Tirana, Albania
We departed for Albania’s capital, Tirana, two days after our wedding in mid September. Because this isn’t a big tourist hub, it was difficult to find any direct flights to Albania so we had a brief layover in Rome (future blog post on spending a few adventure fueled hours there!). We landed in Tirana around 10pm (2200) and thought it would be best to go right to our hotel for the night and refresh for a long day of exploring the next! We stayed at Xheko Imperial Hotel. I talked to the hotel ahead of time and asked them to have a cab waiting for us at the airport. This is a safety tip I would recommend implementing when arriving in most foreign countries, especially if you don’t speak the language. Xheko is an amazingly beautiful luxury hotel. Our room was gorgeous and comfortable.
We woke up early to start our Albanian adventure! We went up to the rooftop of Xheko for a continental breakfast overlooking their courtyard and all of Tirana and then departed the hotel for the day after exchanging our US Dollars for Albanian Lek at the front desk! Our first stop was a museum called BUNK’ART 1.
For some time, Albania was a communist country and their Dictator Enver Hoxha built over 170,000 bunkers across the country during the Cold War period in case of nuclear attack. The nuclear attack never came and there are thousands of empty bunkers so putting a communist history museum in one of these is pretty brilliant. Entry was $2 and we immersed ourselves in the rich history of Albania for a few hours going deeper and deeper into the lower levels of the bunker.
After we resurfaced, we walked less than 5 minutes over to a cable car called the Dajti Express. This is the longest cableway in the Balkans and took us to the top of Dajti Mountain for some breathtaking views of Tirana! At the top there was a hotel and an excellent restaurant that we posted up in for lunch with views called Ballkoni Dajtit. After a satisfying lunch, we took the cable car back down the mountain and walked around downtown Tirana.
We stopped in Skanderbeg Square, located in the city center, and home to City Hall, The National Opera, National Historical Museum, and Ethem Bey Mosque. The square was filled with people. We opted not to go to the history museum as we had learned so much at BUNK’ART and unfortunately the Mosque was under construction so we could not capture it’s indoor beauty. We did stop at BUNK’ART 2, another museum in a much smaller bunker. This was also interesting but if you had to pick, BUNK’ART 1 was far larger and had much much more to offer. Another popular location in Tirana is the Old Soviet Pyramid that was a museum prior to the fall of Communism, but all you can really do is take a picture or climb on it since it is now abandoned so we decided against going here as well. We came across many interesting street and public art installations and thoroughly enjoyed wandering around.
We stopped for a quick espresso pick-me-up at one of the many cafes and attempted to go get a drink at Sky Tower Bar which is a rotating bar that would have been the perfect spot to enjoy the sunset with a glass of wine. Alas, the bar was closed for construction so we decided to get a glass of wine at an appetizer at an unassuming restaurant called A La Sante. This sweet little spot was tucked away behind the busy street behind many other cafes and restaurants and it was lovely! We had a very delicious seafood risotto and half bottle of wine on their porch dining area, perfect for our foodie souls. We walked back over to Xheko hotel to relax before heading back up to the rooftop to enjoy dinner and drinks at the bar. Our bartender was so friendly and spent much of the time chatting with us about life in Albania and our trip plans.
Our next day of the trip started with breakfast at Cioccolatitaliani, an Italian chocolatier pumping out decadent crepes and waffles. We asked Xheko to set up a driver to take us to our next destination, Shkodra (Shkodër), about 57 mile drive north of Tirana. There are options to take buses but hiring a car to take us directly there was very inexpensive and much faster than transferring buses. We got into the car as it pulled up to the hotel and off to Shkodra we went!