Spring Break 2005 – Albania Part 2

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My new Albanian haircut along with my Albanian brother’s haircut and the woman that works next door to my Albanian mom’s pharmacy. You may recall that I spent time with the little sister of the woman that works next door to the pharmacy.

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No, the world isn’t tilted. The church tower is tilted!

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It’s the leaning tower of Albania.

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The old mosque in Vlora.

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A view down on Vlora.

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I decided to take a little side trip down to Sarande to see the Greek and Roman site of Butrint. To get there I took a small bus down along the wild and rugged cost of southern Albania. These birds flew along beside us for quite a while as we drove over the Llogora Pass.

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Sarande.

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Butrint. The Venician watch tower guarding the narrow inlet into the Butrint Lake.

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The castle from a previous occupation of the site. Maybe when the Italians were here? It was restored in the 1920’s or 1930’s.

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Half staff in memory of the pope. I heard about the pope’s death at about 1040pm as I was on my way between Tirana and Vlora on my way back from Kosovo. We learned of his death via SMS.

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This is yet another example of amazingly well done retaining walls. All natural materials and all hand done. I think that many more industrialized nations could learn something from this approach to soil stabilization.

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All of those things out in the water are muscle farms. This area of Albania is renowned for its tasty muscles.

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An old basilica in the lower part of the site.

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One of the old city gates.

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Turtle!

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An important baptismal for the Christian world.

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An old palace that now is slightly below the level of the sea. Proof of global warming? I think so!

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A well. A thousand years or more of use makes for some good rope wear patterns.

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The theater at Butrint.

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The triangle fort.

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Muscle farms.

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A hydro-power station.

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An Albanian transmission substation.

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Syri i Kalter (Blue Eye Spring). The taxi driver I hired to take me out there said that his son had used his cold water scuba diving equipment to plumb the depths. This thing is over 40 meters deep before the passageway gets too small to sneak through with scuba equipment. The water coming out of this spring is very sweet.

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Another spring nearby.

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A restaurant near the spring.

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Southern Albanian transformer.

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The mouth of a hydro-electric power station.

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If it didn’t mean sudden and absolute death, it’d be a blast to jump down that hole!

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Filling up the water bottles at one of the many thousands of roadside springs.

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A typical one person bunker.

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One of the many oil well towers littered around the Albanian landscape. The petroleum pulled out of the ground in Albania is very high in sulfur and the Albanian industrial sector hasn’t yet introduced technology to scrub the sulfur from the petrol. That causes some problems for many cars in Albania. Almost every gas station has both domestic and import petrol.

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An old gun at an old fort.

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That island is part of Greece.

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Another old weapon left at the fort.

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A memorial in Durres to the martyrs that died defending Albania during one of the invasions from WWI or WWII.

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Satellite TV dish on the old fort.

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A cannon bunker emplacement.

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Going into the old amphitheater at the Roman site of Durres.

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The first bits of reconstruction at this amphitheater.

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12th or 13th century Christian mosaics in a small chapel built into the amphitheater.

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The site description. In Albanian.

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Chinese transmission tower.

And with that I left Albania. I’m addicted! I know that I’ll be back.