The Blue Monkey Review

Twelve hours later Ruth, Nina, and I headed out of Podgorica with the directions that a policeman, a cleaning woman, and a shop girl gave us at different points along the way. I’ve written before that that the use of directional signs here would have to be described as parsimonious. Of course, there aren’t that many major roads, so it’s hard to go too far wrong. But I’ve noticed that signs often don’t tell you how to leave the country, or when you are about to do that. So, as often happens in this part of the world, the border crossing appeared unexpectedly.

Even more unexpected was the experience at the border. First, we paid €2 to drive the car through a shallow puddle to wash off the tires. Then we had to all leave the car and enter the passport control office, something new. It didn’t take long for the official to fill out the appropriate forms and take €10 apiece from us for our “visas.” And then we went into another office where I received my temporary Albanian driver’s license. I’d have to say that even though this all seemed strange, everyone treated us with courtesy. And we had a chance to see a bit of local TV—a Bugs Bunny cartoon broadcast in Italian but with Albanian subtitles.

And then we were in Albania. In all my travels, I’ve never seen such a striking change in surroundings upon crossing a border. The physical terrain remained the same flat valley land that skirts Lake Skader on both the Montenegrin and Albanian side. But even the change that you see in going from San Diego to Tijuana doesn’t capture the sharp differences in going from Montenegro to Albania. The country is clearly much poorer. Houses looked smaller, and in town the apartment blocks all seemed dilapidated or incomplete. The roads there were just asphalt tracks, or completely unpaved, even in town. Vendors shared the roads with old Mercedes and horse-drawn carts. And from scarcity of direction signs we went into the land before signs were invented. The only sign we found directed us over a wooden bridge that only accommodated one-way traffic, but was for traffic running both ways. Ruth and I followed the whole length of the southern border between the two countries and had no way of knowing where we were headed into Montenegro until the border crossing appeared—again, quite unexpectedly.

In Shkodra, the only substantial town we visited, Nina left us to take a bus to the capital, Tirana. Ruth and I stayed in town for a while before moving on. I assume it must have been a market day. Ruth compared it to a Roman market with cars. It reminded me of la Fayllucca in Cuernavaca or any substantial mercado in a Latin American city. But this market spread out along both sides of the sidewalk up and down the street, as far as we wanted to walk. Yet any shopper from Nikšić would have scorned the old, used goods for sale in Shkodra. Even the new goods must have come from someplace poorer than China.

Far more fascinating than seeing the invisible hand at work, though, was the diversity of people. In Podgorica or Nikšić the great majority of people dress more or less in the same range of fashions that you would find most places in western Europe. Except for their lack of green-dyed hair, piercings, and body art, my students look about the way my students at Seton Hill look. And the barflies on the korzo could walk into any bar in Greensburg without attracting the slightest attention. But in Shkodra we saw young women wearing message t-shirts and traditional women with scarves and bobby-pinned hair, peasants mixing with urban types who looked just like people in Nikšić, Catholic nuns and Moslem women in long headscarves. I even saw one man carrying what I thought must be a scimitar, then managed to get hold of myself and realized it was a scythe blade he had just purchased or had sharpened.

Albanians have a reputation for friendliness. We were there only a short time, I’m sorry to say, but the dozen or so people with whom we had brief exchanges gave us reason to believe the reputation for friendliness is well-deserved. No one treated us coldly, in spite of a very high language barrier. One man who did speak English gave us very reasonable directions for finding the road to Montenegro: Drive out of town and then ask again. But he added, “If I had time I would go with you and show you the way.”

We drove south and returned by way of Ulcinj. Ruth and I had an early afternoon lunch there, then walked into stari grad. Then, over another mountain and back to Podgorica.