Albanian street style

Being shut off from the outside world for a big chunk of last century has given the older generation of Albanians a unique style. We were big fans. Men in particular seemed to take a lot of pride in their dress, wearing two piece suits and ties, hats, and home knitted vests. It was particularly noticable in some of the older men that they took pleasure in wearing sharp clothes and combining pieces with flair.
We were interviewed randomly for a  local tv youth show in Tirana about our perspective on the fashion in Albania as "Western Europeans". They seemed interested to know if Western Europeans would change there style to fit into the predominantly Islamic culture here and how they found the fashion in Albania. We mentioned we really liked the style of the older generation and found  the younger generation dressed pretty similar to back home but maybe less revealing for women and less sloppy in general. We also mentioned we hadn't felt any pressure to change what we wore there as people seem pretty relaxed. It was just a pretty short fluff piece but afterwards it did prompt us to observe and ponder the styles as we wandered around the capital.
We noticed that brand names were popular and prominent. The guys in particular were very uniform, looking maybe like someone in the UK who spends a lot of money at the mall. There is a bit of Italian-influenced tailoring and colour and gangster bling occasionally but it's predominantly a pretty standard look. Everywhere in the world with advertising will have people forking out bigs bucks for the latest status boosting brand names, but here it seems to dominate. Hopefully the initial excitment of having access to outside fashion will wane and a better balance between modern influence and local creativity and flair will arrive. I suppose its a sign of self assurance when a place finds its own style and people aren't afraid to be playful outside the fashionable style.

This also seems to extend to the choice of cars in Albania, with luxury cars dominating the roads. I'm not sure of the figures but real or fake Mercedes appear to make up more than half the cars we saw on the road. It feels like people are making up for lost time to get their consumer hit.

Albanian Style Masters!

Berat and bud puns

We got our first furgon of the trip from Gjirokaster to Berat - "City of a Thousand Windows". A furgon is basically a minibus or van and forms an important part of the Albanian public transport system. The way it works is you wander to the general furgon area of a town and find a furgon going to the place you want to go to (or going in the direction you want to go). Then you get on and wait for the furgon to fill up, and once it's full it drives off. It sounds like a shambles and kind of is but it works surprisingly well and beats figuring out bus timetables then structuring your day around them. Furgons are a very cheap form of transport, plus you're guaranteed loud Albanian pop music blasting from the speakers for a bit of atmosphere.
We were quite taken with the word furgon and spent half our furgon ride making up bad puns. I thought I'd share some of these and maybe get a few cheap laughs:
"furgon but not forgotten"
"furgon with the wind"
"a furgon conclusion"
etc etc.
Matthew suggested I try to weave the puns into the Berat post and I said it was too nerdy and I couldn't bear it, to which he replied "couldn't BERAT!!"

Oh dear.

Arriving in Berat, our kindly furgon driver dropped us outside a well-located hotel called "Hotel Palma", which is where we ended up staying for the next few nights. From the outside it looked tacky with a big incongruous palm tree and blocky facade, but inside was quite nice and had lovely views all around of the pretty old town and river. I figured it can be good to stay in the most garish-looking place because then you don't have a view of it. We actually really enjoyed it there - the staff were very friendly, we had an excellent people-watching balcony and there was a nice breakfast served on the rooftop verandah/restaurant.

Berat is a very special and relatively undiscovered town (actually, it's hailed as Albania's prettiest town and would probably be on the itinerary of anyone travelling in Albania, so perhaps I should say Albania is relatively undiscovered). Berat is so lovely and unique that I'm sure it will become a real tourist hub one day. So get in quick people! On this trip I have embraced the hypocricy of being a tourist-avoiding tourist, it's almost always hard to enjoy a place when it feels like a tourist theme park instead of somewhere that people actually live. Anyway, here are some pictures taken wandering around Berat's old town on our first morning there.

 

In the afternoon, we went up to the old fortress which looks over the town. While wandering around, we were sprung upon by a man called Vasil who began parading us about on an impromptu tour. It was obvious we were going to be expected to give him some money for this service but he was a laugh and we gleaned a bit of history through his broken English so we decided to go along with it. He showed us some amazing sites and also insisted on taking corny photos of us with panoramas in the background, etc.

After following Vasil around for a while on his slightly chaotic, excited tour, we sat down for a coffee. Matthew had his sketch book and gestured to Vasil that he would like to draw him. Instead, Vasil wanted to have a go and drew a sketch of us instead!

And Matthew drew a picture of Vasil drawing a picture of us....

 

A Dreamy Morning in Gjirokaster

An overnight bus from Athens dropped us in the town of Gjirocaster, Albania for five in the morning. We thought we could wait in a park or something until light and then wake up a bit in a warm cafe. We blundered around the town for a while but heavy fog and minimal lighting made it hard to find much. We sat on the curb with a blanket wrapped around us and tried to pass the time doing crosswords. Morning took a bit longer than we expected as we didnt realise the one hour time difference between the two countries and also the fact that day light saving ended that night, making the local time only 3am.  In the end it was quite fun watching the town wake up in the fog.

First we saw a small group of ladies doing laps of the oval for exercise. We wondered if this early start was to do with modesty as they were older and dressed in Islamic headscarves. Since we have been in the east (and Italy also) we have noticed that in general you dont see many older women out and about during the day. In contrast, there are plenty of older men and they often seem to dominate towns and villages, sitting and chatting in all the cafes and park benches and congregating around games of backgammon or chess. We assume the lack of women is probably more cultural than religious, but I guess the line is fuzzy.
We always comment how good life seems to be for older men in these countries. Back home there is such a danger of becoming isolated and lonely once your working life ends. I think this is especially true of men for some reason. Perhaps it can be traced to Germanic/Anglosaxon culture but many older men seem keen to remain aloof and keep a stiff upper lip in their public interactions. Maybe it's also that a faster paced modern world leaves the older generation a bit estranged from things?  Watching throngs  of over-seventies cycle and walk into town parks and greet each other with great affection and joy, the difference is obvious.  Seeing old blokes in deep conversation or telling jokes it feels like the right way to finish life instead of isolated and alone.  We suspect the women here perhaps would share this companionship but not so publicly, perhaps in domestic settings. It's hard to know though.

Next the street sweepers came with their brooms fashioned from pine branches. They built a fire out of debri and gathered around to warm up. We think they invited us over to warm up too but it was a bit confusing. Finally the stores started to open at around five.  These Albanians work hard. We tumbled into a lovely warm cafe and ordered a few coffees until it was light enough to get around. 

tunnel through the hill and under the castle.

Storing our bags in a hotel we wandered up the steep stone streets towards the castle perched above the town.  It was a beautiful morning and introduction to Gjirokaster. We walked around the long walls of the fort (the biggest in the Balkans) and watched the fog clear in waves to reveal the cottages nestled higgeldy-piggeldy around the hills. Gjirokaster is known as  the "City of Stone" and the old town around the hills is striking for its uniform stone look and ancient presence. Its very much a place for locals. Even though it's such a picture book setting the tourist trade hasn't seemed to have affected things much. People are still going about their day and the town isnt fussily preserved so it has chaotic power lines and satellite dishes perched on crumbling stone. Somehow it was a lot more charming to witness this than an impeccably restored and preserved site with neat mown grass and explanatory labels.

anyone interested in using this image for their self help book give me a bell.

In a souvenir shop we picked up some knitted slippers and homemade raki. The owner was excited when she heard Jenny was from New Zealand. She rummaged through the paintings of mist covered mountains and wood carved eagles to show us a painting of a traffic junction in Auckland that her friend had made, perhaps on holiday? It was rendered giving the impression of harsh artificial light and wide well kept streets.  Looking at the painting that to us was the definition of a banal setting it was interesting to wonder if this would have an exotic appeal to people here? Was it the equivalent flip side of our purchase of the home made and folksy. It was funny to think this painting of a clean, modern streetscape sitting above perhaps a wood powered stove in a small  Albanian cottage while we hang a picture of their lovely stone laneways below our air-con unit of a city flat.