In my first blog post from Tirana, I remarked about how different it looked, new buildings, modern and shiny, new highways, lots more cars. It looked like a modern European Capital. I did note some of the funkiness still around, the problems with the water supply and the fact that Tirana’s mayor is serving while in jail.
But there is still a lot that looks like Tirana when I lived here. Especially away from the center, the street markets, buildings, things that seemed familiar. Here is a gallery of the familiar from Tirana. Sometimes the familiar is also changed, like the historic façade of the soccer stadium built into a new modern building, or the Lana River. It is still a concrete waterway but it looks more like when I was here in 1993 than it did even in 1995 when the whole riverbank was blocked from the streets by kiosks selling everything. So here is Tirana today with a tip of the hat to 30 years ago.
