Well here we are! The last day! :(

I had just written the top paragraph here but lost it all coz the session timed out so I'm not gonna write it again :) It was something about being packed and out the hotel by 9:30am and off to a joint churches youth meeting at Dritte e Bottes (Church) till lunchtime.

Hopefully that will suffice for now :) It was good though.

Sian: In the morning we got up at a stupidly early hour to travel with Egroni (driver) to Louise’s school, GDQ. We started the school day with two assemblies for the kids, age between five and fourteen. They were getting very into it, dancing to Matt’s songs and providing lots of willing volunteers!!!

Matt and Jim led separate drama workshops for (English school) years one to four. They all seemed to enjoy making a lot of noise and joined in with plenty of enthusiasm. This was followed by “recess”, where we played football and “stuck in the mud” until we pretty much collapsed on the floor with exhaustion!

Well, back on schedule now as we are now at the end of Day 5. We had our sheduled day off today and it was quite a contrast to yesterday, but good to carry on experiencing all the different places in Albania.

We were up nice and early again this morning and went for a short walk, but with good cause becasue we were treated to the Stephen Centre which is an American owned cafe enabling us to have a full range of breakfasts!  I went for the full English, yum! :)

(once again sorry for late post, I planned to blog this up this morning (Thursday) but I couldn’t get a connection)

So, day 4 was split into 2 halves. The morning was spent at the church painting and the afternoon was spent visiting the Roma community. 

We managed to completely re- paint the main church hall, including the ceiling, which was a good old combination of fun and hard work! We had people with long rollers do the ceiling, short rollers doing the walls, paintbrushes doing the edges and several people re-painting a storage cupboard. It was a veritable episode of “Changing Rooms” if ever I’ve seen one. :)

(sorry if you were expecting this last night, I couldn't get to a computer)

So today we went to Kruye (Croo-ya) which is an town up in the mountains about an hours drive out of Tirana. It was one of our 2 day's off where we go and experience some of the other places in Albania.  There is a little street with all sorts of shops etc leading up to the main attraction which is the Castle of ...Skendenberg (spelling??!). This Skenden... bloke is highly regarded by all Albanians and seen as a hero because he fought off the Turks for 30 years before eventually being overwhelmed. There is also a feeling that the rest of Europe owes Albania a debt of gratitude for Skendenberg's efforts as it is thought by some that if it wasn't for him then we all might be Turkish.

Hi All.

 Day 2 and we've had much wetter weather today but still good fun!  We had a bit of a history and cultural lesson this morning from Graham (the pastor of Louise' church) followed by a much needed language learning session to help us not offend everybody we meet!

 We got here!

 This is our first post after the end of (full) day 1. 

 We had a pretty good trip on Saturday even though the flight was delayed for a hour. The day took a turn for the worst when we realised we got to the hotel with only 6 mins left of the rugby world cup final, and subsequently even worse when we realised we weren't gonna win!! :(  Nevertheles, we had a good evening and the hotel is fine and all is well. :)