On the road to Tirana
It is after dark but I immediately notice I have crossed the border to Albania - ok maybe the fact that we stopped for an hour and some strange people took an unusual interest in my passport was kinda a giveaway - but even without this I would immediately notice the difference. Because there is no more of the good Kosovoian roads. This is Albania - the country where the potholes don’t like to live in solitude they like to form large family groups where they can keep each other company. Hence the bus goes along the road which doesn’t really feel like a road at all. Now is the time to get my money’s worth of travelling for the 20€ I paid in Pristina.
If you look at the map of Albania there is only about 200 km from the border to Tirana - I mean this should not take more than a couple of hours - but if you could do it in 2 hours - then the price would be a rip off.
I really don’t understand how come any sane bus driver will even consider driving on an Albanian road at night - maybe this is the problem of this trip - the bus driver is indeed insane. We drive along and I try to get some sleep I don’t have much success in the effort but the constant twisting and turning may just make the trip go a bit faster.
We keep driving through the dark and at times the bus seems to be bumping a bit from side to side I can’t really figure out how this is happening but I am not sure I really wanna know - it may just make me too scare if I know what is actually going on.
After bumping through the night on the roads for around 10 hours we get to Tirana it is still dark and everything is kinda quite the town don’t seem to be waking up at 6 in the morning. I get my backs and try to make my way to the place I wanna stay - unfortunately I am a bit disorientated so I start walking the wrong way down the street I am looking for a street sign to tell me which street I am on. Unfortunately the concept of street sign don’t really seem to have caught on in Albania - and the idea of putting numbers on your door just doesn’t happen around this place. Hence it can be a bit difficult to find your way around at times. After a couple of attempts I find one of the few local English speakers and he tells me where I am and I manage to turn around and go in the right direction.
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Land of mystery
I don't really know why I am going to
I guess what is really attracting me to this place is the mystery.
I want to go to a country which is famous for being the poorest country in
I guess this is one of the things which attract me to the place. A country which got such a strange recent history and which pursued an economic policy so strange that no other country in the world would try it. I would like to go before the country is too deeply rooted in the western world. I guess it is now or never because the country has just taken its first major step into the western world by joining NATO. I guess you should never underestimate a countries ability to change - ten years ago I would not have thought NATO membership for
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Mercedes capital of the world
I get to
the place I am staying for the next few days and the first person I meet is a
Danish girl - what are the odds of that? I would imagine there would be that
many Danish tourists travelling around Albania in the spring time. But
apparently I was totally wrong in that assumption.
I get out
getting some cash and having a bit of a look around town. They don’t use Euros around here but their
own currency the Leke. Fortunately it is not like in the bad old days where
chancing currency in a place like Albania would have to be done in the black
market.
The first
thing you notice when you are walking around the city is a huge number of flags
commemorating the Albanian NATO membership stating Albania in NATO a miracle of
freedom. All the official buildings in the central part of Tirana are covered
by posters and flags about the NATO membership. The locals seem to make jokes
about this. Like the president is giving a speech about the situation in
Albania and no matter what the contents’ of a paragraph in the speech is about
it always end with - and Albania is now a member of NATO. There was a big
celebration of the NATO membership a few days before and it sounds a bit like
the locals thinks the NATO membership is more about securing the reelection of
the current government than the actual membership.
After a
while I manage to take my eyes off all the flags and I start to notice another
thing in Tirana.
The first
bunch of cars came at a stage when the roads in Albania did not have the
quality they have today. Considering the current quality of the roads they must
have been pretty bad back then. Of course the country came from a situation with
500 cars in all of the country just after the fall of communism and today there
is ½ a million cars on the streets of Albania. But the poor quality of the
roads meant only a few cars could possibly survive on that sort of roads. Quite
soon it became clear that Mercedes would be the most reliable make of car on
the roads of Albania hence everybody who could get their hands on a Mercedes
would do that. The first Mercedes had a somewhat questionable origin coming
into the country from all over western Europe in a huge import scheme- the main
problem with this import business were the people who imported the cars had a
tendency to forget to pay for the car in the country they came from.
Apparently
there were a couple of big parking lots in the big port cities in Albania where
you could just go down and get a nice newly imported Mercedes from a western
European country. Of course you would not be able to take this car out of
Albania ever again. Today there is sort of some order in Albania hence there is
no longer a big lots with stolen cars anywhere - but there is still used Mercedes
coming to the country which may or may not be legally imported.
I start a
short walk around the centre of town - the centre is not really big you can see
that Tirana used to be a small capital in a small country with most of the
population living in the country side. But around the big square in town the
Italians made some nice governmental buildings in the centre.
On the
central square of the city are two of the main attractions in the city. There
is a big mosque which survived the atheism strategy during the communist era because
it was deemed to be a cultural monument. On the one end of the square is the
Albanian history museum which has a big mosaic out on the faced with scenes
from the Albanian history. Inside is an exhibition of the Albanian history
which is sort of interesting but a bit difficult to follow because it is mainly
in Albanian.
As I walk
back from the museum I pass a strange looking building. It looks most like a
pyramid and it used to house the Enver Hoxha museum.
A bit south
of the centre of the city is a small park where you can get a bit away from the
usual car craziness of the city centre. It is a nice little area with a lot of
locals going down there for their daily run in the park. In the park is a
couple of old cemeteries’ from WW II. There is a fairly big British cemetery
where the British soldiers who fell during the campaign in Albania are buried.
The British cemetery is on a top of a hill and there is a nice little view over
the city. A bit down the hill is a German war cemetery which is not quite as
well located. It could be because the people in Albania had a better
relationship with the British than the German just after the war.
Below the
park on the hill is a little lake which looks like an area which could be the
most attractive in Tirana area.
Outside in the garden is a nice kitchen area with a reasonable space, if you would like to do some cooking yourself. There is also a nice big garden where you can sit outside when the weather gets nice and warm. Down in the basement is a couple of computer which you can use for 1€ a day they have not got super fast connection but it will probably do for most people.
The rooms got a couple of nice balconies out in front of them if you can’t be bother to go all the way down to the garden and you still would like a bit of fresh air. The hostel is also equipped with a couple of house pets which are both extremely friendly. The dog will come running and greet every guest while the cat will be wishing to go in and or out and try to tell you this loudly. Unfortunately the cat also likes to lie on the beds and leave its hair behind.
The house is really centrally located only a short walk from the central square in city with all the main government building or the entertainment district if you want to go out for some nightlife. One bad side effect of this location is traffic. Unless you are a really heavy sleeper you are unlike to be able to sleep after the morning traffic starts to pick up in the morning which seems to be around 7. So you will have no excuse not to get up early and go sightseeing.
