We found a traditional Albanian restaurant after our hike, and we ate:
Speça me gjize: red peppers stuffed with rice, tomato and cottage cheese, and fried rice balls with hints of mint and other spices (oregano maybe?).
The stuffed peppers and baked cottage cheese are really yummy, and vegetarian! Adding these two of our list of food to cook when we get back 🙂
Yesterday we saw a motorcycle (a Royal Enfield!) with Great Britain plate parked in front of the guesthouse. We were curious about the identity of the rider, and I had assumed the rider would be a man, even though Gabriel had pointed out my sexism and said that the rider could be a “she”. So I was delighted to be proven wrong and see a twenty-something year old woman working on the motorcycle this morning. I said hello and we started chatting. She’s been traveling from London for a few months by land and heading towards Azerbaijan. Her goal is to be in Azerbaijan by September because she could hitch a ride back from there with one of her friends. We wanted to invite her to have dinner with us, hungering for more stories from her travel but she had a tight schedule and was only staying in Tirana for one night. “Besides, it’s expensive to stay in the city,” she said. “It’s cheaper to camp on the countryside.” We nodded in agreement, wished her luck and let her go back to her motorcycle maintenance. I just regretted not getting her contact information; it would have been nice to email her in September to see if she made it.
I always find it funny when we encountered someone on a trip like that and they asked us what we’re doing. Often I admire their goals so much that I felt our aimless walkabout is quite silly. Very unpurposeful and juvenile in comparison. So I would minimize what we’re doing and sheepishly admit that we are traveling for a year and have no planned itinerary. But then I could see their eyes widen —perhaps out of curiosity as to how we manage to take a full year off, or perhaps out of wishful thinking that they can extend their trip longer — and I wonder what they’re thinking.
Continue reading →We’ve been taking the public bus to get around. 40 leks (~40 cents) per ride regardless of distance. After a few days we figured out what the names in front of the buses meant, which direction it would take us to.
In some countries you pay the driver when you the board the bus. Here, there’s a conductor (who must have amazing facial recognition skills) who collected fares from passengers who just boarded the bus. Occasionally it got really crowded in the bus and making it impossible for the conductor to go to the back of the bus, in which case he would get out of the bus and enter from the rear door.
We took one of the bus lines quite frequently that the conductor began to recognize us and nodded a quick hello whenever he saw us. I smiled back with the biggest smile I could muster and treasured this small rare moment of being treated like a “regular” in a strange land.
On our way back from the Bunk.Art museum, we took the bus downtown and were dropped off near a row of zagra (grill) restaurants. One of the waiters beckoned us in: “We are the best one!” he said in English, as if he just read our intention to look around and check out everyone’s menu before deciding.
But our eyes were set on the rotisserie chicken next door. Mouthwatering glistening golden brown crispy skin rotating on top of the grill. The waiter in this particular restaurant didn’t speak English so with our advanced hand signaling skills we asked him if we could have half a chicken. “No ‘alf,” he said.
Disappointed, we ordered the wings and grilled sausages instead. The sausage (kernace) was something else. Imagine a more flavorful, perfectly spiced Italian sausage. It’s traditionally eaten by dipping it in a little bit of salt and eaten with raw onion. Delicious. And with a glass of cold beer on such a hot day, it was perfection.
For dinner, we went to get ‘fast food’, i.e. doner. Much to our delight, we hadn’t seen a lot of Western fast food chain in town so we went to a place that looked quite busy. For 150 leks (USD 1.50) we got a pita bread stuffed with shaved grilled meat (chicken or pork), tomato, shredded lettuce, onion, french fries (also stuffed inside the pita bread!) and topped with a ridiculous amount of mayonnaise.
We woke up rather late. The lack of sleep on the overnight bus had really messed up our sleep cycle. By the time we got up, the sun was already out in full force – not exactly the most ideal condition to walk around in.
Luckily, there is Bunk.Art – an old decommissioned bunker turned into a museum about the communist era in Albania on the northeastern edge of Tirana.
