Contrasts

My apartment is in the swanky blokku region of the city. Any Albanian walking these streets will gleefully inform you that during the Hoxha regime this area was forbidden to regular citizens. Here lived the dictator, and the lovely boulevards and villas were reserved for him and his cronies only. After the fall of the regime, most of those villas were torn down so that new high rises could be erected. And what a building boom that must have been - almost no evidence remains of the old structures.

Yikes!

Bird's nest wires

Although I am told that building codes exist, my informants agree that they are honored mostly in the breach. Here are a couple of shots of the electrical wires at the entrance to my apartment.

And yet, in this same city I can walk two blocks and purchase a cappucino and a croissant nearly as good as anything I've eaten in Paris. The person who owns this French bakery certainly has the food figured out, although the miniature Eiffel tower outside the door would be considered over the top by most Parisians.

And those images are really the essence of what I am trying to convey about this place. Tirana wants so much to catch up with the rest of Europe. Exuberantly embracing all things modern and chic, the Tiranians don't have time to sweat the details or follow any proscribed set of rules. They are figuring it out their own way and on their own terms.