The Balkans: Part III: Albania

After an extremely long bus ride, including some mild carsickness on my part, 3 border crossings, sheep wandering across the road in front of us, and helpful directions from a friendly taxi driver when we got lost, we finally made it to Tirana, Albania, late Monday night! Unfortunately, Albania uses Leke for currency, not Euros, Bosnian marks, or Kuna which were all anyone had, and after traversing the dark streets of Tirana without any luck of finding a Bankomat (ATM), a few of us gave up and just went back to the hotel to eat food leftover from the bus. Luckily, I'd stocked up before leaving Croatia, and hadn't plowed through my supply because I was asleep for most of the ride.

Photo credit goes to one of my group members, Hanna

The next day, we went to the Ministry of Integration - that was a rough meeting if ever there was one. I'm not the biggest fan of diplomats, and the lines from the ministry sounded very much like diplomatic fluff. It was informatory, though, to see what the official government stance was. For instance, they were very proud of the fact that the elections were clearly free, fair, and democratic, because the opposition won by such a clear margin. And while the elections are definitely an improvement from the past, we heard from a few other sources that they couldn't quite yet be labeled as 'democratic.' They also gave the official unemployment percentage as 11.5%, but the number is actually closer to 50% if you don't count things like taking the sheep out to pasture for an hour as employed. But speaking of elections, the winning party was pretty pumped:

There were actual caravans of cars like these driving the streets honking their horns the whole time we were there

After a quick lunch (where the waiter was doing some serious lobbying to get us to spend more money), we went to our second meeting of the day with the Albanian Institute for International Studies, one of the best NGOs in central/eastern Europe. Their goal is to work increasingly with the EU in the Balkans, and their formal position is that the future of Albania and Kosovo is the EU. They told us that Albanian citizens actually see the main issues as the economy and improved employment. Less than 2% listed nationalistic projects as a main issue, but if integration happened it would be good and they would vote for it (it's just not one of the their main concerns).

Some pictures of our adventure in Tirana:

Yeah, I climbed that...

view from the top

again from the top

these bunkers were all over!

sunset from the Skybar

 

A few more interesting tidbits: for 40 years, following WWII, Albania was under a dictatorship even more isolated than North Korea. They built 700,000 bunkers to "protect" the city, no cars were allowed until 1991 (which explains some of their erratic driving practices...), and religion was also not allowed, which is why they are so moderate now. Our speaker from the first day gave us a good comparison for Albania and their recovery path from communism: Germany took 25 years to even begin talking about what happened in WWII, so following a similar timeline, it has been only 20 years since the communist rule, so the country is still in the healing process. It seems like such a long time ago that they were rules by communism - it is my entire lifespan after all - but in the grand scheme of things, 20 years is small potatoes.