Skip to main content

European Week

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

ITS said…
Wait dude, whaaaaaa?

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?
Anonymous said…
kujt i thua dude ti? Pa edukate
Anonymous said…
"Hand-Painting: The EU in the Imagination of Albania Children."


One of the children had drawn the road of Albania towards the EU as a labyrinth.
olli said…
I managed to get through the whole of European week attending only one event. I would have gone to the coffee machine exhibit but wasn't free that night.

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.

Popular posts from this blog

Dy Rame Per Tirane

I was watching Top Channel last night, first the news, then Fiks Fare. According to them Tirana's citizens now have a choice not only between Rama and Olldashi, but also between Rama and Rama. A minor right-wing faction, Parti 'Balli Kombetar' , submitted papers to the election authorities registering their candidate, Akile Rama. The people on Fiks Fare got hold of the papers and sent a reporter and camera team to the address listed for Mr A Rama. After much ringing of the bell the gate was reluctantly opened by a middle-aged woman who refused to speak to the reporter and tried to close the gate on her. Back in the studio Saimiri and Doctori - the two presenters of Fiks Fare - revealed that Mr Akile Rama was 73 years old, in hospital, and did not know he was now a candidate for mayor. They also compared two documents - the papers submitted on his behalf, and a genuine document he had signed. The signatures were not even remotely similar. There was an interview with the lea

Albania and the Perils of the 21st Century

Another article on religion in Albania appeared yesterday. Patrick Poole, writing in the American Thinker , argues that Saudi funding for the construction of mosques and the training of imams is a threat to Albania, since these mosques and imams reflect the fundamentalist interpretation of Islam dominant in Saudi Arabia.

Guide Turistike

According to the World Travel and Tourism Council , the future is bright for Albania. The Council ranks Albania ninth out of 174 countries for tourism growth over the next ten years. A summary of the Council's report is available, as is the full report complete with many pages of graphs, charts and spreadsheets. This summer I have seen a number of tourists on the streets of Tirana. Some of them may well be Albanian expats, or people of Albanian descent returning home to visit family, but others are genuine 'foreigners'. Judging from their appearance, they are probably best described as 'independent travellers' - the kind of people who are not interested in luxury hotels or crowded beaches. This is a good start, but independent travellers are not the kind of big spenders that the tourist industry likes. In the longer term, if Albania wants to bring in the kind of free-spending tourists who currently holiday in Croatia or Slovenia, there will have to be a huge invest