Rainy Day In Tirana

This is the main highway (Rr. Durësit) as one enters Tirana from the north.  Note the man on crutches crossing the street.  The street is about four lanes wide at this point, lanes being an amorphous idea here.  It also has a traffic signal.  Most red lights are advisory only, but on the main highways most people will stop, at least for a little while. Cindy says pedestrians is why I can't drive here.  Just after I took this picture I was startled to see a young lady right in front of the car.  She had entered from the right, where I have no peripheral vision.  
This is still the Rr. Durësit.  You could see Mt. Dajti straight ahead if it wasn't raining.  Kind of like Mt. Rainier in Seattle.  Everyone always knew where it could be seen but for the rain.  More pedestrians waiting to cross the street.
One of my favorite buildings.  This is an office furniture/office supply store, with floor tiles also.  I haven't figured out what the Rubic Cube looking thing on top is.  Albania strikes me very much like America in its early motoring days -- the big wooden lady at the motel coming into Vicksburg, the ice cream stands in buildings that looked like an ice cream cone, teepees, all that kind of thing.  Someone is building a restaurant out by the airport that looks like a fuselage.  Next time I go out I'll post a picture.  Even the commercial building have some wild architectural features, like the one at the bottom.

This picture is taken a little out of town on the way to Durës.  I always feel safer on this highway because of the concrete median divider.  This prevents folks passing and coming straight at you from the other direction.  This is sort of an industrial vehicle row -- Ford, Iveco, some others.  We were on our way to a nursery.  But why go to "a" nursery when you can go to two nurseries?  Which we did, buying two bags of dirt at the first, and an olive tree at the second.  This time next year I expect to be pressing olives.  We also bought three little cypress-looking trees, so now we will have green in the garden if it ever freezes and kills everything else.
Here is the windows-as-architectural-feature building, a concept that goes back centuries, albeit not quite as free-form as this one.  The Lavazh in front is a car wash.  Down in southern Albania they're mostly Lavazo -- don't know the language implications of the switch.  We have some Lavazo in Tirana too, though.  This picture is illustrative of a common problem in land-use planning (that's a joke-- there isn't any.)  But there are several instances of big buildings being built with a little section, like an out parcel, remaining in its original form.  I don't know if this is a result of the horribly inadequate land ownership issues left over from the fall of communism, or just poor planning by the builders.