The Next Chapter

Day 3 (4?) in Durres, Albania. We picked this city in large part for it’s proximity to the sea, which we haven’t even made our way to yet. We’ve gotten close, within a couple of blocks, but not all the way. Frankly, I’m shocked at myself, being a confirmed water baby. The inner child in me will have to extend a little grace to the jet lagged adult that I have become.

We got really lucky with our travel days, no delays, no cancellations, no terrible plane neighbors. It was still exhausting. We left our pet sit in Seattle on Sunday at noon, took an Uber to the light rail station, the light rail (along with a thousand Seahawks fans) to the airport, then a 7 hour flight to Iceland (empty seat in our row!), then a 4 hour flight to London, then a city bus to our hotel. Neither Craig or I sleep when we travel so by then I don’t know how we were managing to stay upright. I don’t remember doing it but apparently when I booked our London hotel a couple of weeks ago, I requested a wheelchair accessible room. I think this is the only reason we were able to walk into the hotel and go right to the room, there were lots of other tired looking people sitting in the lobby, hoping for early check in. Thank goodness for that little mistake!

We restricted ourselves to a three hour nap so we had a chance to work into our new time zone. We took the best advantage of our one night in England and went ‘round the pub for dinner. The local we went to was built in the 1200s and was so charming! While enjoying a couple of pints, some fish and chips and a cottage pie, we got to chat with some friendly regulars and definitely got poked at for our “illustrious leader” and his recent visit to the country. The joke is most definitely on us.

Tuesday morning was terribly early for us but we made it to the airport with enough time to enjoy breakfast and coffee in the airport club before boarding our 3 hour flight to Albania. Can I just take a moment here to swoon a little bit about my sweet husband? We all know how great Craig is, obviously. By we I mean all of us apparently. When the (complete stranger) lady next to him on the flight was obviously exhausted and kept nodding off then jerking awake because there is truly no comfortable way to sleep on a plane, craig offered his shoulder to her to sleep on. When I saw him do this I assumed she would decline, who wants to sleep on a strange mans shoulder? She did not decline, she got cozy and slept on him for the entire flight. No stranger-danger vibes from my guy!

A 45 minute and truly harrowing taxi ride later, we finally got to our apartment in Durres. Are you exhausted just from reading all that? Yeah, we were trashed. We unpacked and wandered around until we found a grocery store for a few essentials, then went looking for dinner.

It’s all a blur but we ended up having drinks and some lovey fish about 100 feet from ancient roman ruins. That’s Europe for you, so much history everywhere.

The next morning, after walking around the same block several times, we found a gym and joined for the month. No paperwork, no liability waiver, no barcode to put on our keys. We just walk in every day and they wave to us and that’s it. We’ve managed to go every day so far (3 in a row!). Managed to eat. Managed to do our jobs, despite our phones not being as happy as they should be. My phone number is being routed to the BBC. Seriously, if you call me you might end up being connected to the BBC. That’s professional, right?

Now that the how we got here portion of this ramble is complete, let’s talk about here. Durres, Albania is the second largest city in the country. It’s giving me mini-Naples vibes. A little dirty, a little hot, very much a living, breathing city, not a tourist destination. That’s great for me because I HATE tourists (I do understand the irony here). Really, what I hate are masses of people who don’t know what they’re doing or where they’re going and are maybe a little entitled. I used Google Maps to check out our apartment before booking it and it seemed like a good location, central but not too busy. I was lied to. The street view is 9 years old, which is a really long time. Also, the street is just two lanes and there are lots of shops and such, I expected it to be kind of chill. It is not chill. It’s the most busy road in the town, and where young men like to cruse all evening. It’s terrifying to watch and I can’t look away, they somehow take a two lane road that at home would be 25mph and zoom around, passing each other and showing off.

There are tons of cafes where men sit and drink coffee all day. Most people dress very fashionably here, which I wasn’t expecting. It’s lovely to sit on the sidewalk and watch the parade of pretty people go by. We’ve tried out a few places and think we have found our daytime coffee spot, our afternoon coffee or beer spot and our evening drinks spot. All within a 30 second walk from our apartment. It’s our hope that if we frequent the same places we will start to form some connections with other regulars, and eventually get a report going. It’s going to be harder than we expected, there are not as many English speakers here as we expected and Albanian proved to be a very difficult language for us to even prep a few words of. Oh well, we’ll get there and in the meantime we will latch onto any English speakers we can find.

We enjoyed an evening with some English guys who are in Albania to part. They had some flight issues so by the time they got here they had as much energy to party a we do (none). It was a fun night and I’m grateful to have run into them. They are all three originally from Africa before immigrating to England and it was interesting to talk about the cultural differences between the various countries. They said we’re automatically cool and a higher class because we’re Americans. I can definitely recognize our immense privilege but don’t feel that cool…

Work and travel exhaustion have prevented us from exploring much, we’re finally about to head out and see what we can see. I’ve got a lovely dinner spot picked out for tonight, traditional Albanian food with a set menu. I plan to sample Raki, the local drink of choice as well. Wish us luck!