Today marks the start of European Week. I thought I would check on the website of the European Commission Delegation to Albania to see what is happening. As some of us have come to expect from any institution associated with the EU, they hadn't quite managed to provide any information yet, but not to worry, it's only the first day. There is a link to European Week, but it is for 2006.
So I turned instead to the website of the German Embassy. Needless to say they had links to the full schedule of events in both English and Albanian - but strangely not in German.
Some of the events sound tremendously dull - Lecture: EU Treaties - or slightly Soviet -Hand-Painting: The EU in the Imagination of Albania Children.
But there are some good films and concerts lined up. My personal favourite is Monday night's exhibition at the Tirana International Hotel. Italian Coffee Machines and 'Espresso' is An exhibition of coffee-making machines made in Italy over one century: history, design, feelings, tastes and scents of daily life in front of an Italian cup of coffee.
Comments
I don't get it. What does this event try to accomplish?
Is it to celebrate the facts that Albania is smack in the middle of Europe geographically and about 200 years behind in every other sense?
/irony anyone?
One of the children had drawn the road of Albania towards the EU as a labyrinth.
So I went to see a photo display in the Art Museum by a Greek photographer. The photographs were superb, but the staging and presentation was awful - it seemed that the Greek Embassy who sponsored the event and the Museum's curators were just going through the motions.