Oh, so did I mention that we picked up a straggler in Trieste? He was of Canadian and American stock and was a Fulbrighter in Albania. We drove him as far as Sarajevo where he needed to get on a bus to Split to visit some friends. Garrett and I decided to power through and continue to Albania. Well, we had planned this until we went o an Indian restaurant (in Sarajevo!) and then decided that we would just sleep in the car and get an early start on the morning. We decided that a school parking lot in a small village right on the border between Bosnia and Respublika Srpska was the best place to do this.
Being fairly high up in the mountains, it was pretty chilly and I had to content myself with opening my backpack and layering all my clothes, scarves and towels (which at this point consisted of one dish towel that I accidentally-on-purpose carried away with me from Ukrainian State Railways) on top of me and shiver through the night while Garrett lay smug in his sleeping bag. I initially thought that the chattering of my teeth was probably the most passive aggressive way of dealing with this situation but I think posting it on a blog that no one reads two years later actually takes the cake in this situation.
In early morning we high-tailed it for the border and felt the cold slap of Montenegro’s desperate attempt to get into the EU: a “green tax” of 10 euros for every car entering the country. And no sooner had we paid this official bribe were we stopped by some obnoxious policeman in Podgorica who claimed we had gone through a red light. The fact that we had actually gone through a green light is not important here—three other cars followed us and for some reason the police officer decided to stop the car with Albanian plates. Well, this traffic cop picked the wrong Albanian rental car to mess with and was greeted with a barrage of Ango-Saxonese about how we went through a green light, we’re citizens of the US/Commonwealth, and that we can contact the US/British embassies if there is any problem because we were unaware of the law in Montenegro that Albanians are not allowed to go through green lights at traffic intersections. Needless to say, we were off in a few minutes and decided we were not interested in spending much more time in Montenegro.
So aside from stopping at the Lake Shkodra National Park at the border to pick some wild asparagus and thyme, we made haste for the Hani I Hotit border crossing and were in the DTTD (DownTown T-Dot) by sundown. Along the way we played my usual favourite game of naming all 53 countries in Africa along with their capitals, and then counted the number of furniture shops in a 2-km stretch on the Tirana-Durres highway. There were 72. I say “were” because as we all know I am writing this two years late and that number has probably doubled by now. As the old Albanian adage goes: “Where one shop selling cheap, crappy, Italian-themed furniture exists, there is surely room for 800 more right next to it.” This is also applicable to cafés. While this is clearly a remnant of the Turkish souk style of retailing, it goes against everything that Anglo-American capitalism stands for and has indoctrinated me to the core.
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