All through Albania, I am amused by the spelling of names and words. Our guide say that the Albanian language has 10 extra letters. Here are some examples:
XAXIQI – my favorite Greek dish of tzatziki
Librahzd – a town
Trpejca – a town near Ohrid
Interesting occurrence at a toll booth. Our guide paid the toll to the guy, gets a receipt from someone who didn’t take a receipt ( the time stamp was wrong), guy pockets the toll money. Supplemental income for the guy. C, our guide, tells us there is a lot of corruption in Albania. A contractor will get money from the government to build a park, will start, but will pocket the money and never finish the job. I am not sure how he gets away with it, but C, says it happens all the time.
Individual houses don’t seem to have solar panels. When we see solar panels they are in the fields or on a commercial or farm buildings.
Our guide tells us half the people in Albania are Muslim and half are Christian. The Christians are split between Catholics and Greek Orthodox. As Murray mentions, very few folks actually attend church. We see many mosques, both Shia and Sunni, but they sit empty most of the time and are mostly used for funerals.
One of the things I enjoyed the most about Albania was stopping by the side of the road and having our guide pick some fresh fruit and then eating it. Pears, pomegranates, red grapes, green grapes, oranges, figs, apples and plums. They all tasted so fresh compared to what we eat at home. The figs were a favourite. The tomatoes I ate had so much flavour! I also enjoyed the food in Albania more than the other three countries. Stuffed peppers, stuffed eggplants, tzatziki, saganaki (Murray’s fav).
When we were in the soup restaurants, Laura and I were the only women. I asked our guide about women in trades and he said, definitely not. Women are clerks, teachers, shop workers. Women are going to university, taking medicine, law and engineering, but it sounds like they are not yet accepted into the trades.
When we travelled through the mountains, in all of the countries, we drove through many many tunnels. We rue the fact we did not start to count them as the number would be high. We went through one tunnel that had a toll. The driver paid 5Euros and the tunnel was 4.189 km long. That works out to 0.84 Euro/km. Expensive!
L, R, Murray and I had a discussion one day about how much we all have travelled and what excites us now. Riding in a boat on a lake and seeing birds we see in Alberta, not so much. In Berat, the houses built up the side of the hill, cool! The hamam (Turkish bath) in Prizren, cool! The original paintings inside the Church of St Nicholas/Church of Ascension in Kosovo, amazing. Three cruise ships in port in Kotor on the day we left there, hated them but were fascinated by them. The views from high up, wonderful! We decided that, since we have travelled so much, it takes extraordinary things to impress us. But that’s okay, I think. When Murray and I scuba dive in Bonaire, we tell ourselves that if we see one cool fish or behaviour in three hours of diving we are doing great. So travelling is the same way. We see many things and a few really cool things, and that’s okay.