Destin in Albania

We spent the weekend in Durrës.  It is an ancient town on the Adriatic about a 40-minute drive from Tirana, and is Albania's largest port.   The highway along the coast has been built up for about ten miles to the south.  To the north the coast highway abruptly ends at the foot of a mountain, which can be seen in the top picture off in the distance.  The photo was taken from the balcony of our hotel, the Vila Belvedere.

The next picture is looking down over the town from the former house of King Zog, who fled to Greece when Italy invaded Albania before WW II.  The next is the highway along the coast on the way to our hotel.  The last two are hotels or apartments that are under construction.  You can see some little houses remaining from when this was a little village, but  they've been surrounded by new construction.  The construction scenes are not just typical of Albanian construction, they are the only type of construction I've seen, whether it's a house or high-rise.    

Typing Program

Ted Williams of the Boston Red Sox had a .406 batting average in 1941.  He is the last major league player to hit over .400.  In the past 100 years only seven major league players have hit over .400.  (Although two of them did it three times each, Rogers Hornsby and Ty Cobb)

I was thinking of this after hearing of one of the USAID Rule of Law projects here in Albania.  There are no court reporters in the courts.  Cindy told me that in a trial she attended that every ten or fifteen minutes the judge would stop the proceedings and write a summary.  I'm not sure why this is in lieu of just using the judge's notes -- of course if one used Judge Barbour's or Judge Keady's notes, you'd be in good shape.  Judge Cox's notes were nonexistant to sparse, to put a shine on it, so you'd be pretty much out of luck.

To remedy the lack-of-a-record problem, USAID, through one of its contractors, is working on a pilot program in ten courts to train speed typists to type what everyone says.  I'm unclear on whether they plan for the typists to type a summary as they go, or if they intend it to be a verbatim record, but I had the idea it was the latter.

The fastest typist I've ever been around is Carol Gray.  I don't know what number of words per minute she could type, but with the aid of her little add-on typing program she could type pretty much as fast as I could talk, which is probably around 160 to 170 WPM, unless I get animated, and then it might go up to 171.  For minimum national certification in the United States, 225 WPM is the standard.  Albanians seem to talk pretty quickly, maybe because I don't understand too much yet, but it definitely is on a par with English, so let's say 225 should be the minimum requisite competency speed for verbatim reporting here as well.

So what are the odds that your taxpayer dollars are going to be able to teach some Albanians to type that fast?  About as good as the Atlanta Braves coming over here and teaching some top-of-the line Albanian athletes to hit .400, I imagine.  

And what seems obvious to me, the Albanian lawyers I've met being every bit as intelligent as American lawyers, what do you suppose the argument will be when contesting the accuracy of the "record summary"?  That damn court reporter left it out!

Bastille Day

One Dollar = 76.85 leke, 62.98 Euro, .5041 pounds.

Happy Bastille Day!!  The day in 1789 when a mob released all seven of the prisoners held at the Bastille, succeeding in getting a hundred of their fellow stormers killed.  It's main purpose was to loot the arms stored there.  It is like Lexington and Concord 14 years earlier in that both involved trying to acquire munitions (although it was the British authorities who were trying to destroy munitions they correctly believed the patriots had collected) .  The two events had almost no tactical importance but became real flashpoints of patriotism and each country celebrates their respective events as the beginning of their revolutions.   When I was at Ft. Devens in Ayre, Massachussetts, we marched in the annual reenactment of the Boston to Lexington/Concord route.  We were volumteered, a great military tradition, not unlike the British who marched out of Boston.  Of course, we were not shot at like the British were.

So sing La Marseillaise and have a great day.

Dubrovnik

Top picture is approaching Dubrovnik from the south.  At least we were coming from the south -- Dubrovnik itself faces into the Adriatic looking south, so I guess this picture is actually taken looking west.  You can see the tip of Lokrum island, where supposedly Richard Lionheart almost shipwrecked on his way back from the crusades.  No matter where I go I can't seem to get away from this guy.  But the story goes that he promised God that if he survived the storm he would build a church.  In those days one kept one's word in matters such as these, and he left the money for a church.  I remember the church in Vienna, built in honor of a similar promise, this one a victory over Napolean.  Times had changed by Hemingway's time -- I recall his description of the guy in the foxhole being shelled and promising God that if he survived he would lead a better life, a promise, as Hemingway wryly noted, that was forgotten as he went upstairs that night with the girl from the bar.  A Farewell To Arms, I think.  But I digress.

The second picture is closer up of the walled old town.  The site has been inhabited on and off since Greek times, but became a permanent site during the fall of the Roman Empire when the remnants of two Roman cities, one north and one south of Dubrovnik, came together and settled this site, immediately starting construction of the walls, which continued to be built for the next seven or eight centuries.

The third picture is of Stradun, which is the main street and divided the Roman and Slav portion of the city.  It originally was a marshy area, but eventually was filled in and paved, with marble.  The marble is not smooth polished marble, but it makes a pretty street.  A sign is posted at the entrance to old town showing the location of all the damage done to Dubrovnik when it was shelled in 1991 by the "Serbs and their Montenegran allies."  Stradun was repaved, and my understanding is that most of the tile roofs in the photo are new (since '91.)  

Picture four is from the walkway around the top of the city walls.  The walkway is about 1.2 miles, with many steps, up and down.  The walk is definitely not ADA-approved.

Photo No. 5 needs no explanation; two tourists on the sun-drenched Adriatic coast.

On the Way to Dubrovnik

We are back from Dubrovnik.  It was a nice four-day trip, with two of the days devoted to getting there and back.  Our trip advice was near perfect:  180 miles, seven hours.  The top picture is of the road from Shkoder to Bar (in Montenegro)  The first two pictrures are in Albania; the next three are in Montenegro.  This road is "red" on the map, indicating a paved main highway.  It is denoted "autostrada" on the map legend; I'm sure this is a translation artifact and not a statement of fact, although some of the local drivers seem to think they're rolling down the autostrada.  Shortly after leaving the Albania/Montenegro border crossing we came upon a wreck where two cars hit head-on in a corner.  As you can see from the photos, there is not much extra room when two cars pass on a straightaway, and they do have a habit of cutting the corners.  Albanian society seems to move at a leisurely pace until one gets behind the steering wheel of an automobile, whereupon thoughts of the possibility of another vehicle approaching unseen from around the bend do not seem to intrude on the driver's desire to rapidly get wherever it is they're going.

The donkey cart was outside of Shkoder, and the donkey eating grass was in Montenegro.  We had other encounters of an animal kind:  we came around one corner and there was a guy herding cows through town.  Up in the mountains there were warning signs to watch for cattle.

The fourth photo is the autostrada in Montenegro, getting close to the Adriatic.  Last photo is the ferry at Lepetani, Montenegro.  There is a large bay off the Adriatic here and the ferry saves a lot of driving.

 

Plans

Saturday morning we're driving to Dubrovnik.  It is 180 miles and we've been told it takes about seven hours if we only get lost once or twice.  Albanian highways don't have numbers, or at least if they do, they're not posted anywhere I've seen.  The best I think we can hope for is an arrow pointing to a town we're headed to.

After we get into Montenegro maybe things will improve -- they have highway numbers listed on the map, as does Croatia.  Hopefully they'll be posted.  

We've also been told that when in doubt and choosing between two roads that look like the main road, take a left.  That way we'll be heading toward the Adriatic and not Romania.  Since there aren't highway route numbers to follow, our directions contain info such as "after you pass the castle on the hill in Shkodra, take a left at the next big road."  Our "main-highway" route has only one one-lane bridge and only one ferry.  But I'm assuming since everyone else can get there we can too.

I'm canning my first batch of tomatoes today.  They're not turning out too good -- too much water.  I don't know why, because I've eaten this kind before and they were real meaty.  I'm going to have about 15 quarts of two-day marinara sauce, or lots of soup stock.  I've already cooked the juice down some.   Nancey's dad knew more about tomatoes than anyone I've ever known, and in June Mr. Turnage always started worrying that there would be a  big rain and ruin his tomato crop.  The ripening tomatoes would suck all that water up and the skins would split.  Which is what mine looked like, and we did have a lot of rain up until about a week ago.  So maybe my next batch will be better.

As soon as my pickling stuff gets here I'm going to make pickles.  It was difficult in Jackson to find cucumbers small enough for good pickles, but here there are a lot of them.  And I've seen the first baby okra in the market.  So I'll be putting up vegetables through the summer

 

Family Photos Budapest