Day 14 – Tirana

This morning I said goodbye to Ohrid and Nade and a little bit later to Macedonia. Different people on TripAdvisor had talked about a bus leaving Struga (the village next to Ohrid) at 9:30 and Nade has told me that the bus left at 10 (“new rules, good to know!”) so I went there for 9 o’clock. My ticket said 9:30 indeed but the bus came at 10, so everyone was right in the end.

The border control took 40 minutes again (were borders that tedious in Europe before Schengen??) but finally I was in Albania.
My first impressions of Albania were the following: The whole country seems to consist of mountains and valleys. Construction reminds me of what I had seen in Peru two years ago: you build the first floor of the house but leave the steal struts stick out of the roof so you can built a second or third floor when there is more money. In general everything looks very poor. Nature is awesome but very contaminated by mountains of plastic waste in the rivers and valleys close to villages. Every other house, car or other object is labelled “SHITJE” which means “for sale”. The Albanian petrol business is dominated by the yellow, castrated deer.

After a while I could see the seaside to my left and found out that the bus would stop in Durrës, a very ugly city on the coast further west, and then go back to Tirana. I arrived there at 3 and went to a close by shopping mall to exchange some money. In contrast to the completely antiquated bus station (it didn’t even have a building or shelter or information desk or timetable or really anything), the shopping mall was super fancy upper class European standard and I couldn’t have told I was in Albania if anyone had dropped me there. It also gave me some shelter from the huge thunderstorm with hail and rain that was happening outside.

The exchange office didn’t want my Macedonian Dinar, of course, but at least they were less picky with the Euro bank-notes, so I could get rid of that 50€-note with a missing edge that had been rejected in Macedonia. I will probably get back with lots of money in different currencies because it seems impossible to change any of it back in neighboring countries. Equipped with my new Albanian Lek I could get a Taxi to the extremely modern and nice Art Hostel where I turned out to be the only person besides the cleaning lady.

After lunch I went out to do laundry and grocery shopping and some basic first exploring. Including Tirana in the picture I got about Albania today, I found that it is a country with very high contrasts. While maybe 30 km from here you could see someone transport potatoes on a donkey in a typical third-world-environment, Tirana’s center has extremely modern and fancy parts, which I hadn’t expected at all in Albania. The shopping malls and supermarkets are much more western than in Macedonia where the difference between capital and outside life didn’t seem as extreme as here. If Macedonia had a special connection with Germany, in Albania some Italian comes in very handy. Many signs, products and ads are labelled in Italian and many people speak and understand some Italian. According to the girl in my hostel this is due to the fact that after Yugoslavia ceased to exist, everyone went to Italy for work.

While walking through the center I noticed large groups of 95% men standing around everywhere and when I got to the main square I found myself in the middle of a huge protest. A guy I asked, explained that this was a protest against the current government organized by the democratic party. I kept on walking for a bit and got to the main street in front of the prime minister’s palace where the real demonstration was going on. A band was playing some loud punk-rock music (which I really liked), interrupted by shouts of protest. When I saw the first fire-crackers and Bengal lights and probably Tirana’s entire police force equipped with gas masks along the main street, I decided that this was probably not the place to be and went back to pick up my laundry and to the hostel. [UPDATE: probably a good idea!:https://www.welt.de/politik/ausland/gallery12287012/Heftige-Proteste-in-Tirana.html ]

I was still basically the only guest and spent the evening talking to the girl working there. She explained me that it was impossible to live of work in Albania, as you earn around 200-300€ a month which is exactly what you have to pay for rent. She was also very upset with the educational system, corruption, the poor and expensive medical care and the government that doesn’t seem to have very good ideas about how to get the country economically on its feet.

It’s funny how you meet the same kind of youth everywhere in the world if you just enter travel- or art-related environments. We all have very similar ideas, plans, ideologies and even haircuts and it gives me some hope that there is that new, growing generation with a very open and social mindset all over the world.