Quiet week. We’re still adjusting poorly to the double impact of changing a time zone an hour earlier, and the US going to Daylight Savings Time, which means I start work at 1:30 in the afternoon. When we aren’t getting up until 10 and aren’t getting moving until 11 (or later) it becomes tough to find a block of time to explore. I’m not beating myself up over it though. We’ll switch to European Summer Time in a week and we’ll see if we can’t get on a better schedule then.
H also developed a stomach resistance to peanuts which we only discovered after snacking on them all week. So she was out of commission Thursday and Friday and I’m still hoping she’ll take it easy today.
But! It’s the weekend so out onto the town we go. There is (yet again) a Pokemon thing but we’re in no shape to sprint around the city again, so we figured we’d grab a table at the cafe by the opera and enjoy some drinks and some people watching.
The cafe was busy when we arrived so we grabbed a table in the sunshine with the intention of moving once a shaded table popped up; the table next to us paid their tab and hustled off, so we slid over under the umbrella … just in time for the staff to roll it down and tuck it away. Foiled on that front. But we enjoyed our drink and snack and resolved to make better table choices in the future.
One drink in the sun was enough, so we gathered up our stuff and skirted Skanderbeg Square and headed towards the castle. Since we had been in the apartment all week, H was being deprived (deprived she says!) of her usual coffee intake, and she’d been dreaming of another espresso freddo since last weekend, so we grabbed a table at Millennium Garden and sat and enjoyed a coffee. I think we now have a “usual table” there (or I would like to believe it) and I look forward to having quite a few more coffees during our time here.
From there, we decided to head back to the apartment via a different route, this time through the New Bazaar. It was well into late afternoon by this point and we didn’t expect any vendors to be out, but we thought it might be good in terms of getting the layout of the city down, since this was one of the places we expected to return. We stopped for a bit in a park for some photos, and I noted that this might be the biggest indicator that we are Somewhere Else for the time being …
Religion was outlawed in Albania during their Communist period, and even after Communism fell and the country opened its borders, religion still isn’t a large factor of most people’s lives. Despite that, the majority of the country does still identify as Muslim (even if they aren’t fervent practitioners), so the predominant religious structures around town are mosques, like this beauty.
We made our way over to the New Bazaar and, as expected, most of the stalls were closed up. Some trinkets here, some packaged goods here, but the fresh fruit and veg stalls were covered over, and the meat and fish counters in the building were all closed up. We poked around a little and decided to head back through Skanderbeg Square and head home.
As we had come into the area around the Bazaar, we had noted a sign for a restaurant that I had put on my map, a traditional Albanian restaurant named Oda. It had come up in some travel videos we had seen and had a cute garden, so we decided to check it out. It was still early so the garden was pretty empty, but we took up a table and ordered dinner.
Too much dinner.
I thought for sure we were just getting maybe some appetizer sized snack plates. A little salad, a little plate of qoftes (Balkan / Middle Eastern fried meatballs), and some roast lamb to share. The salad came out first, a huge plate of tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers and onions, enough for probably three or four people. The qoftes turned out to be three hefty hamburger-sized meat patties, and the lamb was a whole bone-in haunch with some fried potatoes.
As we ate and drank, the place started to fill up. The waitstaff started putting together larger tables of ten and twelve, which filled up with families and celebratory groups, all ordering similarly to how we did, big plates of all sorts of food being brought out to the table and distributed amongst the patrons. I kept thinking how enjoyable it would be to have our own table of friends and family, ten or twelve, passing around plates of food and enjoying the garden.
And then the band started playing.
They had set up behind my back, back in one corner of the garden, about fifteen people tucked around a table in the back, accordion and clarinet and guitar and drums and (according to H) one lady playing the “chain of cymbals around a belly dancer’s waist.” They started up just as we were considering leaving, and one of the beauties of Europe is that we could have stayed for the music, had another drink, had we decided to.
Instead, we wandered back out into the city, content with adding another place to our growing list of “places we’ll be back to.”
Skanderbeg Square was quiet tonight, and after checking out some Ramadan decorations, we made our way back towards home, stopping along the way to get gelato. Albania has such a strong Italian influence that the town is full of pizza shops, pasta restaurants, and gelaterias, and we kept walking past them and not sampling the goods, so I had previously resolved to not go back home tonight until we had gelato. We stopped at Fabrika, a shop along the main road out of Skanderbeg Square — H had chocolate and I had çaj mali, flavored with a traditional Albanian tea.
A good, full day.