With my wife Dace we continue traveling through Eastern Europe to share it with you and we arrived in Albania, a surprising Balkan country with coasts, mountains and an intense urban life.
At the request of many channel users, who wanted us to show the less favored parts of the cities we visited, we have gone into some popular neighborhoods of Tirana.
We are walking around on a common morning in the middle of a week like any other, people do their routine, the pace is slower than in the center and the domestic animals are part of the landscape.
However, and true to our vision, you will be able to enjoy the flavor, the colors and imagine the most pleasant aromas that these places also have in store for a minority of intrepid tourists.
In our experience, people who live in these areas tend to be friendlier and more hospitable. Despite the difficulties they face, they have a strong sense of community and try to maintain, more than in other areas, their customs and culture.
The least favored part of Tirana, as in many other cities, is located on the outskirts, far from the center. These areas are characterized by having precarious housing and a lack of basic services: Access to drinking water, sewage, electricity and garbage collection may present deficiencies.
But at the same time, it is in these areas where the real life of the local inhabitants can be perceived. Here the presence of tourism, global brands and marketing is less, authenticity springs up in every corner.
The Kruja neighborhood, which we are visiting, is a historic neighborhood located north of the city center. The neighborhood is located on the slopes of Mount Daiti and is known for its Ottoman-style houses and the dilapidated communist blocks that surround it.
The houses in the Kruja neighborhood are built of stone and wood and have red tile roofs. The neighborhood's streets are narrow and winding and many of them are cobbled. Today it is a quiet and picturesque place, an ideal place to walk and enjoy traditional Albanian architecture.
We must say that in none of these streets have we felt any type of insecurity, no one has been bothered that we are recording, no one asked us for anything. Albania is far from being a risky country.
Clothes hanging on balconies, old furniture piled in corners, dirt sidewalks or mountains of rubble are parts of this landscape. Prepared food or ingredients on offer, too.
Examples of other less favored areas of Tirana include Farkë, a hillside neighborhood with squalid houses and unpaved streets, Bathore, a neighborhood with run-down apartment buildings, and Kodra, a neighborhood with illegal housing built in a protected area. .
For its part, the old town of Tirana is the most traditional part of the city and is located south of the center. The old town is a labyrinth of narrow, winding streets, with stone and wooden buildings from the 18th and 19th centuries, which today are part of the city's attractions, but also have deficiencies.
The afternoon became deep and we fell into the common streets of Tirana, it is time to rest again, the city has exhausted us and we leave full of its magic.
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🔎 I am Gustavo Llusá, Argentine, after traveling for several years through more than 65 countries I settled in Latvia where I married Dace and learned to know another way of life, on the other side of the map.

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