he’s albanian…albanian…that’s for sure…(part 6)
*i apologize for the hold-up in posting this new entry…for some reason i have not been in the mood to write long entries like i was before…it takes alot of thought people…sympathize with me…ok good…now without further delay…i give you:
day 5… thursday…april 8th, 2004…our last full day in albania…the trip was definitely too short…and we all knew it when we woke up thursday and realized it was the last day…everyone genuinely wanted to stay there longer…but our schedules (and pocketbooks) just wouldn’t permit it…this day was our big sightseeing day…they were taking us up into the mountains and other fun stuff like that…
so we woke up decently early and made sure our bags were all packed and ready to go…we were staying in a hotel in tirana thurs. nite so we could get up and make our plane fri. morn …so we ate breakfast w/ sazan…took some pics outside the house of sazan’s family, said our goodbyes and then took off for tirana…
very soon after we arrived in tirana, we headed out of town in a couple of vans for the city of kruje (kru-yah)…it was about an hour and half from tirana and nestled up in the nearby mountains…this city was pretty breathtaking…it definitely was ON the mountainside…and we figured that out quick by the crazy stretch of roads that got us up there…the place we spent most of our time was at a 16th century castle that sat on a rather large cliff overlooking the valley below…in the distance (on a cloudless day…which we weren’t so fortunate to have…it drizzled most of the day) you can see the adriatic sea…the castle had a great deal of history behind it which was rather interesting but i won’t bore you with it because i know i would be bored with crap like that had i not been there (remember that in entry no. 1 of this epic mini-series that i said i’m an “experimental” kinda guy)…i hope to post some pictures of some of the sites we saw so you can at least get a “visual” perspective on it all but we’ll see if i actually wanna scan that many pics…
we then did some shopping on this cobblestone street lined with fleamarket-type vendors…most of the stuff there was handcrafted and whatnot…the kool thing about these shops was that you could bargain with the vendors to get lower prices…i got a few knick-knacks for my fam and then got a kool little ring for myself…i’m not much of a ring guy…but i sat next to a few in high school and i studied them (movie line alert!) and i’ve decided to start wearing rings of my own…so i thought a ring from albania would be the perfect one to start off my collection…
after we got done shopping we had a sack lunch right next to the castle and then proceeded down the mountain and back to the church…when we got back we went and checked into our hotel (which was just a few blocks from the church in tirana)…it was a pretty sweet place…a 4 star hotel by albanian standards…probly a 2.5 by american…but it was still very nice…cam, derrick, chad and i proceeded to go down to a cool little cafe overlooking the busy streets below and played some cards…it was very relaxing and the perfect capper for a day full of sightseeing…after that we walked to the church for our last dinner with everyone…it was a kool time of fellowship and alot of our families came to say their final goodbyes…sazan gave a bunch of us postcards with words of encouragement written in english on the back…this, on top of the plaque of the city of durres he gave to me and the snowglobe of durres he gave to derrick, made for some very meaningful gifts…after we ate, jeff talked to us all together for one last time and addressed the issue of us giving 10 months of our life over there in the next year…i know God was working on all of our hearts about this…and we all had a great deal of considering and praying to do (i’ll talk more about this in the inevitable part 7)…
so jeff gave his final remarks and we all headed off to our hotel rooms for the night…we were to be up and ready to leave by 3 am because our flight took off around 5:30 am…a few of us tried to sleep (emphasis on “tried”)…but alot stayed up and chatted about the week and whatnot…i tried to take part in the former…but this would prove to be a very arduous task…
ok…so i couldn’t make my mini-series end with 6 parts…so i’m adding on a 7th one…just for good measure…so tune in soon for that…
######Note: This post is from a very old Xanga blog of mine. A very, very old blog. In fact, it’s practically a museum. Be sure not to touch any old references or links. You won’t break them, they are most certainly already broken.