Tirana - the capital of Albania

From Lake Ohrid it went on to Albania very early in the morning. Already on the day of arrival in Ohrid, I tried to clarify the onward journey. Unfortunately, it wasn't that easy this time. The first bus company was too expensive for me, the second one already left at 04:30 in the morning and the last one didn't leave at all. So back to the first one, it was a bit strange there that you couldn't buy bus tickets directly, but only reserve a seat on the bus for a small amount of money. The remaining amount had to be paid to the bus driver the next day. When we arrived at the bus station early at 07:15 in the morning, a minibus was ready. The bus driver was a somewhat dubious figure, but as agreed, we gave him about 16€. For German standards this is cheap, but not for here. Well, the journey was very stressful. There was hardly any space in the bus and the legs had to fit in the aisle. When we arrived at the border, the bus driver took our passports and a large bundle of money, and after about 20 minutes we were allowed to cross the border into Albania. The bus driver then only said: Passes okay! Around 12:00 noon, we were suddenly kicked out at the city border of Tirana. Fortunately, there was an ATM nearby and with fresh Albanian LEK, we hailed a taxi that took us to the hotel. We took advantage of the afternoon to explore Tirana extensively. A really beautiful city with a great flair. Although Albania has been cut off from the rest of the world under a dictator for a long time, this city has developed very well in recent years. There are great buildings, squares, lots of color, street art, and the people are all very nice. Furthermore, it is still very cheap, although slightly more expensive than in Macedonia, but for about 5-10 € you can get a delicious dinner with a cool beer. We ended the evening at a market square in a restaurant. Today we started very early in the morning to mount Dajti. This can be reached with a cable car just outside the city center. After a 15-minute cable car ride, we had an incredible view of Tirana. Unfortunately, there wasn't much more to do on the mountain. We didn't have time for several hours of hiking, so we decided to go back down after a while. Back at the hotel, we took a short break and started again in the city. We strolled through the different neighborhoods and ended up in a large park with a big lake. We had already seen it from the mountain and wanted to take a closer look. When we arrived there, we saw the mountain Dajti soaring into the sky in the distance. A great view! After that, we were still in the Blloku district, which is mainly characterized by many restaurants and bars. There are also many universities here and the audience was very young. All in all, we really liked Tirana and it is much more beautiful than Skopje. You can clearly see here that the city is alive and that there is a colorful and wild hustle and bustle. My highlights were the traffic lights, which light up completely in the respective colors green, red, yellow, and the many internet boxes on which heroes from my childhood were painted, such as Batman, Pikachu, and Charlie Brown. Tomorrow morning we will rent a car for four days and explore the coast as well as the mountain landscape of Albania. We have both read and seen a lot of positive things about Albania, so we are excited to see what awaits us.