Berat and bud puns

We got our first furgon of the trip from Gjirokaster to Berat - "City of a Thousand Windows". A furgon is basically a minibus or van and forms an important part of the Albanian public transport system. The way it works is you wander to the general furgon area of a town and find a furgon going to the place you want to go to (or going in the direction you want to go). Then you get on and wait for the furgon to fill up, and once it's full it drives off. It sounds like a shambles and kind of is but it works surprisingly well and beats figuring out bus timetables then structuring your day around them. Furgons are a very cheap form of transport, plus you're guaranteed loud Albanian pop music blasting from the speakers for a bit of atmosphere.
We were quite taken with the word furgon and spent half our furgon ride making up bad puns. I thought I'd share some of these and maybe get a few cheap laughs:
"furgon but not forgotten"
"furgon with the wind"
"a furgon conclusion"
etc etc.
Matthew suggested I try to weave the puns into the Berat post and I said it was too nerdy and I couldn't bear it, to which he replied "couldn't BERAT!!"

Oh dear.

Arriving in Berat, our kindly furgon driver dropped us outside a well-located hotel called "Hotel Palma", which is where we ended up staying for the next few nights. From the outside it looked tacky with a big incongruous palm tree and blocky facade, but inside was quite nice and had lovely views all around of the pretty old town and river. I figured it can be good to stay in the most garish-looking place because then you don't have a view of it. We actually really enjoyed it there - the staff were very friendly, we had an excellent people-watching balcony and there was a nice breakfast served on the rooftop verandah/restaurant.

Berat is a very special and relatively undiscovered town (actually, it's hailed as Albania's prettiest town and would probably be on the itinerary of anyone travelling in Albania, so perhaps I should say Albania is relatively undiscovered). Berat is so lovely and unique that I'm sure it will become a real tourist hub one day. So get in quick people! On this trip I have embraced the hypocricy of being a tourist-avoiding tourist, it's almost always hard to enjoy a place when it feels like a tourist theme park instead of somewhere that people actually live. Anyway, here are some pictures taken wandering around Berat's old town on our first morning there.

 

In the afternoon, we went up to the old fortress which looks over the town. While wandering around, we were sprung upon by a man called Vasil who began parading us about on an impromptu tour. It was obvious we were going to be expected to give him some money for this service but he was a laugh and we gleaned a bit of history through his broken English so we decided to go along with it. He showed us some amazing sites and also insisted on taking corny photos of us with panoramas in the background, etc.

After following Vasil around for a while on his slightly chaotic, excited tour, we sat down for a coffee. Matthew had his sketch book and gestured to Vasil that he would like to draw him. Instead, Vasil wanted to have a go and drew a sketch of us instead!

And Matthew drew a picture of Vasil drawing a picture of us....