Word: tirana
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...major success so far on his tour of North Africa was word that Tunisia, which has no diplomatic ties with either the Communists or the Chinese Nationalists, had decided to give diplomatic recognition to Peking. This week Chou interrupts his safari with a side trip to Albania. In Tirana, Red China's only ideological ally outside Asia, he will get that rare feeling of being a completely welcome guest...
...tiny Albania, seizing any excuse to defy the Soviets, was gushing Stalin's praise. All over the country, monuments to the dead dictator were hung with garlands of flowers; Tirana newspapers published his picture and babbled their "love and profound respect for his teachings," Red China might also have been expected, to use the occasion to glorify Stalin's memory, but remembering the dictator's open distrust of his Asian comrades, Peking chose not to be hypocritical...
Combined with the tight police control is an incredibly complex government bureaucracy that requires official permission to buy everything from drugs to hotel meals. Pedestrians, at least, have it easy in Tirana. There are only 400 cars in the country (ancient Russian and Czech models, except for a fleet of Mercedeses owned by the Chinese embassy); roads are still places where people talk, embrace and occasionally sleep. Nevertheless there are as many as three traffic cops at major intersections, all carrying little black-and-white batons...
Status Symbols. As a shopping center, Tirana looks like a flea market somehow expanded into a town. In the almost completely nationalized shops, a shoddy suit costs 7,000 leks, $140 at the official exchange rate, or a little less than twice what a laborer makes a month. Attempts to industrialize Albania ended abruptly when Moscow abandoned its half-finished embassy, pulled out several thousand experts last year. The country's only large cotton plant was idle for three months; blueprints for new factories faded on the drawing board. Of the 22 Russian MIGs in Albania last year, only...
...duty, the Chinese keep strictly to themselves. They eat in a separate dining room at the Italian-built Dajti Hotel, live in a parklike embassy compound that is constantly surrounded by guards. The latest status symbols in Tirana, worn by Albanian Communist officials who have journeyed to Red China, are a plain beige cloth cap of the type preferred by Mao Tse-tung, and aviator-type dark sunglasses, also the rage in Peking...