They Can't All Be Gems

 

Time to move to a different part of the city.  At the very least, Tirana is a great city to stick around in while I wait for my passport to come back.  It's also easy to haul all my crap from one place to the next as there are taxis everywhere.

Unfortunately, Albania has the same problem with addresses that Portugal has.  The only info I get from the Airbnb website comes from the owner of the place and that info is spare at best.  I can only tell the cabbies what I’ve been given and we both end up having to figure things out from there.

This move is the third time that the cab has brought me to the approximate location.  And this dude kept passing the place before he would let me out.  Even after we’d stopped at a second location and I’d paid him, he insisted that I get back in because our GPSs hadn’t quite synched up.

Dude, while I appreciate your dedication to get me to the right address, please let me out of the car.  I’ll figure the rest out on my own.

He did drop me off near the near place, but it still wasn’t near enough.  Once he left, I kept trying to orient myself based on the pictures provided by the host, but I just couldn’t find the place.  My confused tourist vibes came to the rescue again as a passing man on the street was able to point me in the right direction.  Seriously, if he hadn’t helped, I’d still be lost.

Located down this sketchy looking alley, I wondered (not for the first time during this journey) what I’d gotten myself into.  Each of these places seemed to get worse than the last and, despite the homey looking pictures on the website, I had my doubts about this new place.

Turns out I was right to be apprehensive.

Everything in life is a matter of tradeoffs.  That holds just as true for apartments.  I wasn’t crazy about the last place compared to the first place I stayed in Tirana (nice place that I could see going back to). But the new place actually makes me long for the last one.

The last place:  8^th floor apartment best accessed by a creaky coffin-sized elevator, but the building was in a good location.

The new place: located on the first floor, but hard to find.  Getting to the main road requires a risky shimmy between parked cars and on-coming traffic.  The coffin-like elevator would be replaced with a coffin-like shower stall (more on that later).

The last place: great views, but noisy as it overlooked a busy intersection.

The new place: quiet, but no view.  And dark even in the middle of the day.

The last place: very little cookware, busted stovetop, and no microwave, but spacious.

The new place: ample cookware, microwave, and the place is a decent size, but it’s still missing basic items like dishwashing liquid and toilet paper.

The last place:  beautiful shower with no curtain/partition.  I chose not to wash my hair that week for this reason.  I already made enough of a mess just cleaning myself.

The new place:  enclosed shower, but it was a tiny corner model.  I washed my hair on my first full day and can’t count the number of times I hit my elbows in that thing.

And the clincher: the new place has a broken toilet seat.

I encountered this issue in Cyprus and made the same assumption I made then.  Whoever cleaned the bathroom knew of the issue, but didn’t bother to fix it. Just allowed it to be a nice surprise for the next sucker -- I mean guest. 

I let the host know so she wouldn’t accuse me of anything.  To her credit, the day after I texted her, she had her husband and a plumber come by to fix it.  So, a point to her.

Still won’t be enough points to put this place in the positive.

The dining chairs are very uncomfortable.  I couldn’t sit in them too long or my ankles would start to swell (one of the side effects of my HBP meds).  That only left the sofa on which to sit – a sofa that is way too close to the ground and murder to get out of.  My knees are not happy.

The patio door was open when I arrived.  If you’ve been reading the blog for a minute, you know my issues with Europe and screens … and my issues with bugs.  I spent the first night in a strange bed getting repeatedly stung by mosquitoes.

The water heater in the bathroom leaks after a shower.  The flushing mechanism for the toilet is tricky – the thing made noise for hours before I realized that I had to jiggle the push button to reset it. 

I hate this place.

The one nice thing I can say (other than the responsiveness of the host) is that the refrigerator is big and tall.  The lower part doesn’t want to close, though, unless I really push it. 

Yeah.  I don’t think I’ll be extending my stay in this place either.

But there is something I’ve been enjoying in every apartment: they don’t show commercials on Albanian YouTube!  That is so refreshing as I spend way too much time watching videos.  In every other country I’ve been in, any video longer than 8 minutes will have at least 3 commercial breaks.  It is truly insane.

One last note; the Albanian word for the day is Shqiperise (written without the accents).  I kept seeing this word everywhere with no idea what it meant.  Then I realized that it’s also on the local currency.  It’s the name of the country in their language. 

Albania!  Who knew?