the only stamp in my passport

New York holiday planning continues. We've applied for our short stay visas which got me thinking about my empty passport. Despite owning my current passport for 5 and a half years there's only one solitary stamp inside it. I got it when I travelled by ferry from Italy to Albania. My 5 days in Albania were certainly an eye-opener, not a holiday as such, more of an endurance test. 

Don't get me wrong, the scenery was beautiful, I ate v.well, met some nice people and I learned a lot - the culture of eastern europe was something of a shock for my naive 21-year-old-self. The problem for me was that I was thrown into something I hadn't been prepared for, under different circumstances it could've been a great holiday... I came back from Albania feeling enlightened but also annoyed. To get rid of all the pent-up anger I wrote 5 pages about my experience, not all of it bad. It wasn't the country's fault that I felt so rubbish about my time there, by any means, but if you read what I wrote you'd never what to go there either. Now, four years on, I see what happened to me as a learning curve about a good number of things, I also realised that I never really looked back over the photos I took, mostly because I didn't want to think about the trip. Like I said though, the Albanian scenery was quite spectacular so, here, as some sort of 'moving on' thing, I'm bringing the pics into the light.

  

Hills, beaches, even more coast, restaurants over the sea, old houses left to crumble, Tirana, an abandoned factory at the side of the road.