A short introduction to Albania

I have never seen such a bunch of dim, dirty, docile, braindead, dim-witted, morally devoid, shitkicking morons in my entire life. A generation of communist repression is no excuse for simply giving up and hoping someone else will sort out the mess you are in as I have visited several other nations, some with worse backgrounds, who are working hard to get on with a reasonable existence. During the Kosovo conflict of 1999, a very good family friend of ours once quipped that Albania was "A nation of peasants"! I can now safely assert that given he was at the dinner table he was actually being as polite as possible and this is about as high a courtesy as one could extend to these people.

The landscape changed quite literally in an instant as soon as we had crossed no-mans land in our taxi. The Albanians demanded €10 'entrance tax' each and after wasting even more time standing around doing nothing waved us into what must be by now, Europe's only 3rd world country. Our new environment instantly provided us with sights of women carrying enormous bales of hay whilst men sat around smoking cigarettes losing whatever brain cells they had left as fast as they lost their teeth. The piles of rubbish on the side of the roads, on the roads, by the side of the rivers, in the rivers and even inside the houses appeared all in the space of 100 metres from the Montenegran border. Horses and carts carrying random items of junk meandered through the plastic bottles, cardboard boxes and lumps of polystyrene in exactly the same way that they don't anywhere else! Most human beings would clean up after themselves but it would appear to anyone who chooses to come here that the locals are happier swimming around in a mire of their own feculence than to clean up their act.

Having arrived in Shkodre we decided immediately to get straight on a furgon (minibus) and get to Tirane in the hope of finding some sort of civilisation. The journey gave us little hope as we passed by toothless turkey farmers, scrapped vehicles and increasing mounds of garbage at the side of the road. As the suburbs of Tirane grew, so did the filth and squalour culminating in the unique spectacle of several sheep grazing on an enormous pile of garbage. What kind of losers sanction this shit? I mean come on!