Hotel Europa Tirana

... kleiden sich sehr westlich, man sieht we***** Kopftuech** als in Deutschland. Und alle 100m gibt es ein Casino.

Morgen geht es dann weit** gen Norden, sollte morgen Montenegro **reichen. Liege ganz gut in d** Zeit, kann v**mutlich einige Staedte an d** Kueste besichtigen, Inshallah.

Gruss
Ralf

P.S.
Dachte d** Pauschaltourismus ist noch nicht hi** angekommen, ab** im Nationalmuseum lief doch glatt eine deutsche Reisegruppe h**um.

... says that busses would be waiting to take us to the Albanian capital of Tirana. Nope. Our bus driver gives us a rough indication in the form of a wave. There are two backpackers on the bus, Juliana and Christina, both Germans travelling for a month. We decide to hang together and figure this all out. We stop by the only ATM we see and our cards don't work. So, to make matters worse, we don’t have any Albanian currency.

We walk to some busses but these are not the ...

... apples, I chose the latter, deciding it'd be enough. I would've had cheese too, but the cheese I bought turned out to be butter. That's different. So rather than violate my restrictions against traveling with butter I butter up an entire baguette in preparation for the trip. Fortunately it lasts me the entire day traveling, but with little variety while in Tirana itself, mostly 'byreks', the local version of Mediterranean oily pies. They're ...

... doesn't apply to the majority of the Albanians......... after years of paranoid communist rule that amongst other things left around 70.000 bunkers throughout the country (another brilliant idea by Enver Hoxha paranoid megalomaniac leader number 1) everyone seems quite ready to move on and everyone seems a tad sad that the world tends to look at them in a generalised discriminatory way............ my advise to anyone: just go there.......

... ha, anyway how boring would this blog be without a little bit of cheese now and then..??!!) Walking off the ferry I was stepping into a glorious hot day. My first port of call (pardon the pun) was immigration and not knowing where it was I figured the easiest way to find it was to follow the stamped of other passengers. The immigration office was housed in a small building close to the entrance of the port and stepping inside was like what Id imagine stepping into the New York stock ...

After a long bus ride I arrived back in Tirana and headed back to the hostel. For my last night in Albania, I didn't really do much of anything. While I didn't exactly enjoy my time in Albania, it was a really interesting travel experience and I'm glad I went there. It was definitely the toughest time I've had traveling, partially because of the infrastructure (or lack-thereof) and partially because of my lack of Albanian language skills ...

... consequences. Local policeman direct the traffic but no one really respects them and it was easy to see why. When the lights return the policeman stay and direct traffic with complete disregard to the red and green signals, sending cars veering into each other every few seconds. However the strangest aspect of the roads was the cars the Albanians drove - about 50% of vehicles were relatively new Mercedes Benz. Slightly strange for a country where 400 pounds a month is ...

... any scales - the butter came in a bag so I couldnt even use packaging as a guide - and they dont seem to have self raising flour or baking powder in Albania! So I tried to make a chocolate cake, which of course didnt rise, and I had no idea how long to leave it in the oven either. When it was finally cooked, it was quite solid and took a lot of effort to get it out the pan... but it looked and tasted just like chocolate brownies! Was a miracle.

... with a car. Same Same. Got to the town of Shkouder and then caught a 2 hour bus or so to the capital Tirana. Once i got to Tirana, I now had the trouble of converting my money into Leke on a sunday arvo at 6pm. Luckily i found a western union exchange open. The only one. Found my hostel on the other side of town. Dumped my bags, got some wierd triangular kebab, called a qebap. It had hot chips on the top and a wierd white sauce ive never tasted before. Down that with some ...

... Der er soldater spredt ud i hele Kosovo - i Mitrovicé holder Danskerne til og lejren huser knap 600 soldater. Der skulle jeg tilbringe det næste halve år, som blev til 10 måneder da jeg søgte om "genganger" efter de første 6 måneder. Jeg var hjemme i starten af maj, og tog snart efter en afbestillings rejse til Thailand. Men det er en anden røver!!