Albania's national museum in the days before Michael Palin.
Michael Palin's latest travelogue for the BBC, which aired six months ago on the Travel Channel, somehow eluded us until we discovered it while posting our blog about Ballooning in Cappadocia. So we bought and have just begun watching the DVD.
We found mostly admiring reviews in The Age and elsewhere, including an adoring World Hum interview. Still, it's hard to escape the strong first impression that Michael is slowing down. There's lots of interminable round-the-table discussions with Authentic Drunkards in one Balkan land or another, and more than one feature of questionable cosmic relevance, most painfully the never ending talk with the mysterious reader of coffee residue in Turkey.
We reserve judgment for now because among other thingss, we haven't seen the episode including Moldova yet and Moldova's on the long list of places Palin has beaten us to. We hope he'll convince us to hasten our visit there.
We had the pleasure of seeing Michael Palin give a small talk in Atlanta some time ago. When we asked him where he likes to go for private time off, he talked about his house in the French countryside.
It was fabulous to see Palin's visit to Tirane, Albania. When we visited in 1993, Albania was still a slightly eerie Former Communist Land, as the picture above suggests. We saw in Michael Palin's New Europe that that museum's still there, and looking good. Palin did an interview with that same facade - and nowadays loud, jammed, jostling traffic - in the background. Put us down for another visit to Tirane - soon.
*****
See Albania fifteen years ago on EarthPhotos.com.
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