"Sí...um...jo...er...po!"

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That was my first go at speaking Albanian. I tried to say 'Yes', and inevitably started speaking Spanish again, since the non-English foreign language programming in my brain always comes up with Spanish. I then proceeded to say 'jo', which I usually say when I want to say 'yes' in German, but then realized that it means 'no' in Albanian. So finally I managed to find the right word: 'Po'! Great success!
During the ten days that I stayed in Albania, I had very good intentions, but ended up learning only maybe three more words/phrases: falum nderit - thank you; sa kushton - how much is it; pa mish - without meat. Of course it didn't help at all that the Albanian language is related to absolutely no other language, since it is presumably of Illyrian descent, which makes it the oldest language in Europe (apart from Basque, but that one continues to be an eternal enigma to linguists and historians alike), and that people don't really speak English. I could, however, get around speaking Italian, or, at least, pretending to speak Italian, where it was just Spanish with Italian crust. That didn't necessarily mean that people understood me, nor that I understood what they replied, since it was almost always in Albanian. Nor did basic gestures help, for Albanians sometimes do the head shuffle when they mean 'no', but most of the time it's supposed to mean 'yes'. Apparently, it always depends on the intensity of the shuffle, and the facial expression of the shufflist. So I was in a perpetual state of linguistic confusion, which is confusion of the most basic type, i.e. you got two persons of different nationalities and languages, who don't understand each other, since they can't find common words to converse with. This leads to utter and complete non-understanding, which leaves both parties alienated, and often frustrated. I tried really hard, though, to keep up at least a benign smile, which, I presume, made me look even more like a grade A-idiot.

I was entering this strange country on a stormy day in the year of our lord 2009, around the Ides of March. Actually, the day was nice, I just thought it sounds more dramatic if I write 'stormy', you know, to conjure up images of a lonesome captain in the cabin of his boat on the open sea, defying the treacherous ocean by mere willpower and manliness. The latter was immediately diminished greatly when the border police officer demanded 10 Euros as an entrance fee to the country for tourists, and I paid it without further ado. My completely useless guidebook confirmed that you have to pay that fee upon entering the country, but (of course, alas!) as I learned later, the fee had been abandoned last year, and what I paid was 10 fucking Euros as a contribution to the eternally clockwork-like machine called corruption. Guess I'm a stupid tourist after all.

The same corrupt officer surprisingly helped me find a ride to Shkodra, which worked at once, when a middle-aged guy in a swanky BMW agreed to take me along. Not only that, but he also phoned ahead to make sure that I'll get picked up by my host once in town. He spoke fairly fluent German, having lived there for 16 years.
Upon arriving at my host's place, I fell into an abyss of discombobulation, language-wise. My host was a French lady in her fifties, Martine, so I spoke in shady French to her. Jurek had made it there as well, and we conversed in German, as per usual. Then there was this Kosovar Albanian guy, Raman, with his young daughter, who just yapped away at me and Jurek in his best Albanian, not realizing that there might be people who don't understand that language, or that there are other languages at all. At first I thought he spoke really bad English or German, since he just talked to me with a nonchalance that would explain that, but then I noticed that it was something I'd never come across before.
His presence was explained to us by the nature of Martine's work. She works as a psychiatrist in Kosovo, helping children and families traumatized by the war/events in Kosovo. Raman came along to Shkodra to apparently find better medical treatment for his half-blind daughter, a woeful little creature, maybe five years old, who looked more like a little boy than a girl, and who was so painfully shy she'd always look away when you'd look at her.

Raman tried really hard to be helpful, making tea for us, and cooking a type of scrambled eggs with ajvar and more salt than on the Salar de Atacama in it. He swore to high heaven that it was a typical Kosovar dish, but to me it was just eggs with ajvar and way too much salt.
We all talked for a while, then went out for a little walk around town, to get us accustomed to the city. It was already dark, and there weren't a lot of people out and about, and after walking for an hour, we decided to call it a day, and went back to Martine's place.

Martine was taking a plane to France on the following day, but she gave us the phone number of Stella and Sergio, two acquaintances of hers, so we could stay with them. I took advantage of that newly found contact first thing in the morning at 9am, and called Stella, waking her up out of presumably sweet dreams. Nonetheless, one hour later, she met up with us, and we went to their place to drop off our stuff and have some tea and cookies. We learned that Sergio, a Spanish guy who had previously been doing volunteer work in Kosovo, works on several agricultural projects in the region. His girlfriend Stella's mother is Tibetan, and her father Italian Swiss. She grew up in the Maldives and went to high school in Sri Lanka, then to college in England. She also worked as a volunteer in Kosovo, where she was able to add Albanian to the scores of languages she had already known. We were constantly switching between English and German, and also spoke Spanish with Sergio.

Sergio then dropped us off in his Mafioso car at the Rozafa Fortress at the edge of the city. From up there, we had a wonderful panorama of the city and of Lake Shkodër, while trying to ignore the hordes of Albanian teenagers snapping pictures of each other and listening to music from their mobiles (the person who started this awful trend should be drowned and quartered). Some of the cheekier ones tried to taunt us foreigners, but some short, harsh words from Stella in Albanian shut them up quickly.
After making our way down we had a look at a leaden mosque, which is so unfortunately positioned that it is flooded most of the time. We also saw our first examples of the famous Albanian bunkers. During the Communist era, more than 700,000 of those mushroom-shaped little fellas were built, the motto was, one for every family. Apparently the architect who designed the bunkers had to prove that they would withstand armed attacks when he had to sit inside of a prototype while a tank fired a round at it. The cruel trial was successful (the architect survived, that is), and soon the landscape of Albania was clustered with bunkers. Rumour has it that now that the fear of an imminent Soviet or Chinese invasion is not as prevalent as it used to be in the minds of the country's leaders, the bunkers are used more for amorous purposes. Many an Albanian appears to have lost their virginity inside one of the concrete mushrooms.

We then went for a coffee, and Stella urged us to try trileçe, a typical Albanian dessert that is a sort of cake soaked in milk with a layer of caramel on top. And what can I say, except that it was sensational, incredibly tasty, albeit very simple, which is the epitome of Albanian cooking. The cappuccino that I had with it was very good as well, although one should not add sugar without having a sip first, for they usually make it up very sweet. Sugar addiction seems to be quite an issue in this country anyways, and the average amount of sugar that an Albanian would put into their tea/coffee is around 3-4 spoonfuls. Tablespoons.

After making it back to their place, Stella started chopping up and subsequently roasting vegetables, which we had with a nice salad and white wine. We also stuck to the Albanian tradition of drinking raki before the meal, in this instance it was raki mani, which is made of mulberries, but nonetheless it was as strong as a female Belarussian shot putter, and running down my larynx, it seriously warmed me up on the inside. I decided to pass after one shot, whereas the others had a couple more.

The next day, Jurek and me went on to Tirana, where our host Sinty, who is a techno DJ from Latvia, picked us up close to the centre. Albania's capital is not without appeal, it's not your typical post-Communist big city, which are usually more ugly than you can poke a stick at. What makes Tirana different from those is the simple fact that a couple of years ago, the mayor, who was an architect himself, decided to paint all the Communist appartment blocks in many different colours and patterns, which gives the city a whole different feeling. The behemoth public buildings still remain, as do many Socialist Realist monuments, but the gold-covered statue of Enver Hoxha was torn down by an angry mob in 1992.

One of the bigger nuisances in Tirana is the traffic. Most drivers have less than 10 years of experience, and this combined with the typical Balkan disregard for traffic rules make being a pedestrian in this city a dangerous thing. The basic rule is, just walk! But it takes guts to walk into the middle of a four-lane roundabout, busy with fat Mercedes Benzes and Hummers. By the way, Albania is probably the country with the most Mercedes cars in the world. When you ask them why, they say that the roads in their home country are so bad that they need a strong car, like a Mercedes. The Hummers are more like objects of prestige for Mafia bigwigs.

Another thing that is particularly annoying to western European visitors is the fact that Albanians throw their rubbish everywhere, and that the streets, rivers, and beaches are littered with garbage. The main problem seems to be that they don't know where else to put it. There are no waste incineration plants in the country, and a lack of those facilities makes it indeed pretty hard to be ecologically conscious.

My main task in Tirana was to get new glasses. I'd lost mine on a bus in Montenegro, when I took them off, fell asleep, woke up, had to rush out of the bus, and probably dropped them. In the same fashion I had lost my llama wool gloves from Bolivia in Belgrade.
So Albania doesn't seem to be the best place in the world to get new glasses, but I tried. I went to the first optician I encountered, and talked to the lady in a crude mix of English and Italian, asking her how long it would take to get glasses. She said, one hour, so I did the vision test, chose the frames, and fetched the glasses a couple of hours later. The experience was rather kafkaesque, and in the first few days I was wondering whether the glasses were any good or not, having some dizzy spells, which is not unusual with new glasses.

I once entered a café, where I chatted a bit to the waiter, who spoke decent German. He told me he'd played football for the amateurs of the 1.FC Kaiserslautern, which is the pride of the region where I come from. He had to return because he didn't get a visa. He told me he liked Germany a lot better than Albania, since there wasn't much work in his country, and that it was hard to make money. Plus, he said conspicuously, the Albanian girls weren't any good. "They're all sluts! They hang around in cafés all day, and at night they go do discos. A good girl should stay at home!" He said German girls were a lot better (maybe he doesn't know that German girls don't really fit his twisted image of how a woman should behave), and he'd had a good girlfriend in Germany, Sabrina Mueller. They were taking walks together, talking about the world, practicing German, and I was wondering whether Fraeulein Mueller realized she had actually been his girlfriend.

After a couple of days I went on to Berat, another UNESCO-listed site, had a brief look around the nice old Ottoman buildings on the hill, went up to the castle, decided to boycott the two-tier price system, and went on to Vlora. The latter seems to be a stronghold of the Albanian Mafia, smuggling girls to Italy for prostitutional purposes, and is a seriously ugly city. The streets are dusty, the houses dilapitated, and so are the people. It has a sizable community of US Peace Corps Volunteers, and I stayed with one called Amy. We watched 'My Big Fat Greek Wedding' together with some other volunteers and some Albanian friends of theirs. The Albanians had apparently already seen the film several times, as they were completing the sentences of the actors, or repeating the lines, bursting out with laughter every time. I didn't like the film.

My next stop was to be Saranda, and I decided to hitchhike, and for that purpose, I was blessed with a biblical downpour that left me soaked and freezing. A businessman in a Mercedes mercifully picked me up and after 20 or so km, he invited me for a coffee, and went on to work, so I had to look for a new ride. I found it when a younger chap in a van stopped and took me over the Logaraja Pass in the mountains, which was a pretty crazy experience on that day, since it started to hail just when he was inviting me for a coffee. He waited with me in his car for the bus, which arrived after half an hour. I arrived in Saranda about four hours (and roughly 110km) later, and it was still raining. I checked into a cheap hotel and went out to eat. In the small taverna, I met a middle-aged Irish guy, who had been living in Saranda for some months already. He had travelled the world for 14 years, before his kids (of which he had eight) finally told him that he's getting old, and that he should stop living on the road, so he'd settled down. "But I'm bloody sick of it, I tell yer. A couple more months, and I'll be gone. Maybe Ethiopia again, or Sudan. Or finally Libya, now that it's open to travellers."

I hopped on a local bus the following morning towards Butrint, a ruined city that had been founded as an Ancient Greek city, later became a Roman colony, and then a site of conflict between the Byzantine and Venetian empires. I roamed around the vast site, taking in the atmosphere, enjoying the fact that I was the only visitor there, and had a World Heritage site completely to myself.

Before finally leaving to Macedonia, I stopped by in Gjirokastra, a rare example of a well-preserved Ottoman town, nicknamed 'City of Stone', since most of the houses in the historical part are made entirely of stone, including the roofs. The town also features an old fortress that sits on top of the hill, overlooking all of the town and giving a great view of the surrounding mountains.

To go to Macedonia, I had to take a bus to Korçë, which took seven hours for only around 140km, that's how bad the roads are in Albania. Add a woefully ugly kid puking his guts out and a middle-aged couple making out for hours, smacking their lips loudly when kissing, and you got a really bad bus ride. Another furgon ride later, I was in Pogradec, still 6km away from the border, which I decided to walk, the stingy self that I am. Shortly before the border, I stopped a car and asked the driver if I was on the right way, and he said, yes, and that he could take me to the border. So I hopped in, but realized after a while that I wanted to get rid of my last lekë, and that I could combine this with eating something. So I asked the guy to pull over at a small taverna. He said he knows a better place, and took me to a restaurant, and went in with me, ignoring my saying that he doesn't need to wait for me. He ordered a raki, which proved to be quite a big glass full of the liquor, and quietly drank it. However, I overheard a conversation of his with a waiter, and heard words like 'German' and 'taxi', so I told him, wtf, no taxi, autostop, no money. He just said 'no problemo', but when we went back to the car, I took my luggage out and went off. For some reason, he was following me closely, and when I walked faster, he overtook me, pulled over and got out of the car, saying something like 'I drive you to Macedonia'. I was already significantly on edge by then, and just snapped, screaming at him to fuck off and to get the fuck out of my way and leave me alone, which he did then. He drove off towards the border, and I was worrying whether he would tell the border officials shit about me, when he came back after a few minutes with some passengers in his car, honking, smiling, and waving at me. I just flashed the finger at him, being very angry, and shaky at the same time.

15 minutes later, I got my exit stamp for Albania, a little sad that a good country had ended with a bad experience. What would await the hero in the next sinister land? Stay tuned until next week, children, to hear more adventures of mischief and misfortune from your favourite blogger. Howdy!

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