albania!!

First of all, the keyboards are crazy so punctuation may be lacking in these enrties....

Albania so far - we flew into Tirane the capital and stayed there for the night at Hostel Albania. Got in trouble pretty quickly because we picked the grapes and pears immediately - a little excited at the prospect of fruit of the vine/tree!  Very good fruit though. 

Caught up with a couchsurfer (local albanian) over some traditional albanian food -meatballs, old coleslaw, and yoghurt and wandered the streets for the evening.

An afternoon and night in Tirane was enough so we caught a furgon (minibus) down to Berat to find our place of work for the next few weeks. Berat is a lovely little town with a river running through it, mountains in the background, small cobbled streets and walkways, and cute old albanian people still wearing the traditional "communist uniform" of dark dresses, head scarfes for the ladies, and tweed jackets and rimmed hats for the blokes. Very picturesque town. 

We have been working hard at our hostel for a few days now and picked up the ropes fairly easily. The hardest thing to deal with is the plumbing here - the water is turned off everyday for atleast a few hours and we have to suss out a complicated pump system to keep the hostel in water.....which still usually runs out so alot of the time we are without water which can be interesting! quite hard to explain to guests to!

other than its pretty easy stuff. Jamie and I have been cooking up a storm for the hostel dinners and getting heaps of compliments on the homemade bread etc. We are pulling the manager in line and suggesting alot of things he could do to improve his business - without being rude of course. He is not going to want us to leave!

We are here for two more weeks and then we have a hit with another farm in southern Tuscany, Italy. Need to start brushing up on our Italian!