Destination Durrës

Day 2

Saturday, 6 July 2024

After flying through the day and into a new morning, we arrived in Zürich, Switzerland a little bit after 6 am local time — which felt strange since we had left Knoxville, Tennessee, just a little bit after 6 am the day before. (Switzerland — and Albania — are six hours ahead of Eastern US time.) Needless to say, we were feeling a bit weary at this point.

Scott and Frieda Gureck and Tim Bubar shortly after landing in Zürich.

The Zürich airport is surrounded by gently rolling hills with the Swiss Alps in the distance. Gorgeous!

After a short layover, we were on our third and final flight — to Tirana, Albania.

On deck Tirana.

Statue honoring Mother Teresa who was born into a Kosovar Albanian family.

While food and sleep were high priorities at this point, higher priorities were caffeine and linking up with the rest of our mission team.

Scott, Tim, Altin Kurraj (Radstock Balkans Director), Charlotte, Joe, Esina Kurraj and Frieda.

According to this Wikipedia entry, “In 2016, Albania surpassed Spain as the country with the most coffeehouses per capita in the world. In fact, there are 654 coffeehouses per 100,000 inhabitants in Albania; a country with only 2.5 million inhabitants.”

There is espresso you might get in the U.S. and then there is the espresso you get in Albania. Let’s just say it’s a night and day difference with the latter being simply outstanding!

The first of what would end up being about 4-5 espressos per day during this mission trip LOL!

After this quick caffeine stop, we rented a couple of cars and headed to our final destination of the day — Durrës.

Ever heard of Dacia? We had not but these Romanian-made cars proved to be quite comfortable.

We arrived Durrës shortly after noon and set out for much-needed food. The sleep part would have to wait.

I completely forgot to get a photo of the wonderful place we had lunch — probably because by the time we did eat, I could no longer think clearly. We had not had anything food since a tiny dinner on the flight from Chicago to Zurich and I was delirious. Now, properly caffeinated and fed, we all had to push through the sleep deprivation since this was our only day to see and experience Durrës before heading south in the morning.

On my bucket list was the 2nd century Roman amphitheater that sits in the heart of downtown Durrës.

Interestingly, they were setting up for some sort of concert. Two thousand years of using this venue for entertaining the masses!

Here are some other sights we experienced today:

Durrës is an amazing seaside city with a fascinating recorded history of nearly three millennia. We very much enjoyed this brief sightseeing opportunity before heading south tomorrow to ‎⁨Vlorë⁩ where we’ll be doing the church retreat.

See you tomorrow!