between the lands

Jessica and Andrew’s travel journal

The Land of Castles (and yummy fresh food)0

Posted by Jessica in ALBANIA, CROATIA, MONTENEGRO, MACEDONIA (October 22, 2007 at 5:19 pm)

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Entering Albania from Greece was like going back to the middle east.
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Greece has shiny new busses, and Albania has run-down minivans that serve as shared taxis to get you around (and they are cheap!). While Greece was the culmination of a long return to the ‘western’ world’, Albania was more eastern feeling, and much less developed.
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First stop in ALBANIA is Berat, an old city with an inhabited hilltop fortress. You walk up a worn shiny marble-paved road to arrive at the ‘castle’ where there are whole neighborhoods living up there within the walls.
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We checked out another ‘typical Turkish house’ displaying ottoman-style home features and furnishings, CIMG9366 thousand windows.jpg
and damned if in the yard there weren’t a LIVE TURKEY!
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ANDREW SEZ:
For those young readers out there, and those who are geographically challanged, we are now traveling in the countries which used to be known as Yugoslavia.
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This means a few things: First of all, they used to be communist.
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Religion in this part of the world used to be either illegal or suppressed. So although we occasionally heard the call to prayer, (more…)