Day Five – Tirana to Berat. December 19, 2017

19 December 2017. Berat, Albania

Greetings from central Albania. We arrived in Berat!

Started the day at the City of Tirana’s Office of Parks and Recreation (an agency just formed two years ago!) I had been asked to give a talk to the department staff, which is led by a delightful, exuberant, and very committed young woman named Erinda. They are advocating for and developing parks within the city, planning bike routes, maintaining existing parks, and managing all recreational facilities throughout the city — and looking for new ways to engage local neighborhoods, to build public/private partnerships to help support their programs, planting street trees, and energetically finding ways for Tirana to be more green. Interestingly, voluntarism to keep public facilities in neighborhoods clean is shunned by many because volunteering wreaks of the old Communist days when “volunteering” was “mandatory.”

Anyway, the department is located in a building adjacent to their large Olympic training facility and both buildings are quite modern. We got a chance to glimpse the facilities of a city department. First, you should know that I don’t think the building has heat. Everyone (except us) seemed accustomed to wearing their coats inside the building. The staff for each section of the department seem to share large rooms without any buffers between staff members… sort of like long tables with computers next to computers. We visited the landscape architects’ office within the department and they had “fairly new” computers but monitors that were quite small for design work. The number of women far outweighed the number of men and most staff were in their late 20s and early 30s.

My talk went over well with lots of questions and then we had some time to chat with Erinda and learn more about the department. She’s very eager to visit the US to see Central Park in NY! But she’s really most interested in learning about partnerships for parks and how to get the private sector involved in funding park development and maintenance. I encouraged her to visit but to go beyond NY (especially since NYC is three times the size of all of Albania – population-wise). I said she should try to get funding to see other cities, especially where there has been strong leadership and community support for parks – and of course offered to help her organize such a trip. Interestingly, Erinda has lived in Japan for 6 years – and is fluent in Japanese! It is amazing how much travel this upcoming generation in Albania has traveled (or lived abroad) since the end of the dictatorship, when no travel in or out was allowed.

Speaking of languages – Albanian children start learning English at age 8, but they are also required to study another language (in addition to Albanian and English) and most learn either French or Italian. Older Albanians (including taxi drivers) speak Italian and people often offer that as a language to converse with us, but alas we know no Italian. That doesn’t stop them from chatting away in Italian.. So we now quite often say Grazie at the end of taxi rides…

The parks department folks drove us back to the hotel (in a work truck) and we quickly packed up and walked to find lunch and to pick up our rental car from Sixt. The drive out of Tirana was pretty hairy – As I said earlier they are very aggressive drivers; there really isn’t any striping on the roads; there are lots of roundabouts (traffic circles) and people seem to just criss cross to get from one lane to the other. It seems also as if many roads are set for three lanes but people create four or roads that are for two lanes become three, etc. We made a few mistakes getting out of Tirana (mostly due to the GPS saying to exit at the third exit of the roundabout but it was really the second – not sure how they count!) People gave us all sorts of calculations as to how long it would take to drive to Berat from Tirana – ranging from 90 minutes to 3 hours. It took us the latter. Once we got out of the city, it was pretty much one lane in each direction, but none of the overhead “highway” lights were working (once we were out of the city). That made it a bit scary. People were crossing the road, dogs were meandering, and buses were stopping to pick up people. Mike did the driving and I navigated. My big take-away about cars in Albania — pedestrians beware!

Given that is was dark for a good part of the drive, we didn’t see much. Then as we approached Berat, we made numerous mistakes (Mike blames the GPS), but eventually found the hotel which is located uphill on the edge of the medieval quarter. The hotel (which costs about $60 per night for the largest room with best view) was recently renovated. I think they took a trip to Italy and found some of the “modern, Italian bougie” decorator stuff and decided that is what guests would like. That said, it’s extremely clean and functional (although we couldn’t get the heat in the room to work for several hours in spite of having staff come up to help). Naturally, when we arrived to check in they didn’t have our reservation… but we had an email saying the reservation was confirmed. But, no problem getting the best room in the place – we are the only guests!

We settled in and then figured we should just eat dinner here because we were tired from the drive and we really didn’t have a sense of the town plan or how far things were.. and it was really dark. So, we were the only ones in the restaurant which was even more bougie than the other spaces.. Food was fair and a far cry from the phenomenal meals we’ve had for the past few days. We shared a pasta (simply prepared) and then I had the chicken (special for the holidays apparently) with bland stuffing and Mike had some kind of breaded veal stuffed with cheese (which he proceeded to scoop out so that he only had a small amount of cheese). The wine (Italian – and very cheap) was quite good. At the end of the meal they gave us dessert even though we didn’t order it… sort of a brownie.

Anyway, it is now morning and we are heading out to climb the steep walkway to the 13^th century castle, where there are still people living in a little village in the castle walls… Then we will explore the rest of the city.. and hopefully find a really good country-style restaurant for tonight. We leave Berat tomorrow for Gjyrokaster. By the way, much as it may not sound like it — we are really excited to see Berat in the sunlight.. It’s a UNESCO heritage town, as is Gjyrokaster.

Onward for the adventure.

Fern

PS – I’m caught up now.. so that tonight’s notes will be about today. Whew… Hopefully I will be able to keep up as I also need to complete my syllabus for Winter Quarter which begins a day after we land in California.

driveway of building where the “art” is the wall of hearts.. couples come and write their names on the hearts as high as they can reach… On this day we stumbled on two women who were there on a mission — to cross out their names… I assume love gone bad!