The new Riviera新里维埃拉阿尔巴尼亚用太阳伞改变荒原景象.docVIP

The new Riviera: Albania tackles badlands image with parasols 新里维埃拉:阿尔巴尼亚用太阳伞改变荒原景象 Albania is the latest Balkan country to want to join the European Union. To do so, it will have to convince Brussels it has tackled corruption and organised crime. After decades of holidaying on neighbouring Corfu, Julia Langdon took the hydrofoil to see how formerly Communist Albania was shaping up. 阿尔巴尼亚是巴尔干半岛国中新一个想加入欧盟的国家.为此,他们将不得不说服布鲁塞尔他们已经开始处理腐败和组织性犯罪. 朱丽亚兰登在科孚岛附近度假数载后,乘水上飞机去考察前阿尔巴尼亚共和国怎样改进的. For 30 years I have been visiting the north-east coast of Corfu. And for all that time I have been looking at Albania, often with a shiver at what little we knew about it. 30年里我一直都在访问科孚东北海岸.在那其间我都在观察阿尔巴尼亚,常因对它浅薄的了解而寒心. Its bare coastline and forbidding mountains seemed to represent the isolation of the country, cut off by communism for half a century, home to the mafia - the badlands of the Balkans. 光秃的海岸线以及巍峨的山峰似乎是这个被阻隔了半个世纪的孤立共和国的象征, 阿尔巴尼亚是巴尔干半岛荒原的老家. In the old days, the Straits of Corfu were raked by Albanian searchlights trying to catch those desperate enough to risk a night-time swim, or a paddle in the inner tube of a car tyre to escape its hunger and brutality. 在过去的日子里, 科孚海峡就是阿尔巴尼亚一直努力寻找的明灯,指引他们挑战黑暗,逃离饥饿和野蛮. When communism collapsed, I had heard the putt-putt of outboard engines at night on piratical missions. The children usually sleep through the early-morning gunfire, I used to joke, but it was true. 共和国解体时,夜晚我听到了海盗们发动船的”噗噗”声.我常调侃,”孩子们是在凌晨的枪声中入眠的”,但这却是事实. Thousands of Albanians tried to flee the unrest in their country in the late 1990s 90年代末成百上千的阿尔巴尼亚人试图I had watched the tracer bullets light up the night-time sky over Saranda, the small city in the south of Albania where the last violent rebellions occurred as the country struggled to secure some sort of democracy 20 years ago. 我看到过追踪弹在萨兰达夜空燃起,20年前这座阿尔巴尼亚南部的小城市在国家试图保护民众时出现了最后一批反动派. Now I am approaching Saranda for the first time. I am on the hydrofoil, the Flying Dolphin, prepared for heat and poverty and boys begging f