From time to time I transform into a camera-toting tourist and take pictures. Then I post them using this tag.
When the sun went down, the lights came on, and the buildings looked different. I took pictures of many of the places I saw in the morning as I walked back to the hotel, but in reverse order!
See below for photos of:
I’d learned about Bunkart and Bunkart 2 while browsing listicles about tourism in Tirana. Bunkart is a bunker used as an art gallery somewhere farther from the center of the city where I was wandering around (and around) on my first day as a tourist in Tirana. Bunkart 2 is a history museum. I stumbled across the entrance (well, actually the exit and *then* the entrance). Upon learning that entry tickets were only 7 Euros (or 700 lek), I bought one and went in. I learned a lot.
Albanians were spied on by secret police, sent to work camps where many died, or were just executed, in the not-too-distant past. The security agency was called Sigurimi.
This museum was by no means world-class, but, located as it is underground in a series of small rooms, it does what it set out to do: press upon visitors the need for freedom.
Albania was constitutionally atheist under communist rule and religious people suffered persecution. Now, religion is back. On my first afternoon in Tirana, on my wanderings, I saw a new church, an old mosque that somehow survived, and a mosque so new it hasn’t opened yet.
See below to find out who the guy on the horse is and see photos of:
When I woke up in Tirana, I had a vague plan to walk around and see some of the sites I’d seen in a couple of listicles on my phone in the airport while waiting to board the plane in Frankfurt. I had no idea just how far I’d walk, or how much I’d see!
Luckily, the hotel was right in the city center, and the weather was fantastic: a little cold, but amazingly bright and sunny, and I saw in real life almost everything the internet told me to look for.
See below for photos of:
We did not go to Albania on a train. That was just the first part of a long journey!
For the first time in a long time, I got on a plane (two planes, actually) to go somewhere for fun that wasn’t my hometown. But first I got in a taxi, and on a train, and in another taxi, and spent the night in an airport hotel, and took a shuttle bus, lol.
Why Albania? Siqi was invited to a workshop, and I decided to take leave from work and go too. I’d never been to Albania!
We left on the evening of Tuesday, January 23 and returned in the afternoon on Monday, January 29. We had three full days in Albania, which I’m posting about separately, and then we did the whole journey again in reverse.
See below for more on the journey from Hangzhou (to Shanghai to Frankfurt) to Tirana, Albania.
Continue reading A Trip from Hangzhou, China to Tirana, Albania
I posted about the trees that bloomed at the start of spring. Here are some non-tree flowers that came along subsequently. I’m astonished at the beauty and variety! There are roses, irises, lotuses, and many kinds I don’t know the names of. It’s so good to be able to walk around and just look at this stuff. There’s a lot to see.
On the way back from our visit to Suzhou, Siqi wanted to stop at the lake. We more or less achieved that, but things didn’t go as planned that day. See below for a few photos of the lake and a strange story or two about our journey back home.
The inner area of this Taoist Temple in Suzhou required buying tickets, but the area around it was already pretty interesting, so we didn’t go in, we just took a lot of photos around it. I really like the stylized dragons on the gate in front.
Every place is a place, and connecting places, there are roads. Along the roads, there are trees, plants, buildings, bridges, lights, power lines, signs, and maybe animals. There are millions of combinations of things you can see out the window of a car. And if you’re not driving, you can take photos. Which is what I did on the road to Suzhou.
My boyfriend Siqi drove us to Suzhou for a short vacation when we had a long weekend for the Dragon Boat Festival national holiday here in China. Suzhou is famous for “Venice-like” water towns, ancient residential complexes with exquisitely landscaped courtyard gardens, and the city museum adjacent to the city’s most famous garden.
We didn’t plan very far in advance—in fact, we didn’t plan much at all—but we still enjoyed our time. The main tourist sites were completely booked and/or full of people, but we were lucky with the weather, and were able to amuse ourselves just fine by walking around in the historic district. Now that we’re more familiar with Suzhou’s geography, we know where to go when we go back, which is easy to do since Suzhou is just next door to Hangzhou.
I took photos mainly of:
