We’re halfway through our stay in Tirana, so it is time for my customary “We’re Home” post. Unfortunately, we don’t love Tirana, so it doesn’t feel much like home, other than our wonderful Airbnb. Chad asked on our walk the other day if it was really worth it to do this post or do just one summary post on Tirana at the end, but I think it is good to record our first half impressions. 

We’re underwhelmed by Tirana for a number of reasons. Though we love our apartment, the location isn’t ideal. It is a bit far from our main Conad grocery store (though not as far as our Bansko apartment was from the Billa) and there isn’t a great place for Chad to run nearby. Tirana has a wonderful huge park with a lovely artificial lake but it takes over 20 minutes to walk there and there aren’t great public transit options to get there either. In fact, we haven’t even used the public transit system yet. We are reasonably close to Blloku, Tirana’s main restaurant and bar district, and it isn’t a bad walk to the main tourist area around Skanderbeg Square. But traffic is bad and the sidewalks are pretty crowded (though luckily they’re mostly crowded with other people walking, rather than motorbikes and cafes like in Vietnam). 

We learned from our host, who was kind enough to pick us up from the bus station, why the traffic is so bad in Tirana. It’s because private ownership of cars was outlawed under the Communist regime, which was in place from 1945 to 1991. So the city was developed without a lot of cars on the street other than those driven by the party leaders, leading to narrow streets and very limited parking all around the city. Religion and foreign travel were also banned during that time. In our first two weeks here we’ve learned a lot about that history and a little about the current political climate here.

Our Airbnb is our saving grace right now. It is huge with three bedrooms and one and a half bathrooms. One room has a nice big desk for Chad, so he’s been able to be very productive. The other extra bedroom works great for my morning yoga and Zoom calls. The kitchen is functional and the wifi works well. The furniture could be a little more comfortable, but it’s been great to have AC to regulate the indoor temperature from time to time. The weather here has been pretty warm and sunny with daily highs in the mid-80s Fahrenheit. 

We’ve also really enjoyed learning about Albania and its history. The Albanian language is quite unique and very challenging, though there is not much expectation to use it. I’ve managed to learn hello (përshëndetje, sounds like persian-debt-yeah) but am struggling with thank you (faleminderit, which is fall-amen-dare-eat but much harder to come up with on the spot). Albania was primarily tribal until being taken over by a series of empires – the Romans, then the Byzantines, and finally the Ottoman Empire, which was here for around 500 years before Albanian independence in 1912. There was a brief monarchy but after World War II, Enver Hoxha took control as a communist dictator and closed Albania to the rest of the world. 

We learned more about this during our first outing in Tirana, a few days after our arrival. We made a late afternoon visit to the House of Leaves Museum, which is located in the former headquarters of the Sigurimi, Hoxha’s secret surveillance squad. It was an interesting and sobering exhibit.

 

We followed our museum visit with a walk around the central city and dinner at a very popular restaurant in Blloku called Era. Luckily I knew to make a reservation online. We put together a nice vegetarian Albanian-Mediterranean meal: baked butter beans, zucchini with tzatziki yogurt, roasted vegetable bruschetta, and a quinoa-avocado salad. 

We made another attempt to enjoy Tirana a couple days later when we took a picnic down to the big lake park. But struggled with lots of bees around, though our sandwich from the local bakery was excellent. Our long walk around the lake was good but hot. 

To try and appreciate the city a little more, I booked us spots on a free walking tour for Tuesday morning. The tour was very good and brought much of Albania’s history to life. We tend not to do these in most cities we visit, just because the value doesn’t always bring enough for us to offset the time spent and amount we tip, but this one was very worthwhile and I highly recommend it if you ever do find yourself in Tirana. The young guide was very personable and told the stories very well. I won’t recount all the history we learned but here are some photos from the main sights. And we wrapped up the tour with a nice Albanian brunch (which was much more like an American brunch than the wonderful brunches we had in Bansko). We left the tour feeling much more enthusiastic about Tirana, but that faded within a couple of days as some of the city amenities we hoped to find here (like live jazz and great cocktails) haven’t really materialized.

The other challenge with Tirana, which impacts the locals much more than us, is that the food costs at the supermarkets are surprisingly high. Luckily we have some good nearby produce stands that are pretty reasonable and we’re eating mostly vegetarian. I’ll try to remember to share more about this, and how the higher prices don’t seem to carry over to restaurants, in my summary post. 

Other highlights of our first two weeks in Tirana include other meals out and another picnic today at the park, which was much more enjoyable with fewer bees. We had a fun date night Saturday night with an Albanian tapas dinner (great pickles and veggie casserole, not great tacos), a walk up to the top the Tirana Pyramid (which was originally a museum honoring Hoxha after his death but fell into disuse after communism and now has been turned into an indoor event space and outdoor public space), and then very mediocre cocktails at a Blloku bar we’d heard a lot of hype about called Nouvelle Vague. 

I had high hopes that our daytrip to Kruje yesterday, which I’ll cover in my second half post, would be a turning point for us, but it too was plagued by Albanian challenges. And really, though we don’t love Tirana, we’re having a nice time here, especially watching Liverpool, who are undefeated so far this season, and getting lots of work done. We have a few more Tirana sights penciled in for our last two weeks here. Then we’ll be more than ready to move on to Italy!