Tirana: parliament building to the right, main mosque to the left. Steve pondered what the contrast between the two might indicate. Amongst images in the gallery below is the monument to Albania’s independence from the Ottoman Empire.
We’re back to Tsar Samuel’s Fortress, at the top of a lovely hill overlooking Ohrid City. The passage of time is evident in the nature of this building, and in the fact that it’s nearly two months since I first showed you this lovely location and well over a month since I returned to my regular work life in A’dam. The photos we showed in that prior post came from our first visit, when the fortress was closed. As you’ll see, on the day we could go in, the weather was a good deal moodier :-).
That’s a bust of the last emperor of Germany, with the house here in NL where he lived his last decades in exile in the background. Various photos and trinkets from the interior, including if you choose to look closely a photo taken the year before WWI started, at someone royal’s wedding in Berlin, at which most crowned heads and other non-crowned heads of state and / or government from European states which would soon be losing a generation of lives and a great deal of money in that war, were all at the same dinner table in apparent ease and peace. Since I happened to be there a few weeks after US tax dollars began flooding out of the accounts for more war and destruction again instead of education and healthcare, this struck me, somehow, as another example of simple lessons of history that seem never to settle in the brains of our voting publics or those they choose to elect. There’s also a fascinating little toilet cupboard of sorts, probably installed so as to avoid a bigger remodel or something?
All from in and around Skanderberg square in the center of Tirana. Amazing that it’s already a month ago that we finished those lovely two weeks in the Balkans.
Final photos of the Ayeyarwaddy / Iriwaddy delta from last November’s RGN to BKK flight. Also shared a few in an earlier post. Apologies, again, for the blurry photos through a plane window.