Albania

A few weeks ago the New York Times travel section had an article on Albania:

"Albania kaput!" announced the lunatic on the streets of Tirana. I looked at my new friends, a pair of Serbian filmmakers and a Dutch backpacker I'd met in a cafe, and we tried to walk away. But his insanity was unavoidable, and soon we were a captive audience to his crackpot ramblings about Bill Clinton, Sept. 11 and the future of Albania. I'd been in Tirana less than four hours and, already, moments like these had ceased to faze me.

:
I had arrived in Albania hoping to discover an untrammeled paradise hidden in the Balkans. What I found instead was a deeply weird place: a majority-Muslim country where the mosques are mute but the miniskirts are loud, where horse carts share highways with Hummers, and where people shake their heads to mean yes — except that sometimes they shake their heads to mean no.

:

...Far more frustrating was Albania's refusal to resolve into a neat picture. Skyscrapers were going up while sidewalks disintegrated; the National Art Gallery displayed beautiful artwork, but rarely identified the socialist realist painters and sculptors. A cocktail at Flex could feel like the height of cosmopolitan cool — until you had to contend with adorable but depressing street kids who would kiss your arm in hopes of a 50-lek coin. But when I saw another deranged man threatening buses with a brick — and the even odder response by passersby to brandish their shoes like weapons — I knew it was time to leave.

This instantly reminded me of P.J. O'Rourke's book Eat the Rich, in which he has a chapter on Albania entitled "Bad Capitalism." To quote one excerpt:

A little before curfew on my last night in Albania, I was sitting in a cafe with the wire-service reporter and a couple of other stateside hacks. "Albanians are just like anyone else," I was saying.

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"They're crazy," said the wire-service reporter.

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"No, they're not," I said. "They just have a different history, different traditions, a different set of political and economic circumstances. They're acting exactly the way we would if they..."

:

There was an Albanian family at the next table: handsome young husband, pretty wife, baby in a stroller, cute four-year-old girl bouncing on her father's knee. The girl grabbed the cigarette from between her father's lips and tried a puff. Mom and Dad laughed. Dad took the cigarette back. Then he pulled a pack of Marlboros from his shirt pocket, offered a fresh cigarette to the little girl, and gave her a light.

Culture matters.