Welcome

Welcome to Our Man in Tirana. I moved to Tirana, capital of Albania, in October 2005 and left in October 2007. This blog is a mix of photographs, reports, links, impressions and, undoubtedly, prejudices relating to the city and the country.

Since I am no longer in Tirana I am no longer updating this blog. However, there are over 300 posts covering this two year period and I hope that they are still of some interest.

The links in the column on the right are also a great source of information about the country. These are no longer being updated so some of them will probably no longer work, but most should still take you somewhere interesting.

So if you are curious about Albania or if you are planning to visit I hope this blog will be of value

I am now living in Munich and am blogging at olli in munich.

Mark Mardell in Albania

Mark Mardell, the BBC's European editor, has made his first visit to Albania and is blogging about the country on the BBC website.

Whimper

And now the end is near
and so i face nanananana...

Never did like that crappy song.

But it's true nevertheless.

Tomorrow in the wee hours of the morning we will be heading for the airport for the last time. I suppose it was too much to expect that I could have kept this going while getting ready to leave. So apologies for the lack of postings over the last weeks. This is post number 380 something so I suppose one post every two days is not a bad average.

There were probably 380 more in my head or scribbled down on scraps of paper, but many of them are perhaps best left there.

I suppose I should be penning - or typing - my final thoughts and reflections on two years in Tirana, but right now I don't have any. Maybe in a month or two though I might come back with something.

Thanks to all of you who have read this blog - especially those of you who have become regulars. Thanks also for linking and thanks to all who left comments.

As for the other stars of the blog, Bella now has her own personal hand made dog crate, and by tomorrow evening she will be stepping out of it into the crisp autumn weather of Wisconsin. I might post some photographs here later.

Dougal will be spending this weekend with some of our neighbours before moving in with a friend called Tommy on Monday. At the moment this is a temporary arrangement while we continue to find a permanent solution. But at least he will not be going back on the streets and we hope that temporary might be come permanent eventually.

If another blog appears I will make it known here.

Goodbye.

PS I had another bash at Hotel California at Flares on Friday night and I was rubbish.

Hotel California

When we first arrived it seemed that I heard it everywhere. Now, as we get ready to leave I'm hearing it everywhere again. In the last three days I've heard it three times - on Wednesday in Juvenilja, on Thursday somewhere I can't remember, on Friday at an open air festival in Mother Tereza Square. The latter was a kind of ersatz reggae version - pleasingly different.

I tried it once myself at Flares on karaoke night, but I couldn't hit the high notes. Maybe I ought to give it one more go.

Miss Globe 2007

On Saturday, we were at the Rogner meeting with an expat friend who was leaving Tirana. It was breakfast time, and as our friend was finishing his tea the breakfast room started to fill up with over-dressed (or under-dressed) young women wearing blue sashes.

These were the contestants for the Miss Globe 2007 beauty pageant being held in Tirana tonight at the Palace of Congresses.

High heel boots and mini-skirts - or in a couple of cases micro-skirts, or possibly just belts - have never struck me as obvious breakfast attire, but the girls seemed happy enough tottering and wobbling around with their tea and toast. I'm not sure why they were wearing their sashes - perhaps in case they forgot which country they came from.

As we were leaving they were boarding a large coach which I had seen a number of times around the city in the last few days for their next trip. I'm not sure how some of them made it up the steps, or how they managed to sit down, but perhaps these are the kinds of skills you learn at beauty pageant school.

I had never previously heard of Miss Globe but a search on Google found the relevant website. It seems it was started years ago by some dodgy looking American called Charlie See and is now licenced to an Albanian company, Deliart, run by Petri Bozo. (No English language jokes about his name please.)

According to the website there are 51 contestants so there are a few holes in this globe. Some come from fairly unlikely places - Mongolia and Pakistan stand out - while others seem to prefer an air of mystery - Miss Romania has supplied neither photograph nor information.

Miss England provided one of the lengthier entries explaining how she would like to be like Princess Diana - presumably by doing charitable works rather than hanging around with drunken playboys in Parisian underpasses.

It all sounds a bit corny - among the requirements listed on the website for the 'girls' are 'high hill' shoes, not to be confused with the 'sportive dress and shoes (needed for mountain climbing)'. Appearances can be deceptive but they didn't look to me like mountain climbing types - dancing seems to be the preferred activity judging from the participants' biographies.

Along the way there are various parades, presentations and day trips - including a chance to visit the 'Hydro Energetic System of Vau i Dejes'. Still, people do seem to be taking it seriously. There are receptions and meeting lined up with various mayors, ministers and their deputies, and with the Prime Minister of Kosovo and President Topi.

Personally, I'm backing Miss Venezuela, (on the left) Julia Thaís Mendoza Quintero. As we try to find a home for Dougal and look out on the multiplying dogs in the street, anyone whose ambition (apart from becoming a famous international model, which goes without saying) is to set up an animal rescue foundation gets my vote, although the expressed ambition of Horka Lada, Miss Czech Republic, (on the right) 'to be a good people' would presumably also involve being nice to animals.

The Real Thing

World Tourism Day

Apparently it's World Tourism Day and European Heritage Day. I only know this because the Ministry of Tourism, Culture Youth and Sports is organising a series of events to mark these.

In Tirana, most of the events are taking place at the National Art Gallery on Thursday 29th. There is a exhibition of photographs running all day, and in the evening there is the 'Albanian Tourism Destination Mini-Fair'.