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Letter from Albania: Enver Hoxha's legacy, and the question of tourism {Gadling}
Jun 27th 2008 6:19PM Ooops, for some reason I thought his initials were JB and didn't see that they were JW. Sorry about that.
Letter from Albania: Enver Hoxha's legacy, and the question of tourism {Gadling}
Jun 27th 2008 6:13PM What a poorly written piece of journalism. The author fails to understand even the simplest of cultural differences and transforms them into something negative. He writes how that resort is empty and comes to the conclusion that there are no tourists there. He conveniently leaves out (or does no research at all) the fact that unlike the US, almost all Albanians take vacations in July or August. During this time, many institutions and companies literally close down or work with a reduced work force and people go on vacation. The reason why there are no people in that resort is because we are still in June and yes tourism in Albania is very seasonal. Try going to the same place in July or August, but then don't complain about how crowded the place is. In fact it is the non-coastal Albanian towns that turn into ghost towns during that period. Every half decent journalist would have been able to find that out.
I've read all the article in this series written by JB, and all the time he defines something that is not apparently clear to him as negative, when there is nothing negative about it and a valid explanation behind it. And it's not only one slip, unless you call most of his articles a slip. Even when he talks about something that he calls positive like religious tolerance, he has to take away from it and says that people live in relative peace, SOMETIMES in the same city. No, it's not sometimes, it's all the time. And it wouldn't have taken him any kind of work to see this since ALL Albanian towns have at least one church and mosque prominently displayed in the center. Shame on you JB for passing this on as professional and unbiased journalism.
