Albania

Albania, we meet again!

How I love Albania with the coloured buildings and beautiful people. This trip was a little different as we had a third amigo to come along with us.

Jasmine! Jasmine is also from Scotland she is a childhood friend of ours, we met in Slovakia and convinced her to come on our Albania to Macedonia trip! We were delighted when she agreed and it worked out perfectly because Jazz was staying in Budapest and we were flying from there.

Me, Jazz and Alona.

Jazz had never been to the Balkans before and had only heard our stories. I was excited to see her reaction to Albania as I remembered my first reaction. We drank beer in the airport and exchanged stories.

Once we had got off the plane and into Tirana Airport we asked where the bus was leaving from and they told us to run as it was leaving in 2 minutes. As Jazz beelined for the bus me and Alona ran behind her and just managed to catch the bus. We drove towards to city centre and the rustic buildings whizzed passed us, the people scooting along on their motorbikes and the busy markets crammed full of people. The bus wasn’t too long, maybe half an hour.

We got off and went in search of our hostel. When we got there we seen a man and boy on the phone to someone. The person on the phone was the translator. We spoke into the phone and they would switch to Albanian. There was a big confusion and they told us to wait, so we went outside. The boy flew down the stairs towards us and asked one of us to go up. Alona took the hit and came down five minutes later saying there had been a mix up and that they had sorted somewhere else for us. They handed us the name of a guest house on a slip of paper with no address and we had no WIFI to find it. We decided to rely on fate!

As we made our way there we eventually got lost. The sun was starting to go down and  we didn't fancy walking around Tirana lost with backpacks on in darkness. Alona flagged down a taxi and again the driver called someone to translate. After 10 minutes of Google translating and the man trying to find where the guest house was we piled in and off we went. However our taxi driver didn’t know the way either so he kept stopping to ask people out the window and even chased an affronted man down the street to ask. We went down small winding streets that had markets all along them, he kept asking and asking. We arrived finally and we thanked him and paid our fare - which was only about 2.80 euros for all that! We walked along a little more and eventually we ended up at a quiet side street with a closed metal door facing us and 2 men standing there smoking and staring at us. Now I know this is every warning sign not to go through the door but... we went through anyway.

The door in question