Thursday, December 30, 2010

Tirana News for ex-Residents



For almost three years the directions we gave to our house started with "go down the Llana and turn left at the first bridge past the blood-feud house." Well, the house is gone, and nothing remains except the bare earth. I don't know how this came about, but the most repeated version is that the occupants have been moved to a secret location. This was the last remaining house on the river.




Albania is now part of the Schengen visa-free zone, and the morning after the vote in Europe these banners appeared all over town. There are a lot of things the government is not very speedy about, but flooding the city with banners is something they can do exceedingly well. This first picture has a little blue arrow at the bottom with the wording Pa Viza Ne Europe; little blue arrows with names of major European cities also appeared on all the downtown street signs: Helsinki, Copenhagen, Lisbon, etc. They hardly ever pointed in the right direction, and they're gone now. All joking aside, this is a huge improvement for Albanian citizens, who no longer have to wait in long lines to get a visa.




This is the big one on the Prime Minister's office.

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