Tirana

I thought I would start my Tirana post with a photo not in Tirana. Travelling into Albania, most people make clear that it is essential to visit the Albanian Riviera. As soon as I’d departed by cross-border bus and convinced Europcar to open for business, that was exactly where I headed. One could of course be cynical, but there was really something to it. In some ways it felt like what I imagine Monaco was like in the 1970s. The sea glistened and Ferraris drove too quickly over speed bumps. Mark my words, Sarandë is the new Ibiza for people that don’t mind stray dogs.

I knew very little about Albania, there I said it. “Was it in the Soviet Union?” was the sort of question I might have pondered before I arrived. I now know that it wasn’t. It existed in its own socialist world, with all of the hallmarks of the Cold War. Most notably, it was literally full of bunkers. 750,000 to be precise. For a population of less than 3 million. Tirana and its suburbs host what are by far the most impressive of these underground safe places. In a move critics (me) consider to be excellent, they have now been converted into museums. It is quite the experience. Once I got past the smell of damp and impending sense of doom, I could imagine myself carving out quite a nice post-apocalyptic life, asleep in Enver Hoxha’s bed.

I wonder if a flag can exhibit largesse. In the square in which it stands, a great opera house invites you in for soprano and well-made pasta. At one end stands an old mosque, at the other a great socialist mural. The square rises subtly to its centre so as to give the effect of adventure, and perhaps also for drainage.

I think one of the key principles of a social experiment is that the participants should not be aware they are in a social experiment. For a little over 10 minutes I watched person after person walk into a small room in a museum and press this red button. Was it that they really wanted to know what it was like to experience a chemical attack, or simply that there is something inevitable about one’s hand touching a button such as this one? Each one of them had a second thing in common: their face betrayed nothing but apathy as they pressed it. When nothing happened, they carried on just as they had arrived. Unfazed. Ungassed.

I liked Tirana, but its entertainment offerings dried up surprisingly quickly, and like Podgorica, my body was being ruined by the heat. Growing up in Western Europe, city breaks are about walking roughly towards places of note and then on to the next. It’s a routine millions of us have completely engrained. I simply cannot not do it. But the more I travel, the more I realise that the vast majority of places in the world are just not designed for that type of holiday. I am starting again. One must haggle with taxi drivers and overpay. It is essential to buy drinks from petrol stations if you want to survive. Pavements are contested spaces between you, mopeds and wild dogs. Most museums are bad. All of these things were running through my mind as I asked myself: what social issue could this sign possibly be trying to address? What did the squeeze horn do to deserve being outlawed, whilst others in the brass section play on? How could any Albanian orchestra play Brahms under these conditions?

I had seen some of the Balkans. Along the way I’d learned many things, but perhaps none more important than: don’t attempt to access a Europcar branch in Albania on a Sunday. Tirana’s mountainous setting gave me a serene send off, as a boarded my RyanAir flight to oblivion (Stansted).