June 12th - Goodbye Bucharest, Hello Albania

We packed and repacked, weighed and reweighed our bags. Each bag had to be less than 10 kg, and we were allowed only one personal piece of carry on baggage. Finally we were ready to depart the apartment at 9.30 so we summoned an Uber, locked the doors and off we went. 

Well, the Uber driver had scant regard for our ears and even less for our blood pressure as we wove in and out the traffic at high speed and I spent the entire time in prayer. 

We finally breathed a sigh of relief and leapt with aclarity out of the uber and into the airport. Once we found the correct queue after a few false starts, we discovered the scales declared all our bags as less than 8 kg and they were whisked away into the body of the plane. 

We finally relaxed and waited for our departure to Albania. This was without incident, though it was amusing to watch several passengers change their seats according to where they wanted to sit rather than the seats assigned to them. As Selah was seated a few rows away, we followed suit.








  

Upon landing and going through customs we grabbed a coke from KFC ($NZ4.20) and waited for Xaku our host for our time in Krage pronounced Krea. I imagine I'm in Korea and get it pretty well right. 

Xaku's daughter Anna was driving for us as Xaku doesn't drive and it took about an hour to get up to their mountain home. 

After getting our bags sorted, and finding our beds etc, we went out with Xaku to walk his two dogs while his wife and daughter made dinner. When we returned they had gone out so we ate the spag bol, watched the sun set and went to bed. 



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Vienna 31st May, and starting our cruise

Image
 We had decided the night before that we would rise early, check of the airbnb and start the day with coffee in a cafe somewhere. We were away by 7.30, and got an uber into the central train station so we could store our luggage for the day. This cost 3.50 Euro, so was a great option. We then grabbed a coffee and sat outside to plan our route. The hop on hop off bus won, as it would give us a way to get to other places as well as learning about other places on the way.  The first route took over two hours, wandering all around the city, over the Danube and back again. Lots of historical information about the places we passed and then it was time for lunch. We found hot food for sale at Spar Supermarkets, and tables and bar stools also inside. This was fantastic as it had just started raining.  Well fed, we heading over to Selah's choice: The Museum of Kriminology. It was very well researched, with lots of authentic displays and newspaper articles from the last couple of h...
Read more

Budapest Tuesday 4th June. Synagogue and Parliament

Image
 The day we met other kiwis. Doing the same tour in reverse, we happened to meet with them in the garden of the Parliament.  The Parliament was amazing and spectacular and incredible and overwhelming and and and ...ostentatious and there was no information anywhere of how much this edifice cost the people of Hungary. It might as well be a castle. And there's no drop-bears. How odd to have missed this important detail. Sometimes I thank God that we live in New Zealand with the somewhat embarrassing Beehive.  Bruce took these photos. The tour cost NZ$108 for the 3 of us.  In the morning we went to the Grand Synagogue. This cost NZ$148. It's been an expensive day.  The synagogue tour was better as it spoke to the heart. It spoke of a people, so willing to be counted as citizens, that they gave up their customs and built a synagogue, employing a Christian architect from Vienna. A synagogue that looks like a Catholic church, with symbols and imagery that would not lo...
Read more

One day in Zurich makes a jetlagged person stumble

Image
Leaving Darwin for Singapore...... In Singapore. this is a glass topped pool. Hard to photograph.  So, here we are. We've arrived on the continent. Zurich airport is much like any other, except, like Singapore there are trains to take you to one place to the next - in this case to where we picked up our luggage.  Having collected all four pieces we headed over to customs. There wasn't any. What there was was the clear bright sky, pavement and directions to the train station. A few false starts later and we were aboard the train to the Zurich town centre, where we wasted some time because we couldn't find lockers to put suitcases in, and then we couldn't work out how it worked. How it worked was that you paid for 6 hours and when we returned 10 hours later, we paid for 3 more hours. hmmm. In any case, The train station is reminiscent of Sydney Central station, except that 7am in Zurich is crowded with people, and we when returned at 6 pm, there's about 10 times as ma...
Read more