Balkan Rush

Torrid summer day. The day Albania was meant to be just a road between borders for my traveling shoes. But from the first step into that country, you drown into oblivion. You no longer exist in the busy, cosmeticized, oh-so-ahead-of-you Western world, but you become a passenger through a gloomy, grey and quiet setting depicted by Tarkovsky.

If you’re going to visit the Balkans and you plan to migrate from the sunny Adriatic Coast in Montenegro to the family oasis in Ohrid, Macedonia, Albania is the shortest way. The country is a trailer for post-apocalypse.

I crossed the border from Ulcinj to Shkodër in a dusty old communist bus with the inevitable, colorless window curtains. I am now in a mini-van in a roller-coaster ride to Tirana. I am swinging my head from right to left quietly observing what the road has to offer. It’s gas stations. A landscape of gas stations sprinkled every 200m, tainted with car washing services every now and then. I can spot traces of a rail road, now covered with grass on the left. Other than that, it’s the Wild, Wild West revisited.

Albania is the fantasy place of dystopian SF dreamers. It’s also the place where intellectuals who like to talk about post-communist rebirth should go and observe simple men trying to thrive while the shaky democracy is still dazed and confused. See the world through their eyes, from a mini-van, crisscrossing the country.

Tirana is an unfinished puzzle. I feel like I slipped down the rabbit’s hole back in the 90’s in my own post-communist country, as if I was given the privilege to see what it was like. Cranes, the scurrilous communist buildings, the little merchants at the corner of every street selling cigarettes on a plastic table. The holes, the noise, the randomness. I’m seeing my past that I was too little to see in their present.

Embarking in yet another mini-van to the border with Macedonia, I allow myself to succumb to the metallic freshly created memory of post-revolutionary gunpowder.