Hotel Rexhina Vlore

Hallo zusammen,<br><br>den heutigen Tag habe ich zu einem Ausflug nach Berat genutzt, UNESCO World Heritage Site. Die Kommunisten haben zwei Staedte, Berat und Girokastrja, zu Museumsstaedten deklariert und diese nicht zerstoert. Beide stellen heute grossartige Ensembles ottomanischer Architektur dar und sind daher beide World Heritage Sites (Girokastrja ist allerdings recht weit im Sueden und daher werde ich die Stadt nicht besuchen). <br ...

The girls, 2 other girls from the hostel and I are off to Berat, a 3 hour bus ride to an Ottoman era town. We are given rough directions on where to catch the furgon to Berat. Juliana, in particular, is trying to save as much as possible. The taxi would be E3 to the bus "area" but she wants to take a local bus there for E.25. Two stops out, our bus back ends a car. Minimal damage but the other driver is making it into a major incident ...

<br> I&#8217;m in Albania now, a country I never thought I&#8217;d get to visit. I&#8217;ve only been here for one day but already I think I have come to the conclusion that I like the country. The people are super friendly and there seem to be a few hidden gems in the capital city of Tirana.<br> The last time I left you I was in a café in Kotor, hoping to go white water rafting the next day. Luckily for me I got my wish and I headed up to the Durmitor national park with a tour ...

... were built by the past dictator, Hoxha, who was paranoid of his country being invaded (if you have only one friend in the whole world, what do you expect?). All this bunkers were the country's mainline of defense, and to make sure that they could withstand the full tank assault, he had the designer put into one of them and had the bunker blazed by tanks. The poor guy survived, the dictator was happy, so he had 700,000 of them built all over the country. With only 3.6 ...

... the locals were. They loved Scott, and therefore, loved us too. The kids outside the hostel would come and look for us to play with everyday, and the people in the area would wave and talk to us even though they knew we couldn't understand them. <br><br>Berat is a really fun place, and I think Scott was wise to choose it as a place is an up and coming hotspot on the Eastern Europe Gringo Trail.

... to be here before the masses come. Anyway back to Berat I stolled up to the old castle on top of the hill quite a trek up but the old ottoman houses within the castle were really nice and good to stroll around the cobbled alleways again not with any tourists around. Tommorrow I am off to the coast before getting the ferry to Corfu. Albania so far is a pretty awesome place and the locals are really freindly.

... Tirana Airport takes only 2.5 hours or from Durres Port only 2 hours. In Vlora mainly the tourists come te spend their summer holidays because of the beautiful beaches it has. But there are also possibilities of fishing and hunting in appropriate seasons. In Dukat, Vlora's biggest village, tourists come for climbing and tracking. And just 10 minutes from there in Llogora paragliders practise every spring time.

... from grapes, much like Italian grappa). Serious rocket fuel. Catherine chose not to indulge, so she had a thick Turkish-style coffee - another kind of rocket fuel, in a way. While we sat and chatted, we got to meet the grandfather who was a proud Communist, still wearing a watch with good ol' Enver Hoxha on it. Potentially the only remaining Hoxha fan in the country, now that I think of it! Anyhow, it was amazing hospitality and great look into local life. After ...

... was noted by Cicero in his Philippics as magna urbs et gravis, a great and important city. Its decline began in the 3rd century AD, when an earthquake changed the path of the Vjosa river, causing the harbour to silt up and the inland area to become a malaria-ridden swamp. Christianity was established in the city at an early stage, and bishops from Apollonia were present during the Council of Ephesus (431) and the ...

... of the Helveti (Teqe e Helvetive), of 1790, with a handsome porch and a carved and gilded ceiling. Near of tekke was the grave of Shabbatai Zevi, a Turkish Jew living in Berat who in the 1660 declared himself to be the Messiah and began a movement that led to hundreds of thousands of impoverished European Jews trying to follow him in an attempted emigration to the Holy Land. The Ottoman authorities put him on trial for disrupting the Imperial Peace and ...