Monday's Activities

Our hotel cooks were very creative with the balsamic vinegar with our breakfast this morning. These eggs were delicious.  Mine was the bird, Lucy's the butterfly, my mom's the "Dinasty" (our hotel name).

This morning after breakfast, we went with the Homers, the humanitarian missionaries, and President Reber (my Dad's mission president) and saw some of the LDS meeting houses here in Tirana. The top picture is in the chapel of one of the churches. The bottom picture is of me in the young women's room. It was really cool to see all of the personal progress books and the young women's theme in Albanian. They only have two young women, but in the branch in the Slovakian church I went to last year, they didn't have any.

This is what the church building looks like from the outside.  Many of the buildings in Tirana are painted with bold, bright colors because the former mayor was an artist and wanted to change the look of the city so he gave everyone bright paint for their buildings. Some of the buildings are even patterned!

Next, the Homers took us up to the top of this mountain with a beautiful view of the city of Kruje and other surrounding cities. This is also where a faction of the Muslim people come to offer sacrifices. In the third picture down of Lucy, she's in front of where they kill the lamb to offer it as a sacrifice. She was totally obsessed with all of the stray cats up there (I don't know if you can see the one behind her). The first two pictures of me are in where they light their candles and say prayers. There was also a room with their  "holy water".  It was a pretty cool experience.

The Albanian market place under Skanderbeg's castle in Kruje was really fun. There was so many authentic, fun things there. Lucy had a lot of fun picking out things to use for her country report that she will do on Albania next year. 

We stopped by a rug shop and watched this lady making a rug. It's absolutely amazing how she keeps track of all of those different yarns!

Lucy and I got to ride some donkeys on our way up to Skanderbeg's castle. It was scary and fun at the same time. Kinda hard to stay on a donkey that was trained to haul rocks instead of people! They were using the donkeys to haul big rocks out of the castle for an archaeological restoration of the Roman type baths. It was cool and we got to meet a lot of the workers and archaeologists (and donkeys, chickens, cats, etc.).