What Albania is Like

Albania is a wonderful place. The people here are the most hospitable people that I have ever met. I’m talking, grandma trying to feed you even when you’re not hungry, kind of hospitality. I love that they want to do that for others, you just have to be careful not to take advantage of their hospitality because they have a really hard time saying no to requests. Sometimes going really out of their way to do something that you only asked for if it was easy for them to do. You do have to let them serve you sometimes even when it is something that you could have easily done or wanted to do to not burden them. Otherwise, you could offend them.

But besides that, there is one specific story I want to share to show some of the culture of Albania.

So the father of our Airbnb host was in the village for a day, he usually is away for work. So we asked him to drive us into the city so we can get groceries. As the other guys on my team and I were in the car with him, we were driving through the mountain roads when our driver hit a wet patch of water and oil. Thankfully God protected us because instead of hitting the guardrail that’s over a small cliff we spun out towards the mountain hitting the curb before it. 

We were all fine, no one got hurt, just some whiplash. We got out of the car and out of seemingly nowhere like 15 guys came to help us get the car back over the curb on the road. The car had some damage, two of the tires were damaged and gas was spewing from the bottom of the car. And these guys had lit cigarettes in one hand and were checking the spewing gas with the other hand. Albanians are just built different.

Once the car got out from being stuck they had us get into a car of a random Albanian who spoke no English and after they dropped the car off at the shop to be fixed they took us out to coffee. It was the four guys on our team and 5 Albanians, only one of which spoke English. While we were there they were just having a good time and acted like it was just another Tuesday. While we were there, somehow our original driver got his other car to where we were having coffee and then he drove us to the grocery store. 

After we got our groceries we called him to say we were done and he picked us up in the same car that had just crashed. It looked like nothing had even happened to the car and it had only been about two hours since the car got in to get repairs. So in what would have been days to get fixed back in the US, it got fixed in two hours. This was all before noon. It was both a terrifying and interesting morning. If that doesn’t give you some idea of what Albania is like then I don’t know what will.