More Tirana time and general Albanian observations
Trip Start
May 06, 2007
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99
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Trip End
Jul 24, 2008
Tirana,
Albania
Tuesday, December 18, 2007
Albania was a very dirty country. All through the countryside and in the cities there is trash everywhere. Especially pervasive are the blue plastic bags that every store seems to use. The whole reduce-reuse-recycle movement obviously hasn't exactly infiltrated this country. On one bus ride, while stopped for a smoke/pee break, I even saw one mother give her daughter the empty potato chip bag to throw away. She watched out the window as the little girl threw it on the ground and got back into the bus. Teaching young kids to throw their trash on the ground is not going help clean up the country.
Riding the buses through the Albanian countryside, I saw concrete bunkers all over the place, looking like ugly, large mushrooms sticking out of the ground. These were all built under communism when Hoxha decided that they needed to be prepared for an imminent attack. From 1950 to 1985 about 700,000 were built and they're nearly impossible to destroy. When the first one was built, the chief engineer was required to stand inside one while it was bombarded by a tank. He emerged unscathed. Now there really isn't much anyone can do about them, so they remain cluttering the countryside.
In addition to concrete bunkers littering the landscape, there are also partially built, abandoned buildings. Most of these buildings are adorned with a scarecrow-like thing hanging from it. I'm not sure if they're going to come back and continue building them or if they are just abandoned forever. The buses also passed by a number of Albanian cemeteries. All of the gravestones in these cemeteries included a picture of the person buried there. In my opinion this is to continue the culture of staring so that the dead person can stare out at anyone who passes by the graveyard.
There seems to be a bit of an obsession with the selling of live turkeys. In each of the cities/towns I visited, people lined the streets with their turkeys for sale. I'm guessing that this is either for Christmas or New Years (since religion was outlawed during communism, there aren't many Christians or people of any religion in Albania, so New Years is more likely).
Women and men are treated very differently in Albania. The going out culture is entirely male focused. After dark, you barely even see women walking in the streets. In Tirana it's acceptable for women to be out after dark if they are accompanied by a man, but no where else. Cafes, bars, and clubs are men-only establishments. But in that regard there also isn't much of a drinking culture. You never see people drunk in the streets. An Albanian is much more likely to go out for a coffee than for a beer, even in Tirana.
While the Albanians were generally nice to me, they also talked about me in front of me in a very obvious way more than any other place I visited. And this wasn't in the oh look, a foreigner sense, this was more in the point and laugh kind of sense. Obviously I don't know exactly what they were saying, but that was the feel I got from them.
Albanians are also very pro-American. There were a number of times when people asked me apprehensively if I was British and then got very excited when I said I was American. American flags were more popular there than they are in the States. When George Bush visited Albania he was greeted with a very warm welcome - much warmer than that of any other European country. I think most of this pro-America sentiment stems from the American backing of and aid money to Kosovo. Although I chose not to visit Kosovo, partially because of the current political situation and partially because it was getting really damn cold and I wanted to head quickly to the relative warmth of Turkey, other travelers I spoke with described their experiences in Kosovo to me. They said that walking the streets you see "We love America" posters plastered all over. Prishtina, the capital, even has a Bill Clinton Blvd.
While I wouldn't recommend anyone go out of their way to visit Albania, if you're in the Balkans and up for a bit of a challenge, it is a very interesting place. I'm very curious to see how they continue to change over the next 10-20 years as they work their way further and further away from their communist days (which ended in 1992). They are surrounded by countries far more developed than them, so hopefully they can get past their immense corruption and start to develop a bit more themselves.
