i took a trip around the balkans just before starting medical school.
my favorite things about the balkans:
-liquid yogurt!
-history!
-cheap! (most places)
-communism and ethnic violence are things of the past!
-liquid yogurt!
after landing in athens, greece, i took the bus up the west coast of greece to albania!
just before my bus left athens, the door knob to the restroom i was using fell off, locking me inside. luckily, someone eventually heard my incessant pounding and was able to let me out. the night bus ride to tirana was delayed for four hours at the greece/albania border because evidently someone was trying to smuggle in something illicit, which the customs guy found by literally cutting open the suitcase with a knife. this precipitated an all-bus pushing and shouting match with the between the perpetrator and the customs guy. eventually we were able to get back on the road and, after loosing a few suitcases out the side of the bus after taking a hairpin curve a little too fast, arrived in tirana!
albania – what a funtastically fascinating country!
albania has seen some tough times. they were under the control of a communist dictator named enver hoxha for most of the last half of the century, and then, swinging the other way, experienced a nasty bout of anarchy in 1997. the biggest pastime in tirana is partaking in “bar kafe” culture, in which one sits at a bar kafe and drinks expresso and hard liquor all day. they love their alcohol, starting with beer for breakfast! indeed, it was surprisingly difficult to find food amidst all the establishments specializing in alcohol. also – and i’m not kidding – there must be more casinos in tirana than there are in las vegas! the only difference is that tirana casinos are only about ten square feet and have only one slot machine. and albania loves america – to the extent that they named a main street in tirana after george w. bush.
i stayed at this nice little imaginatively named hostel called hostel albania, which is run by a german local celebrity dj named claas. went to a tiny mosque in the main square which, due to its beauty, is apparently is one of the only religious buildings in the country to have survived hoxha’s tenure. also, found a statue of mother teresa at tirana university (she was ethnically albanian!), went to the revolving top of the skytower for a nice view of the city, saw a nice albanian themed photography exhibition at the national art gallery, and climbed the hoxha pyramid – a huge pyramidal edifice built by hoxha’s son to commemorate him, later turned into a nightclub called “the mummy,” and now abandoned and covered in anarchist graffiti. perhaps the scariest moment of the trip was getting to the top of the pyramid and realizing that i had go down the same way i came up, as it was 45 degree cement all the way to the bottom!
i then took a minibus called a furgon to a city called shkoder, where, while fighting off dozens of taxi drivers fighting for my attention, boarded an unmarked bus that a police officer who didn’t speak english told me was heading for… montenegro!