First Impressions

My guidebook had faint praise for Tirana: "Europe's quirkiest capital city may not be packed with sights or brimming with cultural events, but it is well worth visiting." Also, there were warnings about "busy and dusty city streets." Yet exiting the fairly sleepy international airport, I happily noticed the warm temps, the palm trees lining the road, and the foothills of the Mt. Dajti range on the not-too-distant horizon. Hmm I thought, maybe that author has an underdeveloped appreciation for quirky. Wishful thinking: within 10 minutes we were stuck in a traffic jam that barely moved for half an hour.

Having now been here a little over a week, I must report that bad traffic is probably Tirana's defining feature. It's the first thing you hear when you wake in the morning and the last thing you smell before you fall asleep at night. Speeding cars, honking horns, cursing drivers, and vehicles blocking pedestrian sidewalks dominate one's experience of the city.

History provides some explanation for the Albanians' fanatical love of the internal combustion engine. Until 1991, there were only about 600 cars registered in the entire country (now 3.6 million people). When the Hoxha regime ended, so did the restrictions on car ownership and personal mobility. A boom in imported cars followed (Mercedes is a popular make). To an outside observer like me, it seems almost as if the people have embraced the personal auto as a symbolic rejection of that past. The resulting air pollution and degraded quality of life seems a shame to my way of thinking, but then again, no one ever told me I couldn't buy a car.

Of course, the irony of the traffic situation is that it's actually faster to walk than to drive most places around here. That is why the young men occasionally ride their motorcycles down the sidewalk - because the sidewalk is less congested than the street. So this auto-love is clearly something I don't understand and probably never will. For now the best that I can hope for is that I soon will become accustomed to the bumper-car atmosphere and take it in stride like a local.