Arrival in Tirana

Day 1 Tuesday Dec 27, 2011 An early start even though our flight wasn’t until 9:20 a.m. There wasn’t a choice in flights because British Airways only does one flight a day to Tirana. I suppose we could have gone with one of the local Balkan airlines but I feel better with BA so this is the flight we had to take and it left out of Gatwick which is a bit further from us. I booked Marathon Taxi to pick us up. I like their ads, “We may cost a bit more, but we show up on time.” So far, we have used them 3 times so we are comfortable with them too. He also recommended an hour to get to Gatwick so he would pick us up at 6:25. My daughter thought that our flight was 6:25 and we would be leaving at 3 in the morning or some such time. She has reason to believe that as I am sometimes known for getting the cheaper flight or red eye to save money. Ha, this time, I talked my husband into going with business class seats as they weren’t that more expensive. Good thing I did. We get through security quickly. I stop into the duty free shop to moisturize my face and hands with the most expensive product with samples. My SOP for travel. Then we go to the lounge. There are some breakfast foods. British Airways actually had one of the nicest assortments of choices for breakfast that I have seen in a business lounge in quite a while. Most of them are cutting back so much that bringing your own food has almost become necessary. There were a number of children in the business class lounge. For some reason, this dismays me no end. I just can’t imagine how all these families with 2-5 kids can afford the business class tickets and it also seems like most of the kids don’t have a lot of discipline and control so there’s always a lot of shouting and shrieking which hurts my ears. Luckily there was a play room so guess people flying business class with kids is here to stay. When I had a child that age, I was lucky to be able to afford to go across town! Our entertainment was to watch the planes land at IAH and play tag in the train tunnel. When we boarded, there were a great many children flying, from the ages of infants to pre-teens. Way too many. Another reason not to fly on a holiday like Christmas and New Year’s as families are traveling home to visit. A lot of Albanian families on board and that included some children in business class. I am so glad we had the business class because we were a number of rows away from the crying children and screaming children in economy.

 Landing in Tirana, we taxied to the gate and then took a bus the 200 yards to the door. Since we were business class, we got a bus to ourselves. So we were first in line for immigration. My daughter’s immigration office was busy on the phone and doing personal things so it took her longer to get through but she got a stamp. I was doing my usual trying to be friendly and my officer was faster but she didn’t give me a stamp and the window was too high for me to determine that until after I had gotten through so I didn’t ask for it. Poo. Luggage was coming out and even though our bags were marked Priority, they were mixed in with everyone else’s and took a long time to get our bags, about half of the flight was already gone by the time the last bag came.

 Walking out, we found our guide immediately. He had a sign with Adventures Abroad on it. This was Klodi who would be our guide and driver for the entire trip. He waited while my daughter and I hit the toilets and said we could find an ATM just about anywhere in the city so that shouldn’t be a problem. Loaded up the bags and determined that my daughter should get the front seat because she is the most prone to car sickness. My husband was sure he’d be fine plus he never gets the front seat because he just falls asleep. We have a big van for the trip which is good and another reason why Adventures Abroad was chosen because one of the other companies was just going to put us into a car so all three of us would have been sitting in the back seat. This van was a Mercedes Benz and quite a nice vehicle.

 Took us a bit of time to get into the center of Tirana. Lots of traffic and looks to be a city that always has lots of traffic. Tirana was one of the few cities that actually had traffic lights. Everywhere else is just a go if you can, squeeze into the line, block the intersection, etc. etc. Not really any traffic lanes and the police just seem to make matters worse as they have a paddle with a stop sign on it and use it to their own whims. Many times in Tirana, the police would stop one lane of cars to let another lane join into it and never paid attention to the traffic lights so cars would be moving into the intersection from all directions. Everyone eventually gets where they want but it takes a bit of time. Klodi does not talk a lot when driving and as the traffic was so bad, we didn’t ask him a lot of questions while driving either. So there were a lot of long silent drives but as there is always a lot to see, I really didn’t mind it too much and usually got in a few questions of things going by outside. Could have used a lot more information though, I thought.

 As we get to the center of town, he is pointing out some of the main buildings. We also see a Christmas market which I recognized as such having just been to two in Europe. We didn’t get to go until we came back to Tirana though. We get to our hotel which is right on the main square of Tirana, Tirana International Hotel, supposedly 4 stars. Klodi drops us off and asks us what time we want dinner. This is when we find out that lunch time to Albanians is around 2-4 p.m. and dinner around 10 p.m. They eat their big meal at lunch and have a light dinner before they go to bed. Much too late for us so we request 7 or 7:30 for most of our dinners throughout the trip. Dropping us at the main door of the hotel seems to be SOP unless it was a city where he was staying in the same hotel. So we stagger in with our backpacks (I’m staggering) and I pull out my voucher for the hotel but they give it back. They are more interested in having our passports which they want to keep for security for the mini bar. We convince them that we will return from our rooms shortly and pay 20Euros per room and get back our passports. It was only the 4 and 5 star hotels that ever wanted our passports. At first, we thought it was like old Europe where you had to turn in a passport and register with the police but it was just policy to avoid someone stealing their mini bar supplies. We are on the 8th floor with rooms next to each other and overlooking the main square. We can hear a lot of noise coming in from the square and also we are fairly sure we will hear the call to prayer from the mosque. There is a small amusement park on the right side from us. The rides generate quite a bit of yelling and screaming and laughter.

 We suspect that we are the only guests in the hotel as well. We discover at breakfast that there are maybe 2 other rooms taken. We decide to go out and find an ATM. We have calculated what we think we will need for the meals that are not included and calculate it to be about $234 so we’ll get 25,000 lek which is going at the rate of apx 104 lek to $1. The staff returns our passports to us. They direct us around the corner to the bank street. Being the capital city there are many banks on almost all the streets it seems so we have no problem finding an ATM. We took one bottle of water from the mini bar and then thought to ask them if the water was safe to drink. It is but we got that from Klodi because the hotel wasn’t sure what we meant. We head out and it’s pretty cold. I had taken the lining out of my coat and that was a definite mistake. We’re looking for fresh fruit, an ATM, and diet drinks. On this short trip, we didn’t find but a place with tired looking oranges, found many ATM’s and they don’t have anything other than coke zero for diet drinks. As Klodi puts it later, “we don’t need it”. As their tourism industry builds up, they will find they do need it for business! Back to the hotel with money. We stop for a triangle shaped “pie” with spinach in the middle. Kind of like a puff pastry. It was good. There were several tiny storefronts selling food of this kind. Got an ice cream too that was very Italian gelato type which makes sense since they are very close to Italy. Back to the hotel for some reading, relaxing, and trying to get on line until time for Klodi to fetch us for dinner.

 He is prompt but don’t remember now if we asked for 7 or 7:30. He drives a short distance and up a small street into a parking lot for Juvenila Castelo, the restaurant which he says is “traditional restaurant”. There are some people in there for dinner already in spite of his telling us dinner is 10:00 p.m. for Albanians. We also find out immediately that there are no “nonsmoking” restaurants or bars. People light up and puff away wherever they are. They do this even in some places where there are “no smoking” signs and usually standing right underneath the sign. We also find out tonight that it could be a problem for my daughter to find good food like she eats. They usually have broccoli or cauliflower but not always and when you ordered grilled vegetables, that means eggplant and zucchinis that are grilled with olive oil and then slathered with cheese. My daughter had the grilled veggies and lamb. I got some traditional meatballs which were just big meatballs in a tomato sauce. My husband had the veal here. Klodi shared that the veal is just young cow and not force fed like lots in the states used to be (however later we ran into some actually killing of cows and was a bit gruesome). My husband thought it was tasty but tough as they cut the meat the wrong way so wasn’t tender like it could have been. The food was fairly good except for the vegetable snafu.

 I start learning how to say thank you in Albania which is Faleminderit (e’s pronounced like short ‘a’ and accent on second and fourth syllables and all letters pronounced including the last t). Wasn’t until I had him write it in my book that I got good at it. We learned tonight that Albanian is a unique language, according to Klodi, which means that there aren’t any others like it. But it was an oral language until 1906 or so. As we discovered during the trip, the three of us speak “modern” and “technical” meaning words that are computer related, technical related, auto related, etc. are easily understood by us because they are close to English. When we later tried to describe this to Klodi he because quite defensive of his language so we let it pass. There is a sort of fitness gym there. My daughter and I had gone down to see it. It’s not much but it will help with her workout since she has the Houston Marathon shortly after she returns home. It was also decided that if she wants to turn on the lights herself, she can go down at any time. She’ll do that tomorrow and then meet us for breakfast and then we’ll head out for our first day of touring. Always nice to be in a new country and look forward to seeing things, learning a bit of the culture, meeting people.