WhyNot: Albania (as I promised)

Albania is the poorest country in Europe
"We are all spoiled brats in Finland" - This is the reply I gave to Albanians asking me about the life in Finland. I really had to restrain my self a couple of times from sending an sms to my friends saying that. I was literally furious. We have no reasons to complain at all in Finland and still we do so. More money, more problems.
So my journey in Albania was an eye opener if you want to express it that way.

What can you say about a country where people still ride donkeys and some people are still basically nomads. Most of the roads have more holes than Swiss cheese. Capital city has got no bus station and bus stops are rare or nonexistent. Level of corruption high and it is full of German tourists ;)

As said in my previous post from Tirana my blog is not gonna be "Lonely Planet" but since many of my friends have not been in Albania I feel the urge to give some info about the country.
Public transportation is quite interestingly provided but once you get the hang of it it's easy to travel with. As I said before there are no bus station in Tirana but some other cities in fact do have those. To be honest to call them bus stations is an overstatement since they are dirt or asphalt yards with many busses and furgons. Furgon is the Albanian word for minibus. Most of the lines are operated with furgons since there are not so many travellers and the roads are too narrow or bumpy for a coach.
You just need to know where the busses leave and there's many of those places in every city. Trust me. Just ask three people and choose the answer you got two times. Hopefully. If you got the dough you can always just ask some of the locals to take you where ever you're going. There is always plenty of 'em loitering around busses. Did I mention that there is also no bus stops. Well in Tirana I saw few signs but you also just need to know where those are. Buses tend to act like taxis though so you can get into one or hop of when and where ever you want to so just ask the driver to stop and voilá! Wikipedia said that there's even trains in Albania but no one said anything about those to me and I didn't see one. Btw, they do transport live chickens in busses also.

I found Albanian people very friendly and many times I was ashamed because of my own behaviour. For example I was walking towards "bus station" in Gjirokaster with a guy from Hong Kong when this old guy shouted something to us and I was like "not again, somebody is trying to offer a ride for us" and just kept on walking. The "Kung Fu-master(I will explain in the next paragraph)" luckily stopped to hear what this old man had to say to us. He was only trying to say that the bus station is in the other direction. He saw us with backpacks and knew where we were headed. This was only one example of many similar situations where locals helped without any hidden agenda.

I said that sometimes I felt like I had no pants 'cause the people haven't seen so many tourists in many places and there was quite a lot of staring. Well this was nothing compared to things my friend from Honk Kong had to take. It was straight forward staring, laughter, some shouting and the funniest thing ever was that some people made some Kung Fu moves when they saw him. Hence the Kung Fu-master name. Kung Fu dude even asked me if we (western people) think that every Asian guy knows Kung Fu or Karate. Muahhahhahahahaaa

After Tirana I traveled to Dürres, Berat, Himara, Saranda, Gjirokaster and Pogradec. Nothing worth mentioning happened there so I'm just gonna show you some pictures from those places.

To summarise: I really liked Albania a lot, especially Tirana. After you get used to how things work it's really interesting country to visit. Lot's of things to see although not in Tirana. Saranda is nice place to do day trips from. Food is good and cheap and people are nice. Only minus is the level of service. You never see a waiter smile in Albania and that is sad.