweek ranked Albania 57 out of 100 Best Countries in the World in 2010... How do they determine these rankings I wonder...
I happened to come across current English issues of Time, Newsweek and The Economist while here... I've so missed reading magazines like that... was really interesting to find out whats going on around the world... I'm absolutely certain that Time is getting thinner and thinner...
Albania is another country where you need to either spend or exchange your local currency before you leave...
Into
Macedonia next...
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Brian
non-member comment
Ye gotta love the common people, the world o'er.....Singing: "Is there for honest poverty...e.t.c..."...... Tis nice to hear that yer finally recieving "Good vibrations", from folks....xxx