Soni and her mom wanted to give me a treat today, so they took me up to Durres, which is about an hour's drive (bus ride) away. There's an amphitheatre you can climb all about. It's more of a "beach" destination, apparently, we didn't actually get out to the beach, but we went to a little dock near the amphitheatre to see the sea, though.

Durres was far more quiet and peaceful than Tirana, far fewer people, far fewer cars, clean air... quite relaxing. We went to the local archaeological museum. A former culture minister (who is an archaeologist) was there showing people around. His wife hard-sold us a book on Illirian culture he'd written. She was nice despite the hard-sell.

Book is interesting, but it has a definite "searching for the thesis" feel to it. That is, the goal is to show when the Ilirian (Albanian) identity was formed. Not a huge detraction. Favourite quote so far "All of the Albanian archaeologists, whose number had now [1958-1960] grown to eight..."

Our flight leaves at 5am or something insane like that, so we'll need to get to sleep very early tonight. We hop over to Milan and from there haul over to Toronto. I couldn't sleep a few days ago, so I got some work done for the provisioning server project, mostly just factoring the billing system project so that the code can be reused. The kind of work you can do in the middle of the night after you mistakenly accept 4 turkish coffees after 4pm.