Okay, won’t be much of a blog today, as this was the travel period to start off the adventure. We flew out on Saturday, around 11:50ish in the morning. We flew to Chicago (O’Hare) with about a 3-hour layover. We then caught a flight on Austrian Air to Vienna, Austria landing around 8:30 Sunday morning, with another 3-4 hour layover. We landed in Albania after 2 pm on Sunday…
Soooo… let’s kick this adventure off…
First day in Albania! Technically just a partial day as we didn’t get to the hotel until after 3 pm. Between the airport and the hotel we got a brief glimpse of Tirana and the surrounding landscape and cannot wait to see more tomorrow! Our guide said that Albania is still fairly new to tourism so it’s unntouched/unaffected by hundreds of thousands of travellers each year as so many other countries nearby.
Our tour guide explained to us that there are a lot of people out today and that we would see a lot of night time activity due to the BIG showdown going on tonight – soccer match between Albania and France. Good thing we had this advance warning else the chanting outside our hotel might have been mistaken for a riot, or the pregame fireworks – loud and continual – might have been mistaken for explosions starting WW3! The match has just started and we can hear some of the cheering from our hotel room but it’s nothing that will keep us up tonight.
Again, because we just arrived, with only a shuttle ride to the hotel, little in the way of photographs to show.
Here’s a couple:
Our Hotel:
A couple of interesting buildings seen from the bus:
And an evening street shot… Policia are EVERYWHERE keeping things tight due to tonights Soccer game between Albania and France:
Hopefully we’ll have some more/better shots after tomorrow’s tour of Tirana.
Ciao