LAST summer my boyfriend and I decided to opt for a summer holiday that would be more than just tanning, eating cheap hotel food and drinking beer by a pool. After a lot of travel planning over FaceTime and reading lots of ‘Nomadic Matt’ blogs we decided that after travelling in Italy for a few weeks, we would go from Athens to Croatia, via Albania and Montenegro.
We heard plenty of Albania horror stories, mainly from our parents’ generation, who were remembering news stories from the 80’s and 90’s when it was still part of a messy Communist regime. But modern Albania is not scary. We were expecting an odd, interesting, sparse and very different culture, and we weren’t disappointed. But there were a few things that did surprise me about Albania….
1. How affordable everything is
Arriving at the border crossing we were advised by someone on our tour bus to refer to the cost of things in Albania as affordable rather than cheap, as it would be natural for us British to say. This made sense: cheap infers low quality and is derogatory. Or, as he put it – minimum wage in Albania is less than £150 or €170 a year, making a 20 cent pastry actually not cheap at all…just affordable to us.
Despite this, it was refreshing for us and our student budgets to reach Gjirokastër (in the South of Albania) and exchange €25, knowing it would be enough for our few days there. This was enough for a museum entrance fee, three course dinner and alcohol.
2. The sheer number of concrete bunkers
The landscape was sparse and in many ways similar to Northern Greece, however some things immediately struck me as different. The rural hillside is scattered with bunkers, built in preparation for enemy attack but never used. Concrete circular pods dotted throughout the hillside, jutting out of the ground definitely gave the place a slight post-apocalyptic feel.
3. The lack of female waiting staff
Generally, outside of the capital, Tirana, we saw very few women. In Gjirokastër, two men served me in the bakery, a man changed my money, a man was on the ticket office for the castle and a man served my ice cream. I was prepared for Albania to be different to a lot of other places I had been, but the lack of women doing any kind of normal job did surprise me. This is changing however and attitudes are shifting. In Tirana, there is little of this outdated view of ‘women in the home only’ left at all and the shops, restaurants and bars had almost as many female staff as male.
4. How old fashioned everything in the countryside was
As we were driving, it wasn’t uncommon to see men carrying supplies with a horse and cart. This is an extreme example, most people had slightly unreliable looking cars that were about twenty years old. Small things like designs on posters and adverts made it look like the time memo that the rest of Europe had was thirty years behind schedule. Despite this, the town of Gjirokastër is beautiful, full of history and the local people are really tapping into a relatively new found tourist trade with gift shops and ice cream stalls popping up.
5. How modern the capital city is
After driving for hours through sparse countryside and feeling like we could almost be in the 1960’s arriving into Tirana was definitely a surprise. Tirana is a bustling city full of brightly coloured buildings dotted along wide streets, crazy drivers, phone shops, big parks, mosques, restaurants, street food stalls and upmarket hotels. It has a feeling of a very new city that hasn’t quite decided on its vibe yet, but I guess that is exactly what being dragged out of communist rule comparatively recently does to a place.
For me the most interesting thing about Tirana were the coloured buildings. We learnt that Edi Rama, a previous mayor of Tirana, had started a project repainting the dilapidated grey concrete buildings. He claimed that in doing so, crime rates lowered and more people paid taxes - the coloured buildings were making people happy and reminding them that there is life past communism.
If you ask me, Tirana is going to be the next big thing – perhaps a European city break destination in the next 10 years. I’d say get there before it’s too cool and the big cat European investors get their hands on it….
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