this is the main mosque in Tirana.
Et hem Bej Mosque – Tirana – worth a visit
Tirana Albania walking around town
Tirana seems fairly busy but more like a small German town. The infrastructure is needing a lot of investment and there are some inconveniences like needing to buy bottled water since the tap water is not recommended as drinkable. But once you get inside a restaurant or café you find it very nice and clean and people are very polite and attentive. It’s actually a very pleasant city to walk around. The buses are not quite understandable since Google maps shows them with numbers and even the city designated transport maps show the buses with numbers corresponding to the routes, none of the buses have numbers indicating the route and many don’t show exactly where they’re going. The bus stops are just small standing signs with a bus icon. But I found people very helpful and responsive so if you were to take a bus just ask where the bus is going or tell them where you are going and they will let you know if you should be on that bus.
Inverness Scotland and Culloden, the Jacobites
Inverness is where you go to see Loch Ness and Culloden’s Moor where the Jacobites (believers that the son of James II from his second marriage should have inherited throne) led by Bonnie Prince Charlie challenged the brother of the king of England, George II, To a battle in a soggy and marshy terrain against modern Canon warfare on the English side. The story I didn’t know was that the followers of Charlie had almost marched into London and had a some chance of dethroning George. But they decided to go back to Scotland and on the way had some very successful battles. They almost won the crown but George’s brother a mass far superior weaponry.
jacobite is from the Latin form of the name James, Jacobus. It refers to the followers of the royal family from the second marriage of James II.
what Family tree shows is that when there were no more heirs through the first marriage of James II of England (Scottish by ancestry and the king of Scotland), they decided to grab George from Hanover who didn’t speak English. What I didn’t know until I saw this tree is that he was a blood descendent of James I And was not just picked from some obscure claim. George was the beginning of the house of Hanover which continues to this day.
Orkney islands the second time
the first visit to the Orkneys I didn’t have a car which made it extremely difficult to go and see what I wanted to see so I went back to the mainland, rented a car and went by ferry to the Shetlands and then back down to the Orkney before returning to the mainland.
Alness – Dornoch Firth Scotland
this is one of the very beautiful areas in the Highlands
Harris and Lewis – the outer Hebrides
one of the famous products from the island of Harris which is actually a continuation of Lewis, is Harris Tweed. I bought a Harris Tweed jacket in 1985 and I thought “Harris” was the name of the company produced the jacket. But it refers to handwoven wool tweed produced on the island of Harris and no other place in the world. Many products will import the tweed from Harris, create a product and ship all over the world and even back to Scotland. But the tweed needs to be certified by the association of Harris Tweed producers and therefore gets the standardized label “Harris Tweed”. Asking around I found there are probably over 200 people dedicated to weaving this product by hand.
Edinburgh Art Gallery- Scotland
I highly recommend visiting this museum in the very center of Edinburgh. It has all different kinds of art and it’s fun to walk-through.
north Shetland Islands – Scotland
Leipzig – Germany
OK, back to Germany. I wanted to stop over in Leipzig so here are some photos from a Sunday when everything is closed.
During his first years in office in Leipzig, Bach created new cantatas on a weekly basis – about 150 compositions in total. 30 more can be traced to later times. And these numbers do not include Bach’s Passions, cantatas on the annual occasion of welcoming a new city council or numerous compositions for special events. Bach also presented the works of other composers in the Leipzig churches as well as his own reworkings of some of them. The first performances of the St. Matthew Passion (1727) and the lost St. Mark Passion (1731) took place at St. Thomas Church, the St. John Passion (1724) and the Christmas Oratorio (1734/35) were premiered at St. Nicholas.
The interior of St. Thomas Church as it existed in Bach’s times has been removed almost entirely. This includes the two organs. The oldest parts of the large organ had been made in 1511. The smaller organ even dated back to 1489. Still remaining from Bach’s times are several pieces of Communion equipment, the portraits of superintendents in the choir, as well as the Löbelt cross and the baptismal font.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Wolfgang_von_Goethe
Scotland – the Picts
many carved Christian stones were erected in the British Isles between 700 and 800AD. Slabs like this one, however, are only found around the east coast of the northern half of Scotland. They were commissioned, designed and sculpted by elite members of Pictish tribes. Who were these people and what do we know of them? During the 6th and 7th centuries AD, the art of the Picts was to incise geometric and animal symbols onto boulders. In the 8th century their sculpture changed. They completely covered both surfaces of large stone slabs with carved designs, including a Christian cross. Fine Pictish metalwork, mainly in silver, has also been found but ittle else has survived. However, churchmen and poets from other nations wrote and spoke of them, so we do know something more about the Picts. These people were not invaders or incomers. They were descendants of the Celts who had lived in this country for over 1,000 years. The Picts were a grouping of small tribes living in the northern half of Scotland during the first thousand years AD. They were farmers, sailors, hunters and craftsmen who used many raw materials, including metals, wood and leather. Although we have not found Pictish farmhouses, byers or barns in Easter Ross, we know that they existed because place-names like Pitcalzean and Pitcalnie have survived.
Brochs. The large standing cylinders groups occupied.
The Norsemen came here in the 9th Century AD and gave us the names ‘Skelbo’ (‘scelbol’ – shell stead) and broch’ (‘borg’ – a strong fortified place), but the broch builders who lived here, were the people of the Iron Age. We are not sure if these stone towers were only built for defence – to keep people safe during an attack from invaders. On earlier maps, brochs were often called ‘Pictish Towers’. A Roman called Ptolemy recorded the names of the Iron Age tribes and the people were called ‘Picti’ – the painted ones. The map shows the location of all the broch sites in the north. Only a few brochs were built further south. Perhaps they were status symbols and built to impress?
