Grand Hotel Korca Korce

... br>The ferry leaves with a moderate 30 minute delay. We are in awe at this new efficiency

Passenger areas:
There are relatively comfortable restaurants to hang out in. Drinks and food are available in huge quantities and nearly make up for the overflowing toilets.

ETA:
We arrive at our destination with only three hours delay.

Car:
Once at the port in Aquaba, we drive off the ferry, are waved to the correct building ...

There is a town north of Corfu and it's really cool, but it's a village in some way.Though, I did visit the Corfu town and I must say it is AMAZING. All those fortresses and fancy resturants and bars were a total hit! Everybody was so relaxed, people aren't that stressed at all. I ...

... owning a piglet. Alessandro's uncle died in prison, after he was caught trying to take a boat to Western Europe.

In spite of Hozha's brutality, Albania had a population two or three times as great as I'd originally expected. I now knew, because I counted them all.

A third theory of mine that got disproven was the belief that I'd feel comfortable in this "gentle" land.

First, an evil-looking boy called at me, "Oh ... Yeah! ... Oh ... Yeah ...

... hotel on the lake front within half an hour. In the mean time we are the main tourist attraction as we are the strangers carrying backpacks, which you don't come across much in Albania. Pogradec is a small city that has a lot of potential of turning into a beautiful tourist destination. Their lake shore is very green, with a beautiful boulevard along the lake through most of the town. People actually use the trash cans, therefore it's clean and you get to enjoy the plants and ...

... night in Elbasan? I said I definitely had to be in Berat tomorrow morning, so she said she would drive me to Elbasan the next morning and I would continue to Berat, and I agreed. I was a bit frusterated but at least I was having a really great time with the family and neighbor girls so I didn't let it bother me too much. We had some lunch and then I went to the beach with the kids. We really bonded more that day, holding hands, swimming around with them on my back ...

... Then inside we had a simple dinner (I tried to learn some of the words for the foods) and later I took my first bucket bath. I actually impressed myself by getting all the shampoo out of my hair. I think practice in the Turkish hamaams helped. Before bed we spent about an hour looking at the pictures in my guide book with Anjela's little brother (9 years old) and Anjela dancing around with her aunt, Lelya, and both kids watching me write in my journal, impressed with the English.

... food chain store taste fantastic!












Finally the elevator was repaired and we are able to take a ride up. It is very very small! See, my arm couldn't even extend fully! Overall, it was a very enjoyable two day trip for us!
We get our advise on which trip to join from Reveplanner, works out pretty well for lazy people like me :p

We had a good visit to Lake Ohrid, both the town of Ohrid and the monastery of Sveti Naum on the Macedonian-Albanian border. Seventeen years ago I visited the monastery, but was unable to cross the border into Albania: at the time it was closed to Americans. This time, however, we walked across, past the Albanian border posts and concrete bunkers, to a hopping little Albanian resort town on the lake.

... gave us directions to the border control and his friend zoomed by in an older model mercedes. The road sloped downhill and it was an easy walk for at first. We passed old bunkers from the days of Enver Hoxa. Enver was the (extremely unpopular) president of Albania for the longer part of the Cold War and he had a bit of a paranoiac bent: he had 700,000 bunkers built in his country, just about everywhere, just in case war came. Hoxa wanted to be sure the bunkers were ...

... at 2:50 we found out the last one had left at 2pm. Instead we caught a bus headed for Tirana and were then dumped by a roundabout in the middle of nowhere and told to catch a minibus. We flagged one down about 10 minutes later, which was already full, but were squeezed in and raced back to Vlora, narrowly missing several cars, a flock of sheep and actually hitting a bloke on a moped. He was unharmed, not that the driver stopped to do anything other than hurl abuse.