Poor Tom, look at the key they gave him. You could look right through the lock into his room. Plus he had to use this key to lock the inside of his room and then he couldn’t get out!!
I love these mosaics.
We finally got into the birth place of mother Theresa. She was born in Skopje, Albania but the now Skopje is in north Macedonia — they keep changing the borders.. Her original name of Gonxha Agnes Bojaxhiu. But when she left for the nunnery at 18, she was enamored with a nun named Theresa and she took her name.
Mother Theresa was a Nobel prize winner. She went to the British Isles when she was 18 years old and then moved to India. It was there she decided she wanted to work with the poorest of poor. She started an entirely new order of nuns with brand new uniforms that looked like what the poor people wore in India. She started with only twelve other nuns and now there are thousands world-wide.
We sat quietly in the upstairs chapel where the pope had said mass in the last several years.
Mother Teresa looks like she’s in the light of God. And I just want a little of her grace to fall on me.
Click.
This was a train station at the time of the great earthquake and all that is left standing is the front wall. What’s interesting is the clock stopped at the exact moment of the earthquake. It was in the morning and Flori remembers it.
I thought this was an interesting statue. I don’t know what it means.
By this time in the trip we were tired of the local food and we decided to eat pasta.
We drove to Ohrid and got another tour guide to give us a fantastic tour. Here are more amphitheaters and churches. But this time we got a lot more back story about the areas we were looking at.
I love their country flag.
These were the ruins of 100’s years old university and where they invented the Cyrillic alphabet. Under the roof was a mosaic from that period. They are currently building a church over the ruins as they get the funding.
I was talked into climbing this mountain stairs in order to get a better picture of this church. Tom said he was going to save his knees for later. These churches are made of stone and they are never painted. They are beautiful unadorned.
Here I am waving from above. I guess it was good exercise.
We saved ourselves more walking by hiring this fisherman, turned tour guide boatman, to take us to our next spot.
Beautiful views of the church.
The homeowners would be charged real estate taxes on the size of the footprint of the building and so therefore they made the first story small and they kept making each level bigger to save taxes. Note the street lamps are built in the same shape as the houses are.
This was a baby Saint Sophia compared to the one Liz and I saw in Turkey. The icons they discovered are now being preserved.
I had already seen a paper making “company” in possibly Armenia but I was impressed with the fact I watched her ink that copper plate and run it through on this piece of paper and so I bought the actual paper you see for $10 USD.
We drove down here to see the Bay of bones museum only to find out they were closed on this day.😪
I was so so so over seeing another monastery but it was in the program and so we saw it. We had a long beautiful walk and saw some more lovely stone buildings. We also saw tourists paying to put their ear on the top of a block of something. We assume it was the body of some holy person. We also saw them putting money down to go into a little room which I believed was a confessional but Flori said there was only one priest in the whole monastery and he was collecting tickets allowing people to enter the church.
More scenic views. AAUUGGHH!!!!!
We arrived alive in Tirana again and for the third time and stayed at the Starlight hotel. It felt very comforting since we were there for the third time and we knew the routine. We had dinner downstairs and then got ready to leave at 2:00 AM to the airport.
After the stress of being told I didn’t have a flight, it turns out I did have a flight and the rest was quite easy.
I got out of the countries quite cheaply. I already had a Montenegro mug, so here are the Albania, Macedonia and Kosovo mugs. The man in Kosovo wanted me to buy the double headed eagle mug which is the old flag (because their hearts are still Albanian). But I am into currently accurate information.
The cookies were for my dad and we’ve already discovered one of the decks of card’s suits are too little to read.
This was not one of my favorite trips. And I have been known to flip someone off when they mention Albania. I’m not sure I’m just getting jaded and tired of travel…or it was a bad country to visit.
If you want to leave a comment, I am the only one to see it.
Safe Travels!!!
Linda Jeanne