Back to Skanderbeg Square today. There’s a Pokemon event and we saw enough activity yesterday (although no actual players) that we hoped we might find some other people playing today.
We took a different route to the Square, this time past both a Pizza Hut and a Burger King. I don’t know that we’ll avail ourselves of a Pizza Hut — the pizza from the shop below the apartment is pretty good — but I have a feeling it won’t be long before we get silly and get an Albanian Whopper.
We got across the square and lo and behold, a little group was definitely playing! It’s funny how you don’t need to even speak a single word to identify someone enjoying a similar hobby sometimes. We skirted the group, figuring we’d just follow along, but a couple of folks noticed us back and motioned for us to join them. Turns out some of the group are American ex-pats, and suddenly we had a bunch of new game friends.
The game is played based on your location, and this particular event was set up with tasks across the map, and this group was — let’s say, ready to roll. They set a brisk pace and we had a lot of fun, playing and chatting about Albania (and getting a sort-of off-the-cuff city tour from one of the Albanian players). After about an hour, we decided to set our own pace and leave the group and wander back through some of the new parts of the city that we’d been led through — the castle, the mosque, and a nice section of restaurants by BunkArt2 — more on that later.
We grabbed a late lunch at the Millennium Garden, and H got to replace her new espresso freddo with an ACTUAL espresso freddo, thereby guaranteeing our consistent returns to this place over the course of the next three months.