Albania 17 May: Bozaj - Fushe Kruje
This morning we left Montenegro, saying goodbye to our friends from Montenegro, Natalie, Anna, Marco and Maja at the border. We are happy to have our friend Safet with us for the next few days.
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At the border, we met our coordinator for Albania, Tedi Vokshi and her 9-year-old grandson, Regli. Regli is very funny and we call him the "captain" of our team.
Our first ceremony was in the town of Shkoder, with 500 people waiting for us. We had representatives from several TV stations there, the Mayor and many, many pupils from the high school.
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The landscape was interesting, surrounded by mountains but offering a consistently flat running route.
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We started leap-frogging after the first ceremony. It was quite funny explaining leap-frogging to local policemen without an Albanian translator!
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The police escorted us for the whole day, taking care of traffic on the busy road we were running on.
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Our second event was in the afternoon. It took place in a small school, close to the city of Lezhe. The kids were already waiting for us and as soon as we arrived, they started traditional North Albanian-dancing.
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After 10 minutes or so, we were invited to present the run and then, as we left, some of the school athletes joined the team for a few kilometers out of the city.
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A huge storm-cloud was following us as we ran. It would start dropping then stop, again and again, but it didn't get us- we were simply too fast :).
When we finally arrived in Fushe Kruje at around 6 p.m., we had a short meeting with our organiser Tedi to discuss tomorrow's events. After that we drove to Tirana, where we spent the night after a long and exhausting day!
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Team Members:
Martin Leitner (Austria), Jana Chochlikova (Slovakia), Tatiana Chochlikova (Slovakia), Frank Foerster (Germany), Petr Machacek (Czech Republic), Amur Basic (Czech republic), Safet Belegovic (Montenegro)
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