br23 blog - minsk, belarus

“Muslims in Albania’s northern city of Shkoder are opposing plans to erect a statue to Mother Teresa, the ethnic Albanian Catholic nun in line for elevation to sainthood by the Vatican.
The dispute is unusual for Albania, where religion was banned for 27 years under the regime of dictator Enver Hoxha and where religious harmony […]

TIRANA (Reuters) - When a politician speaks, the public may feel they have heard it all before, but this has taken on a whole new meaning in Albania.
An apparent cut-and-paste in a keynote speech by Prime Minister Sali Berisha had him mouthing the same lines spoken by his famously verbose predecessor Fatos Nano, Albanian […]

My wife seems to have a lots of fun lately. Last week, she had a Thanksgiving dinner at a high-tech million-dollar house of a former vice-president of Microsoft (who has been a Microsoft’s VP for 10 years, now retired and moved to Czech Republic). He seemed to like her and even served her coffee personally. […]

“Do business in Albania,” ran a joke popular among German businessmen, “your car’s already there.”
Albanians are so sick of police doing nothing about the theft and hijacking of luxury cars that they’ve taken to setting up their own informal networks of hot-lines and roadblocks.
When a big new Mercedes was stolen at gunpoint earlier this […]

After all, all those Balkan jokes about Albanian military were not totally off the mark:
Albania’s antiquated air force of Soviet-designed MiG aircraft, which killed 35 Albanian pilots but no enemies, is finally on its way to the museum and the scrapheap
A satellite of Soviet Union and China during the first decades of the Cold War, […]