Tirane

You might think my tone has become somewhat negative of late and if you want to know why then I suggest you drop into Albania for a few days. My opinion of Albanians on the whole was galvanised by experiencing some of the worst driving and traffic conduct I've ever seen. At first I thought they were just stupid but it is just too easy to arrive at that conclusion. I believe that some things are inherent to Humans and as such the driving style of these people must have been developed i.e. logic was thrown out in favour of a taught method of recklessness. Simple solutions to negotiating junctions seemed to be avoided at all costs as if the objective were to jam the roads altogether and, like the Chinese on subway trains, the will for them to bang in to each other seemed all too irresistible. Another factor at play here, which is truly phenomenal, is that as the city operates regular power cuts to share the minimal supply, one of the candidates for electrical timeshare is... THE FUCKING TRAFFIC LIGHTS!!! Yes, that's right, not only do residential and low-end commercial units have to sacrifice their juice from time to time but the general city services have to as well! The temporary replacement for the lights are police officers with table tennis bats who scream through their whistles and gesticulate furiously whilst the traffic does whatever it wants anyway. I swear, if you gave these people a sweet they'd chuck it on the floor and eat the fucking wrapper!

As there are so many power cuts throughout the day, most of the shops are powered by strings of portable generators that line the pavements. The exhaust fumes are added to that of the endless queues of cars and all in all their air quality is nearly as bad as Beijing. The cars themselves are an interest in themselves as, and this is no word of a lie, over 50% of them are Mercedes! Rumour has it that quite a lot of stolen vehicles have found their way here from western Europe but as to why they all seem to be of the one make is beyond me.

Now that I have said what I have said, I should add that any generalisation of a country will of course have some exceptions and I'm happy to say that these are quite positive. Firstly, upon our arrival in Tirane, a young soldier with a reasonable grasp of English not only walked us across the city to our hostel but offered to take us round the town the next day. The hostel owners were again very nice and gave us advice on where to go, what to eat and what things should cost but apart from these few examples, I wasn't presented with anyone who would be worth extinguishing should they have caught fire.

It's a good thing the hostel was good as I'm pretty sure we would not have stayed as long as we did if it wasn't. As we entered our dorm we were met by 3 Aussie chicks comparing the length of their armpit hair whilst discussing the Greek homo-erotic novel that they were writing. Hans and I skilfully dodged a recital of the story by heading down the road to probably the only nice part of the city containing bars, cafes and restaurants. Given all that we had experienced that day, to have an absolutely delicious meal was a total surprise yet a well received one and as strange as it seems, I am now on the lookout for an Albanian cookbook. Due to another long day of travel, tiredness appeared seconds after the main course and so without hesitation we headed back to the dorm for a quick lie down before waking up nearly 13 hours later! "What the fuck happened?" I asked, "I don't know but I guess we needed a break" came the reply and with that we decided to wander around town that day without our bags and without a specific goal. That evening we found a backgammon board and before long it was a well deserved 6-1 score, sadly to Hans :-(

After a totally fruitless search for, well, fruit (or any other breakfast item) we settled for a mid-morning pizza at our nearby Albanian restaurant. Afterwards we took a cable car to the top of the mountain for a look at the view but it was crap so we had a beer and left (you can tell how exciting this bit was can't you?). Later that evening I took full advantage of a chance to level the scores in our backgammon contest and leveled up the scores a bit to 7-6 to Hans. The endless beeping of the horns turned our discussion to leaving and so we decided to have a day trip to Berat the following morning.