Globe Corner Blogs

Last year when I was trying to figure out how I was going to go from Dubrovnik to Albania, I found that it was very difficult to do. Maybe not very difficult, but time consuming to say the least. This year I found that it was very simple to walk into a tourist agency and book a one day excursion to see the “Colors of Albania” via the shiny new high-speed catamaran that departs form Dubrovnik every Wednesday.

It only took three hours to speed down the Adriatic Coast and arrive in the historic port of Durrës, Albania. We were then whisked away to our assigned guides and herded onto buses to make the trek to the capital city of Tirana. The short distance took a very long time to cover as the entire highway seemed to be a parking lot of Mercedes, Hummers, and other flashy cars. Our guide told us that Albania has the highest number of Mercedes per capita and Albanians helped “clean” Germany of their Mercedes. Everyone on the bus just raised their eyebrows and nodded.

As I watched the Albanian countryside from our slow moving bus, I realized why the tour was called “The Colors of Albania”. Albania is probably the most colorful country I have ever seen, on a lot of levels. Not just the colorful characters that swarmed our bus as we got off in the main square, but the buildings were painted lots of colors and in very interesting patterns. From what I was told, some Albanian officials decided that dreary Tirana needed to get a bit of a facelift. The problem was that they didn’t have enough money to paint all of the gray buildings so they asked for paint donations from various construction companies. They were very creative and these are some of the results.

After some free time to explore the center of Tirana, we headed back to Durrës and toured some of the archeological sights including the Amphitheater of Durrës dating from 2 A.D. and the 6th century Byzantine city walls. The city itself had the feel of a ghost town, because everyone was at the most popular site in town: a very tiny store that was selling

Skënderbeu cognac. I had only learned the day before my trip that Albania was famous for their cognac and that I absolutely had to bring back as much as I could carry to distribute amongst my friends in Dubrovnik. All of the tourists from Croatia and Russia on our tour were in the store buying as many bottles as they could carry, however none of the other nationalities on our trip seemed to know what the heck was happening. It took some time to navigate through the mosh pit in the store where I was able to grab the attention of the overwhelmed owner of the store and hand him all of my remaining lekë and ask him how much I could get. He handed me back five large bottles, I thanked him, turned and smiled for the camera crew from the Albanian TV station that was there filming the spectacle and headed back to the boat with all of my loot.

Read more: Albania, Eastern Europe, Food & Wine, Travel


Lisa can usually be found staring longingly at the Eastern European shelf at the Globe Corner Bookstore. However, she really wants to go to Colombia.

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