Final thoughts and pics - Tirana, Albania

Final jigsaw of the trip and it was missing two pieces!

The canal near us has really become pretty with the spring blooms

i walked the 55min to BunkArt 1 (which actually took much longer because Google Maps routing really doesn’t work in Albania, I found). The suggested route led me through this gate and I made it inside, but then got kicked out and had to detour around. It looked really nice and all I know it that it appears to be “Bektashi Order Headquarters“.

BunkArt1 and BunkArt2 are museums dedicated to Albanian history, mostly WW2 and Albania’s struggle for independence. BunkArt2 is dedicated specifically to the communist era political police and repression. It is much smaller with only 24 rooms. I didn’t go inside #2, but it’s in the main square and looks like this:

I toured BunkArt1, although less convenient it is much larger (120+ rooms). I’m not much of a war buff, but took a few pics and read more than I can possibly remember.

This afternoon, I did a last amble around. Saw the (apparently) famous Winnie the Pooh cafe (licensing issue?)

The Mosaic of Tirana - it was closed and I’m not sure what it’s about based on what I could see.

I noticed that many streets have sidewalks only wide enough to accommodate the trees and not people

And I saw these metal origami dog and pig in a park, which I thought were cute.

We’ll leave Tirana tomorrow. We’ve enjoyed our time here, but Albania is unlikely to be somewhere a place that we’ll come back to. After our noisy construction experience in Durres, we were worried when this showed up next door

but we were very lucky they haven’t really started the work yet. A tall building is going up in the space and sadly, this apartment will lose a lot of the natural light.

Anyway, that’s it for this trip…