Mercedes are everywhere - here in the capital Tirana and elsewhere across the country
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Saranda in the south: piles of rubbish and recently built blocks of flats as far as the eye can see
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Fresh tomatoes, cucumbers, plums and cherries: a farmers' market in Lushnja in central Albania
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Gjirokastro, one of the country's three UNESCO World Heritage Sites
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Tirana: begging on the street - in any weather
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The building boom in Saranda, the country's tourist centre
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Përmet in southern Albania: donkeys and mules remain the usual way of getting around in the countryside
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In a minibus, a so-called fourgon, you can get almost everywhere
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An improvised - and functional - bridge outside Përmet
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These ruins outside Saranda offer shade on a hot day
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Collecting rubbish by Lake Ohrid, on the border with Macedonia
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Sit on this for a long time and you'll feel it: rustic park benches in Përmet
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Satisfied with the catch: fishermen near Pogradec on Lake Ohrid
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Back to the stall in rural southeast Albania
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The market in the southeast Albanian town of Korça offers almost everything, from shoes and clothes to cosmetics, food and old TVs, bikes and CDs.
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Bikes for hire in the middle of Tirana
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The station in Tirana has only two platforms - enough for Albania's hardly overloaded rail network
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For a long time Albania was a blank spot and isolated from the rest of the world. Today, the country is heading towards Europe – albeit at a slow pace. Poverty, unemployment and structural shortcomings remain, but so do beautiful stretches of land, untouched nature and hope.
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Gaby Ochsenbein worked at Swiss Radio International and later at SWI swissinfo.ch from 1986 to 2018. She lives in Bern.
If you want to start a conversation about a topic raised in this article or want to report factual errors, email us at english@swissinfo.ch.
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Tourism in Albania: a building site with potential
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“Albania is not yet on the radar, but with its stunning coast, its history, its ancient ruins, his mountains and its unspoiled nature mean that it has a lot of potential,“ says Alexander Wittwer, since January 2013 the Swiss ambassador in Tirana. Albania may have potential, but it also has a bad reputation: it is associated…
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In the 1970s and 1980s the Stalinist regime had hundreds of thousands of steel and concrete bunkers built, out of fear of foreign invasion. Today they have lost their military purpose. Some were dismantled and removed, others are slowly mouldering away or have been covered by vegetation; others have found a use as storerooms or…
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Lushnja, home to around 50,000 people, is located about 100 kilometres southwest of the Albanian capital, Tirana, in an important agricultural area. The vocational school is on the outskirts of town: a three-storey building where about 700 apprentices train as car mechanics, electricians, plumbers and heating engineers. The Swisscontact development organisation is heavily involved in…
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