Tirana – Albania 21/7/16 – 23/7/16

(t) Leaving Lake Ohrid by bus at 5am, taking the mountainous drive through to Tirana, Albania’s capitol, funny but just the other side of the lake on Albania’s side the terrain is fairly different, not quite so green and bushy. The timing of the buses meant we had 4 full days here, and sorry to say that was 3 days too long. The town doesn’t really have a main centre just very long tree lined roads with shops that are mostly in the basements – quite unique. The Skanderbeg square has the statue of the man and the opera house and the museum and that’s it, most locals seem to spend time at the park by the casino. We did a lot of walking around and found the sky tower where we had a meal and then drinks in the revolving bar, not very high but nice views of the city and over to the mountains. We also visited the Blloku area which was only for the politburo during the communist rule. Now it has most of the restaurants and night life.
One thing that Tirana has loads of is coffee house/ bars but none of them do food so it’s quite hard to find restaurants unless you go walking for a while. Our first night we though we were ok following groups of people but alas the road went nowhere so on the way back we spotted a sign down an alley stating restaurant -great. Well what a strange place, an older lady came out and ushered us into her back parlour by the kitchen to a low round table. We felt like we had wondered into her house by mistake! The menu was ‘traditional’ food and mostly consisted of lamb innards with cottage cheese…..we chose lamb shanks with rice. Out came 2 huge shanks, plain – no sauce veg or anything-, and plain rice, however, it was cooked to perfection. The funniest bit was when the lady and the cook made a bee line for us and leaned over to scoop a cockroach off the wall behind us!!
We visited the museum which was impressive but only some of it – roman artefacts – were shown in English so a lot of the countries history was hard to follow.
We decided to take a day trip to Durres by the coast, 3 hours of walking round everywhere and we couldn’t find transport for love nor money. We were told by one tour place ‘there is a train but it doesn’t work’. At this point I really thought we would be stuck there, however, good old Google for other blogs and we found the one tour shop to get our tickets out to Montenegro. I’m sure there are numerous great places to visit but with a useless public transport system you would need a car.
Overall the city just didn’t have any cohesion and whilst its part of the experience to go to new places I would have preferred to have bypassed it.

Awesome flag tho, looks right out of Game of Thrones