Happy New Year!! Buon inizio 2024!
I tell you, the folks here in Tirana sure know how to make a racket to celebrate the New Year. The city is still wearing its Holiday lights, the people are happy, and fireworks were going on until the wee hours of the morning. Yet, when I went out at about 6 am, the streets looked relatively clean and there were no noticeable signs of craziness.
January 1 is not an easy day to get anything done, so I decided to take myself on a self-guided bus tour of the south of the country, by taking the 7:30 am bus to Sarandë. It turned out to be a rather long bus ride, four and a half hours long, but it gave me a chance of looking over the countryside. I am very favorably impressed by what I saw. Albania seems to be a reasonably prosperous country (even though the taxi driver who took me to the bus station lamented the ineffective government), with good roads and other modern infrastructure. The small towns are neat and have a sense of pride, and the country houses are gay, well maintained, and have nice gardens.
I was a bit disappointed that half of the trip was along the edges of valleys covered with agriculture (but of course the road builders had to take maximum advantage of the flat topography) but toward the other half we crossed some pretty credible mountains formed by thick units of thinly bedded sandstones (?) (from the bus they looked very similar to the Monterey Formation) and even thicker sequences of black shales and turbidites. Everything has been folded and faulted. Not surprisingly, Albania has light oil and natural gas fields in the southwest portion of the country, which are an economic boon to such a small country.
Sarandë is a beautiful coastal city, well set to receive a significant tourist stream. Unfortunately on January 1 most things are closed (including the money exchange bureaus, so I had to pull money out of the ATM), and everybody in the town was out by the seashore drinking tiny cups of very strong coffee, having lunch, or just walking behind the happy kids. Based on my very limited observations it seems to me that Albania has more similarities with Greece than with Italy, in terms of food and national character. I misspoke when I said that the language uses the Cyrillic alphabet; they use our same alphabet so if you take your time it is possible to decipher some of the written language. There are quite a few mosques, so I assume that the majority of the folks follow Islam, but I also saw a Greek Orthodox priest walking the seashore promenade.
Unfortunately I had to get back to Tirana, so after a hurried lunch I hopped back on the return bus and would have enjoyed a second look at this beautiful country but, alas, fell asleep for most of the return trip. By the time I got back to Tirana at 6:30 pm night had fallen, but that gave me the opportunity to once again look at the Holiday lights.
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