Travel Europe | #12 Postcards from Albania

Travel Europe | #12 Postcards from Albania

They’ll eat me. They’ll eat me not.

A few serious discussions with friends from Sarajevo effectively crossed out Albania from my summer trip. Why would I go to a place where local people told PG-10 rated stories about how unsafe the country was, how dangerous people were after many years closing their country to the outside world during Communism, how our school bus tour to Greece had to change route heading to Macedonia instead of crossing Albania. Thinking that Muslim countries sympathize with one another, I told my friend I would pretend that I spoke Bosnian so they’d be friendly to me. “No. Then you sound like a Serbian, and they will hate you even more.” My friend laughed and joked that they might ‘eat’ me. (For those who don’t keep up with events in this region, Serbia and Kosovo had been fighting for years for the independence of Kosovo, where ethnic Albanians made up the majority of the population.)

I was completely content with just cruising around the coast of Croatia and Montenegro until one day I saw a tourist ad promoting trips to Albania.

He loves me. He loves me not.

No, I didn’t have an on-the-road rendezvous nor succumbed to unrequited love to exotic looking Balkan men. I had a serious meltdown with my boyfriend on the street of Budvar, Montenegro next to the travel agency which posted the ad. He didn’t want to visit the country because he was a bit scared of me. Being a plan-for-everything kind of person, he refused to go anywhere without researching about it first. Unable to convince him to make an impulsive trip to Albania, I started to ‘cry’.

I took a couple of hours debating what it meant to love and be loved and conditional love and all sorts of love in addition to a couple more days consulting with local Montenegrins and researching on the Internet, I finally got the boyfriend’s agreement to venture into Albania.

My oh my! Albania was no way near what you considered Europe if by Europe you mean Italy, France or even by the standard of neighboring Balkan countries which were already messed up.

But this is why Albania is special, in sense that you want to see another side of Europe.

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