A few photos of Tirana

This week I am in Tirana, Albania, this little country of less than 3 million people, no bigger than Vermont and a former Stalinist dictatorship with a personality cult to its paranoid mad dictator Enver Hoxha who finally died in 1985. The communist lost power in 1990 and since the country has been on a mad rush to catch-up. Albania joined NATO last year, with enormous help from Canada and other member countries. It wants to join the E.U. in the near future. I am on my 9th trip to Albania on work related issues. What surprises me each time I come to Tirana (pop 680,341) is the amount of change in the City. Per example 3 years ago, power cuts were so frequent that you needed a flashlight all the time with you and an emergency generator for your office and home, now it is a thing of the past. The City Mayor has planted 2000 trees around the city and you can see these green streets everywhere. New buildings and the first large modern hospitals have just opened, the airport and the highway to the airport is brand new. Infrastructure projects are everywhere, modernization is the ''in'' word. Today I went to the major square in central Tirana and discovered a huge rebuilding project of 50 million dollars paid for by the Emir of Kuwait.
The Sheraton Hotel is also owned by Kuwaitis and the other major hotel the Rogner is Austrian. What strikes me about Albanians is that they appear to simply want to enjoy themselves and life. Their history from 1940 onwards was sad and depressing, now they are putting all that behind and looking forward.
Photos of central Tirana where all the official government buildings are located. I also include one photo of the infamous 80,000 concrete pillbox which were part of the defense plan of the dictator, they are everywhere in Albania and impossible to get rid of.
This one is in the garden of the Rogner hotel, there are two others in the garden and one across the street in front of the former official home of the communist era Prime Minister. The idea was that in case of invasion the whole population of the country would go into them and shoot at enemies. By the time Hoxha died, the country was a pariah on the international scene and had no friends even in the communist camp, Hoxha had fought with everybody and saw the world as against him. He also had a huge white marble pyramid mausoleum built as his official tomb in the centre of Tirana. Today the marble covering is gone and the derelict mausoleum stands abandoned, a monument to his madness.