Albania - October 2005

Tripping Up in Tirana

The Guinness

According to the ‘Irish Bars in Europe’ website there were two bars that sold Guinness in Tirana and one was supposedly a bar in the Palace of Culture, next to the Opera House. The barmaid at Lux Bar had however never heard of Guinness but there was a Guinness mirror on the wall.

Lux Bar - a Guinness mirror but no Guinness to drink

We tried to find a place called Murphy’s Bar but after much searching and asking people we ended up in Bistro 7 which it turned out used to be an Irish bar in a previous life and didn’t serve Guinness any more. It still had a few thing Irish on the wall. The owner invited us to stay for a beer and served us olives and raw carrots and told us of his love for Liverpool football club.

An Irish verse on the wall of Bistro 7 but again no Guiness on sale - but a warm welcome.

We wandered past a small supermarket and my eyes happened to catch the liquor section and there on the shelves were three kinds of Guinness – bottles, draught and standard cans! Once again there was no need to use the emergency can of Guinness I had brought with me. We purchased some Guinness and had it back at the hotel and asked Endri, the hotel owner’s son to choose my next destination out of the hat.

Cheers - drinking Guinness in Tirana

Endri picking my next destination out of the hat.

Getting there and around

There didn’t seem to be any direct flights to Albania so we chose to fly to Bari, Italy with Ryanair for £38 return and then take the overnight ferry from Bari to Durres in Albania for £115 return. For some reason I booked cabins with portholes but then realised we were travelling by night so wouldn’t see much anyway.

From there we caught the train to Tirana for 25p. The train was an old Czech locomotive and the carriages Italian. It took a while to find a carriage with windows in it. Women came around selling bananas – a sort of Albanian trolley service I guess. The train travelled slowly, sounding its horn constantly to get the grazing animals off the track.

The Tirrana - Durres train

The train timetable at Tirran station

Team Makeup

Friend Kevin was brave enough to join me on this one. He proved an ideal travelling companion – the pace which he liked doing things and the type of things he liked to explore pretty much matched my own – apart from modern art!

Kevin - looking like I have just suggested we go to see some modern art.

Accommodation

We stayed at Hotel Endri in Tirana which is less of a hotel and more a couple of spare rooms in an apartment block rented out by the very pleasant owner called Petrit. The place is named after his son Endri. It was clean and spacious but not that easy to find. The owner had given us his mobile phone number and we were told to give him a call when close.

Hotel Endri - we found the sign but finding the hotel istfe was a challenge

Food

One night we ate shish kebabs, accompanied by goat’s cheese and pickled red peppers plus a beer for a mere £3.50.

By far the best meal we had was in Bella Napoli in Durres just before we caught the ferry back to Italy. Fresh fish was their speciality so we had a couple of excellently cooked fish freshly baked in the pizza oven.

Sightseeing highlights

At Skanderbeg Square we popped out head into the Theatre of Opera and Ballet and on hearing some folk music upstairs I just had to introduce Kevin to one of my rules of travel – go as far as you can until you are challenged! Well, we weren’t and we ended up in what appeared to be a televised prize-giving ceremony with folk dancing and music as entertainment.

Catching a bit of folk music at the Opera house

 

Skanderbeg Square - Et’hem Bey mosque and Skanderbeg himself

There aren’t a lot of ancient structures remaining in Tirana apart from the mosque and 19th-century Tanners’ Bridge.

Tanners Bridge

Much of the city is quite austere. The river goes through the city in a grey concrete culvert. To brighten up the place the Albanians have painted the apartment blocks in bright colours and it certainly adds a splash of colour.

The brightly painted apartments

The bomb shelters that  were built in their thousands

Out of the City

In Durres, on the coast of the Adriatic Sea, we visited the second centaury amphitheatre. We were the only visitors and its a strange place, having houses built on half of it. I wondered how many hundreds of tourists there were at that precise moment in the Coliseum in Rome and here we were completely alone.

The Roman amphitheatre in Durres

Quirky moments

I happened to visit to the doctor a few weeks before going and in idle conversation I was asked if I travelled much. When I told her I was going to Albania soon she quickly produced a giant needle and gave me a couple of inoculations.

Previous visits to the Post Office’s Foreign Currency department had supplied me Danish Kroner for visiting the Faroe Islands and Bulgarian Lev but admitted defeat when I asked them for Albanian Lek. It turns out that you can’t get Lek outside Albania.

Speed of traffic didn’t appear controlled by any speed limits but by the state of the road. Huge potholes meant traffic had to slow down to negotiate them – a sort of inverse of speed bumps but with the same effect. Watch out for missing manhole covers along the roads and pavements as its easy to trip up.

The no horns sign seemed very ironic given the noise around

Lasting Memories

The number of private armoured guards outside various buildings.

A country that had been isolated for many years but keen to envelope the new century. There were modern office blocks and new buildings being constructed everywhere.

The streets were buzzing with young people at night but there was no drunkenness or rowdy behaviour and it felt a lot safer than wandering around the streets a UK city on a Saturday night.

We found the people friendly and very helpful. When we were trying to find the hotel we asked in a grocery shop. Instead of just telling us the way the owner left his shop and escorted us up the road to Hotel Endri.