Log> Sights> Albania, Macedonia, Kosovo

My stomach feels like it is still on the mountainous strips of potholes that are marked as highways on the Albanian road maps. The feeling is most likely due to a valiant effort at lunching on a steak that was likely roadkill a few days (or weeks) ago somewhere on the littered backroads of Eastern Albania.

My friend Juha and me had joked about taking over a small country at some point or another for a longer time now, and Albania sounded like a good place to be more intimately aware of. We landed in Tirana on Thursday, spent three days there and then rented a car for a road trip to Skopje in Macedonia, and Pristina in Kosovo.

In a nutshell, Albania is a beautiful mess. Tirana has serious infrastructural problems still; the houses are in bad repair, streets uncontrolled and full of potholes, waste management non-existent. But the people are friendly, warm and honest. Not once did we have a problem or even a suspicion of being ripped off or otherwise treated as outsiders, despite the reports of the corruptness of the country. I'm shortchanged in London much more than I'd expect to be in Albania. And despite not a lot of people speaking (any) English, we managed to communicate, be understood, ask for directions and give rides to elderly hitchhikers heading vaguely in our direction. In Tirana, we didn't see anyone else identifiable as a tourist. One of the highlights was a great 12 rounds in a Tirana boxing match where local Qato narrowly defeated the challenging Russian, and the crowd went wild.

We didn't have as much time to spend in Macedonia, but the contrast was blatant. Infrastructure is superior, food is more varied and better presented, English is spoken more widely. An interesting observation was that in Skopje at night there were women walking by themselves (home from the gym, to the cafe, at the bus stop, whatever), which I didn't see in Tirana, and thinking about it now, would have seemed out of place there.

Kosovo, by comparison, was easily the most developed and western of the places we visited. It wasn't even as trashy, whereas some roadsides in Albania were just blue from all the plastic bags and bottles that had accumulated in the gutter. The UN influence was everywhere: KFOR, UNMIK, OSCE, EU and some national development agencies had their vehicles all around Pristina. There were many more western brands visible in advertising (and mostly not counterfeit, mind you), and Euro was the only currency in use, even in the ATMs, which is sort of weird since this temporary, nigh arbitrary 'Unmikistan' has no real ties to the Euro zone or hasn't inherited the currency from Serbia, for example. The trip concluded with a 300 km, 8 hour drive from Kosovo to Tirana on a road of potholes, bunkers and half-rotten dogs.

There are photos of bridge crossings, a boxing match in Tirana, rows of bunkers, expats in bars, locals on the front seat, anti-Ahtisaari posters and other general weird beauty over in the Picasa Album.