Spring Break Travels Part II: A Tramp Through Albania

After we left Istanbul last Saturday, our Turkish Airlines flight landed in Albania at around 8:30pm local time. It felt immediately apparent, I thought, that we had arrived in a different place. Gone was the general hubbub and chaos of the Istanbul airport, as well as the crowds of Turkish men holding up signs written in Turkish, Arabic, and other languages I didn't recognize. The Albanian airport was small and quiet, and we again opted to take a taxi straight to our hostel instead of trying to navigate an unfamiliar city in the dark.

Before I left for Albania, several people asked me why I was going there. Well, I had never been to Eastern Europe before, and my friend Cate and I were looking for a cheap place to travel, especially to go visit the Albanian coast, which we'd heard was beautiful. Albania was listed as #4 on the New York Times's top places to travel in 2014. We had read interesting things about the country's history and culture. And Albania was easier to get to and travel around from Istanbul than Croatia, another Eastern European coastal destination we were considering.

Indeed, the country ended up being extremely cheap (traveling with our stipend given to us in British pounds can be a huge gift), and the coast was beautiful. Otherwise, I think Albania surprised us in several ways. First of all, the country has a long and fraught history of being fought over and passed around from empire to empire, and it only recently emerged from a long-lived and oppressive communist government. The political situation is still shaky, and it is one of the poorest countries in Europe. (It did, however, join NATO a few years ago and is petitioning to join the EU, the status of which is looking uncertain right now.) I read, while we were there, that Albanians were not allowed to travel abroad or leave the country until 1990, the year I was born. That isn't that long ago, and the time the country has had to turn itself around from the communist regime is shorter than I've been alive. The signs of the communist state are everywhere in Albania: old clunky-looking, sometimes dilapidated concrete 1960s-era buildings, cement bunkers all over (and I mean all over), a lack of central city planning and zoning laws/public infrastructure in Tirana and other places, graffiti from recent years protesting in support of freedom and democracy. There was also a piece of the Berlin Wall in one of the main squares of Tirana. It was an eye-opening experience to consider the consequences of living under an unstable government, especially for someone from the U.S. who takes those things for granted. (And who is currently studying in the UK, where national history is even longer-lived, even though the days of empire have declined.) Albania did not feel like the first world or like Europe, and I think walking its streets and meeting its people was a good exercise for my expanding global political consciousness.

The people there were amazing for sure. We had heard about the Albanian people's hospitality and friendliness, and everyone we met was generous and willing to help us, even when they did not speak English. Funny story and one of the highlights of our trip: one of my sign language interpreters in Oxford is good friends with an Albanian woman who owns a hostel in the country's capital, Tirana. The way they met was through another British/BSL interpreter who is currently her boyfriend; the two of them live in the hostel now and are actively involved in the Albanian deaf community. Small world! I knew I had to stay at that particular hostel in Tirana, and I'm happy we did. Our new friends chatted with us about Albania's history and its sights and people and made us feel thoroughly at home. We spent one day in Tirana, wandering the streets and people-watching, before we headed to the city of Vlore on the Albanian coast.

Getting to Vlore was an adventure in itself -- it was pouring rain the morning we left, and we had called a taxi to get across town to the bus station. Due to some confusion with getting the cab to the hostel, we left a little late and were worried about missing our bus, but funnily enough Albania is such a small country that everyone seemingly knows everyone; our taxi driver somehow knew the phone number of the bus driver/bus company, and called ahead to ask him to wait for our arrival. Upon getting to the bus station (which wasn't really a bus station, but a side street of Tirana where all the buses parked alongside the road, signs up haphazardly in their windows to indicate their final destination), the bus driver took our bags, shepherded us on the bus, and we were off. We had learned that there is no printed or publicized bus schedule or public transportation schedule anywhere in Albania, but the locals all know how to get around! The miserable weather continued on the drive, and we couldn't see much of the Albanian countryside from the bus except for buildings immediately on the side of the road. Again, there are no zoning laws or permits in the country, so people have been able to build whatever they want across the green plains and rolling hills. The result was, again, haphazard, isolated and sometimes half-finished buildings popping over in assorted places and no quaint or picturesque town planning at all. And, again, many many bunkers in the ground everywhere. Apparently the communist government in its later years got so paranoid about outside invasion that the leader of Albania ordered that hundreds of thousands of bunkers be built all across the country. There was one bunker for every four people or something like that.

We got to Vlore and the rain was still coming down hard. Instead of wandering the city (which looked as grim as a lot of Albanian cities did, for all its picturesque location along the coast), we got a cab to go straight to our hotel. We'd chosen this hotel for its location right along the Mediterranean; it was built into a cliff overlooking the beautiful, undulating, deep blue sea. Once our taxi driver got us there and we checked in, we looked out on the water and decided we weren't leaving. And so we didn't, more or less, for three days. The weather wasn't as cooperative as we would have liked, but each day did bring some glimmers of sun and many hours of looking out on the water. After tramping all around Istanbul, it was nice to have a few days of pure down time, eating cheaply and reading and writing and pondering that ocean. This was my first time visiting the Mediterranean (okay, unless you count Portugal last December), and the color of the sea was mesmerizing: sometimes a dark cobalt blue, sometimes a lively turquoise or almost green. The waters were amazingly clear, and the changing light of each day made for a range of different hues and rhythms of the waves. I finished reading some books, did some writing, hit the gym for a bit each day, and watched some movies/TV. The hotel was extremely quiet, it being the off-season, and although we were ready to leave by the end of three days there we also appreciated having few people around. I'll be visiting Greece for around two weeks later this break, and this trip made me so excited to return to the Mediterranean and the other coastal panoramas and beaches there!

After our R&R at the Albanian coast hotel, Cate and I headed back to Tirana for one more day before flying back to Oxford. Again, the weather was awful and made us hole up inside for much of that afternoon after the (again very backcountry) bus ride, but the evening brought a special treat: our Albanian hostel friends took us out to a meeting of the local Tirana deaf club. The deaf community in Albania is an emerging phenomenon, since in the days of communism deaf people and other people with disabilities were more oppressed and isolated than even the average citizen. Deaf people rarely got to visit each other, were often kept at home with no access to language and other resources, and rarely got to use any form of sign language. After the fall of that regime, the community was able to come together and grow, and there are currently efforts in Albania (not by the government, but by self-organized organizations and even some help from outside entities) to give deaf people more empowerment and life skills than they've ever had before. Albanian sign language, I found, is very different from ASL, and it is also an emerging language: a few decades ago, all deaf people had was a rudimentary system of fingerspelling and some gestures, but now that the deaf community has had more opportunity to congregate publicly a broader and more complex system of sign language is developing. Fascinating stuff!

The Albanian deaf people we met were amazingly friendly, patient, and kind; a few of them knew some international sign language, which I found borrows from ASL more than I had thought. One or two others had had the chance to travel to America to visit Gallaudet and pick up some ASL. But most of the others only knew Albanian sign, and I had to resort to trying to use gestures to sort out what they meant. We somehow worked it out, even though we didn't understand most of what each other was saying. One thing I discovered about Albanian deaf people, and probably deaf people all around the world, was how eager they are to communicate in sign, even if it's a different system of sign. They were excited that an American deaf person had come to visit their social gathering, and I wound up learning some Albanian signs and they some American signs. Meeting other people who also hold that sort of communication access dear, and who are willing to try again and again to achieve it, was a wonderful experience. (I also reflected afterwards that a lot of these Albanians probably didn't know English, and yet through sign language we were able to understand each other a bit, if far from perfectly.) After the main deaf club meeting, we joined a few deaf people at a nearby cafe/bar, and I learned more about different sign languages and the international deaf community. Even if not in ASL, there's something special about taking the time every once in a while to have a conversation solely in sign. I was proud of Cate, too, for taking the plunge into the hands-flying, visually overwhelming world of sign language after only learning ASL for a few months. Always great to have that sort of signing company, especially while on travel.

We left the deaf gathering around 9pm that last night in Tirana, made our way back to the hostel, then got up early the next morning to make it to the airport. Since we'd flown Turkish Airlines, our plane took us back to Istanbul, where I had one last (yummy) piece of baklava before boarding my new flight back to London. Cate and I parted ways there, since she was headed to Paris for a few more days of vacation, and I ended up back in Oxford at the end of a long 12-hour travel day, tired and admittedly wanting to wash my clothes and shower and sit in my bed, but very very happy to have made it back from traveling without incident this time! Being able to traipse the world like this is a gift, and I've enjoyed a weekend of catching up with other friends in Oxford, as well as reflecting on some of the perspectives I've gained through visiting these very different places. Now, dissertation reading beckons, and I've got two more weeks here to dive into schoolwork before the next adventure: Greece!

Signing off for now.