more from saranda...

So, it's not your average tourist destination, but these parts of Albania are really beautiful and I think tourism is on the rise. The second day we were there a huge boatload of (mostly European) tourists came over from Corfu for the day, and they loved it. Tell your friends! :)

About 40 minutes outside Saranda is Butrint, a national park (and a UNESCO world heritage site - woo!) that is a city dating to the 8th century BC. I was fully alert and feeling great after sitting upright on a bus for 9 hours the previous night through windy mountain roads (ha ha).
Nice views from the site and the castle on the hill above.Another friend of Nicole's met us for lunch by the sea, a FABULOUS fish meal. The fish we ate is really expensive in Greece, so we enjoyed it that much more - caught hours before in the sea we were looking at, and SO CHEAP. Fish, mussels, calamari, etc. The next day we tried spaghetti (Rocco, being Italian, knew of this great pasta place) made with the black ink from squid. Interesting!
The next day we drove out to Ksamil to swim. They brought the sand here to make this beach. There are three small islands that you can swim between, all gorgeous (though obviously not camera-friendly). It was wonderful and the weather was great. This is where my paddle-boat moment took place. :) Rocco and I got by ok, with his Italian and my Spanish, as we paddled out to the farthest island, avoiding the currents that he said would take us straight to Italy. (Would that really be so bad?)
Saturday afternoon we caught the ferry (barely - they had to hold the boat for us as we were obviously having too much fun to be bothered with being there on time) to Corfu...

Agioi Saranda (40 Saints)

It was time to exit again, and Albania is one of the closest and cheapest non-EU destinations. I went with two friends, one of whom lived in Albania for five years, so she arranged most of the trip, which included a stop-over in Corfu (more on that later). It was such a wonderful weekend, minus the 9 hour overnight bus ride...we didn't want to come back to Athens. :(
Saranda is a small city right on the sea across from the Greek island Corfu. Nicole lived there for two years (after three years in the capital Tirana), so we spent lots of time seeing friends of hers for coffee and seeing what there is to see outside the town. It was interesting visiting Albania knowing the issues between Greeks and Albanians (largely based on experiences with Albanian immigrants in Greece), and it was fun to find warm, welcoming, friendly people - who love foreigners! That is always a welcome change. :) Since the fall of Communism in the '90s, Saranda has tried to become a tourist destination, with loads of hotels popping up along the coast that have yet to see much business.
Nicole was there when the waves of Kosovo refugees came in 1999. 4000 people came to this town, farther south than they wanted to come and too close for comfort to Greece, but there were so many people that the other cities were overwhelmed. They lived in bombed out hotels and other destroyed buildings (left over from the war in '97 that are still there today). Along with a handful of missionaries, foreign aid workers, Nic and a few locals, about 20 people total, worked with this population during their stay in Saranda.

Rocco (see previous post!) is an Italian there who works with the Catholic nuns running a center and school for kids. He has a car, so we spent most of our time with him. :) We visited the beautiful center where he works (the Catholic church is not short on funds!) and talked with the head nun there.

As our conversations usually do, this one turned to trafficking, which is an enormous problem in Albania. Not only are the girls lured away -- there are no young women in Saranda; they all leave for better-paying jobs elsewhere that can often turn into trafficking situations -- but the young men are also easily tempted into the life of the traffickER. With so few work opportunities in this poor country, the ease of smuggling women across the borders and the lucrative paycheck that comes is very alluring. As we see with women who have spent any time at all in the industry, the money becomes addicting for the men as well.

Ok, too long, more later. :)

I had a moment...

Ksamil, outside Saranda, Albania

Do you ever have those moments where you suddenly take an outsider's look at your current circumstances and are struck by the hilarity and/or unlikeliness and/or strangeness of it all?

Saturday afternoon, around 1:00 pm (who knows really) ...
I found myself on a dolphin-shaped paddle boat ...
on the sea ...
in Albania ...
with a hairy Italian man in a speedo ...
named Rocco ...
who spoke no English.

Ha! I had to laugh. :)