At last the photos!!!

Now here are the photos I wanted to upload in Albania.  Easy enough when one is at home on your own computer. This is the restaurant by a river that looks likes a ruined castle in the village of Mullett.  Tomor and Miranda took us here to talk through the arrangements for next years Ladies UNIKE conference.  

Ann with Miranda

and inside the restaurant.

On Friday evening Mira, Ida's sister, and her husband Gjergji took us to a fish restaurant in Tirana for a wonderful meal.

Prawns with pomegranate seeds

Then a raw fish salad with pomegranate seeds, though we think the fish had been cured in lime juice,

noodles with mussels

and then sea bream cooked with cherry tomatoes and olives

and finally fresh fruit for desert all In season, new oranges, mandarin oranges, persimmon and kiwi fruit.

The church in Elbasan have just finished installing underfloor heating pipes in the main hall and three rooms off this corridor.  The ceilings and walls have been plastered and painted and now the concrete is being laid on the floor covering the pipes.  It is left to cure for a month.  

The main boulevard in Elbasan on a fine November day. Blue sky and 22C at midday.

And finally, orange trees grow alongside several of the roads in central Elbasan.  They are a lovely sight with their bright orange fruit, almost like Christmas decorations. Now you have been able to see what we see and understand how enjoyable it is for us to be in Albania. 

What good is a blog with no photos?

In the early days of writing a blog I bought Blogging for Dummies thinking that it would help me. I soon discovered two things. It was largely focused on how you could use your blog to raise money by advertising and increasing your viewing audience, and secondly it assumed you were at home using your home computer and keyboard. I wasn't really interested in the first and I wasn't doing the second. My blogs are written on the move. And therein potentially lies a huge problem. I am writing this with my iPad. I can include photos if I have taken them with my iPad, but not otherwise. Whilst I can connect Ann's camera, to my iPad, the iPad of itself does not have the power to download the photos. So it tells me. So then I go to a local internet cafe, use their computer and keyboard, connect Ann's camera and hey presto,we have it! But life is not that simple. There used to be an Internet cafe on nearly every main street here in Elbasan, Albania but not any more. Worse still, try even FINDING an internet cafe in the Cyrillic writing nations, Macedonia, Serbia and so on and then you are confronted with a Cyrillic keyboard! The Internet cafe I have always used here in Elbasan has become a betting shop with a few computers upstairs and they now all have German keyboards. It is not just that the Y and Z have changed places and the @ sign is elsewhere, this computer try as I may wanted all script centred, in blue and underlined and it wouldn't fit the text round the photos. Agh! I gave up and came home.

So, I was going to show you the restaurant that looks like a ruined castle that Miranda and Tomor took us to on Friday morning to talk through next years Ladies UNIKE Conference.

And I was going to show you some of the wonderful food at a fish restaurant that Ida's Astley's (nee Sinakoli) sister Mira and her husband George took us to in Tirana on Friday night. I have never had a fish meal like it. It was absolutely superb!

And I was going to show you up to date photos of the underfloor heating that has been laid in the church here in Elbasan, and all the plastering and painting work they have done on the building, with some money we gave them last summer. It just needs now to have the doors and windows put in and the floors tiled and electric fitments so that the ground floor is finished off and they can use the main hall and three rooms for youth and childrens work.

How much better the blog would be with photos!!! Hopefully, normal service will resume as soon as possible.

Much love from Ann and me.

 

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