An Unlikely Pairing In Albania & Italy

Once again, I have undertaken a trip to somewhere totally off the beaten path, resulting in me finding an even less beaten-path way back. This time, my mission was to get to Kosovo, which is actually pretty easy to visit from Albania.

However, flights between Edinburgh and Tirana aren’t all that regular, so while I could (and probably should) have stayed another couple of days in Albania to finally give it a little bit of justice, I was trying to save my annual leave for a bigger trip this year, which meant this trip turned into yet another strategic effort in which I looked at how to get home earlier.

And so, like my mad trip to Moldova, I ended up coming home via a night in Italy. With a convenient flight to Bologna, I had a few choices: I could either revisit Bologna itself to eat my weight in pasta, finally get to Florence for an all-too-brief overview, or… what else is around Bologna? As it turns out, a plethora of delightful, non-touristy towns.

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So that’s how I found myself in lovely Reggio Emilia, a small town somewhere between Bologna and Milan. An easy train ride, and with nothing really to do, it was the perfect stopover on a hectic trip.

Anyway, let’s go back to the start of this mad venture.

Unfortunately, as well as irregular flights to Tirana, the flight times aren’t great either, and so I arrived into Tirana after 9pm on the Saturday. It was a shame not to get more of the day to explore, especially after I did Tirana such a disservice on my last trip there.

TIP: I read a lot of incorrect or outdated info online about getting Albanian currency at the airport. There is a currency exchange booth in the baggage area, along with lots of ATMs. Some of these only accept their own bank’s debit cards; others will accept any. The one I got to work charged a 800LEK fee, which is hefty, and there was nobody at the booth, so I gave up and went through to the main terminal – where, luckily, an Iliria’98 booth was open (I’d read this has the best rates but had also read it closes at 8pm – this was not the case, or at least not on a Saturday!).

Normally I would never recommend exchanging cash at an airport, but you can’t get Albanian Lek outside the country – at least, not very easily – so I’d definitely get a small amount at the airport just to tide you over for the first evening.

From the airport, it’s easy to jump on the Luna bus which now costs 4€, or 400LEK, which is an increase on what I’d read online. It leaves on the hour every hour, you can just pay on the bus, and they do take card.

As it turns out, Tirana is home to a surprising number of quirky bars and restaurants, so I decided that my theme this time would be to try and get to as many as possible in my (barely) two evenings there.

So I made a plan – two places closer to my hotel on my arrival night, potentially three bars in the nightlife area on night two, and then one bar/café on my final morning when I discovered it serves breakfast.

This was my list:
🍸 Tymi
🍸 Hemingway
🍸 Radio
🍸 Small
🍸 Nouvelle Vague
🍸 Komiteti

As many of my well laid plans go, it all went to pot immediately. I headed to Tymi for a very late dinner and wasn’t able to get in as they were closing soon. As I found out the following night from somebody else, I wouldn’t have got in any earlier anyway as the queue had been massive all throughout the evening. So I went round the corner to Hemingway (purported to serve amazing rum cocktails) which is open much later… to find it wasn’t open at all. So that put an end to that.

Hemingway isn’t open on Sundays either, so I had to give that a miss altogether, but Tymi was now top of my list now that I’d seen how cool it is.

So most of night two was actually spent in there, partly because I had to queue for about half an hour to get in! Was it worth it? A resounding YES.

Tymi is legitimately one of the coolest restaurants I’ve ever been to! It honestly does not get any more quirky than this. It’s like a mix of dive bar, nerd fest, and a colour explosion. I knew the second I poked my head in the night before that I would NEED to come here! There is so much to look at and it’s exactly the type of place I love.

After that, I wasn’t much in the mood for a night out but I decided to wander to the Blloku neighbourhood (partly to walk off all the sausages) and found all three bars on my list. I thought I’d pop into Radio for a raki, but on a Sunday night it was dead so I went to check out the others first. Small was also quiet, but virtually next door I spotted Nouvelle Vague… which was not only fairly busy, but I was immediately enticed in by its cool entrance! They had an interesting cocktail menu so I managed to have a rum cocktail after all.

I ended up spending quite some time nursing my drink and taking it all in. I never did make it back to Radio for my raki – whoops!

And in the morning, I popped into Komiteti for breakfast and it was the coolest out of the Blloku lot! It felt like I was on a Caribbean island, not in the middle of an eastern European city.

Tirana is, surprisingly, somewhere I’d definitely come back to with friends! If just to visit those bars that I missed…

It’s also somewhere which appears to be evolving all the time. It’s gone from an awkward teenage phase to being a bit more cool and hip. It’s trying to move away from its closed-off past, which I totally understand. But I also think it’s perhaps letting go of too much of its past, and nowhere really represents this more than the pyramid.

Back in 2019, I had really wanted to climb the pyramid, but at that time it had become dilapidated and dangerous enough that authorities were taking action against people doing it and it wasn’t really worth the risk for either emergency service (police or ambulance!). Fast forward a few years, and the pyramid is now unrecognisable.

Now much more modern with lots of steps, offices inside, and surrounded by weird shipping containers, it appears to be going for a “hip” vibe that also comes across as sleek. Personally, I think it should have stuck with the brutalist look and modernised it.

Here’s what it used to look like, for reference:

What do you think? I mean it definitely needed some renovations, and I’m glad it’s been redeveloped and repurposed, but it just seems to have lost what made it really unique.

In fact, I feel like it’s missing a trick anyway. I finally got to climb the pyramid – but the best view of the mountains is covered by one of the containers! What is it even going for? I don’t really get it. I took a pic the other way instead.

One modern addition to the city centre that I do like – the weird building that looks like a man’s face! It’s still being built, but that doesn’t stop it already being lit up above Skanderbeg Square.

I can’t really judge Tirana on another short visit; it feels at the moment like I’m getting fleeting glances of its evolution. One day, I’ll experience it properly.

Read more: Adventures In Albania: Two Hours In Tirana Is Not Enough

While I barely did anything on this visit, I had already seen the city centre last time on a walking tour and also managed to visit Bunk’Art 2 briefly on that first visit – which means I’m slowly but surely seeing more each time. I still haven’t been to the main Bunk’Art 1 out on the outskirts of town, and there’s an evening cultural show that looks brilliant and is definitely on my list for “next time”.

Overall, I’ve left Tirana this time with a much better impression of the city, and I still have reasons to go back – not least because there are plenty of other places in Albania that look fantastic.

I was lulled into a false sense of security with Tirana’s notorious traffic, however, with the journey into Tirana from the airport taking little over half an hour, and no delays either way on the Kosovo tour. Getting back to the airport was a different story altogether, and one that left me sweating and the closest I have ever been to missing a flight!

So buckle up baby, here we go with another stressful travel story…

Buses to the airport leave on the hour, so I decided to get the 10am bus for a 12.30pm flight. Even if the bus took a little longer (even double how long it took on arrival), I’d still have plenty of time. Believe me when I say – when traffic gets bad in Tirana, it gets BAD. When we didn’t move at all for 20 minutes at one point, I was starting to really panic.

The traffic was CHAOS. This was like something out of Vietnam!

Eventually, we started moving again, and I breathed a sigh of relief. As we drew closer to the airport, I was feeling confident. Until we hit more traffic right outside the airport. For HALF AN HOUR.

I started actually shaking. My flight was now due to leave in an hour, and we were moving one car length every couple of minutes. After 20 minutes, I finally gave up and walked down to the front of the bus and begged him to let me off.

But he didn’t. I simply stood next to him for the next ten minutes, and eventually we got through. The good thing was I was now at the front so I leapt off the bus the second the doors open and I was gone in a puff of smoke. Altogether, the bus had taken nearly an hour and a half.

I loaded my boarding pass ready to go through security, and felt sick. “You must print your boarding pass at the check in desk”, it said at the top. WHAT?!

I ran to check in, to find a massive queue for Ryanair. There was no way I could wait! Luckily, there was someone walking around who I could ask – and even MORE luckily, he took one look at my boarding pass and said, “but you’ve got your boarding pass there, so you don’t need to print it.”

I pointed to the part that said I do, and he said he didn’t know why it said that because it only needed to be printed if you didn’t have the digital boarding pass (which, it seems from the people I spoke to in the queue, if you’re Albanian then you don’t get the digital boarding pass?) and that I was good to go straight to security. Thank GOD.

Security, mercifully, wasn’t bad at all, and now I just had passport control to conquer, which had been a breeze on the way in. I was happy to see the e-gates in action, so this should be seamless. I waved my British passport to one of the ladies directing people, and she stopped me in my tracks.

“Go to the desk,” she said.

…okay?

So here I was, ten minutes before my gate was due to close, having to join another queue, at the front of which was someone having issues. OF COURSE.

I was sweating again while watching all the other British people get through the e-gates within 30 seconds.

And then I went up to the desk, the guy took one look at my passport, and went “eh? Why you no go to e-gate?” He passed back my passport without even looking inside it. FFS!!

Bizarre experience aside, the airport at Tirana is actually pretty efficient and small enough that it’s easy to navigate. So thankfully, even arriving suuuuuper late, I didn’t have any issues getting through to the gate. It didn’t close on time anyway, so I would have even had time to nip to the loo with minutes to spare.

Read about another chaotic flight misadventure: A Tale Of Riga & Ryanair – It’s Another Travel Disaster Story

Anyway, I have never been so thankful to be on a flight. (As an aside – this is one of the few flights I’ve been on where I really wonder if I was the only British person on it!)

And next up: a lovely stay in charming Reggio Emilia.

Except, as a natural continuation of the chaos in Tirana, I decided to start this part of the trip with more chaos. You see, Bologna airport now has an express train straight into town, which would be perfect if it wasn’t an absolutely whopping 12.80€ each way – for an eight minute ride!

Absolutely not, I scoffed, and started looking into the alternatives, of which there aren’t many. A #54 bus leaves on the hour to nearby Birra (from which you can catch another bus to Bologna Centrale) or keep onwards to Bologna Borgo Panigale train station instead. After finding that I could buy a train ticket from there to Reggio Emilia for exactly the same price as going from Bologna Centrale, this was my plan.

And just like my other best laid plans… this also went wrong. It’s a half hour walk to the above train station, so when I was through mere minutes too late for the bus, I decided to walk. Fine. It was hot; whatever. I finally got to the train station and there was a train in four minutes – perfect!

I jabbed at the ticket machine, got the correct ticket ready to pay for, and then… it would not accept my card. Rummaging through my stuff, I got another card out. Also not accepted. I tried the first one again. I tried a third one. No luck at all, and now it was two minutes until the train. I tried to feed cash into the machine but there were no slots and I realised it was coin only (or card – or not). Naturally, I was about 50 cents short of 7.20€.

I had to give up and let the train go, which was annoying given there wasn’t another for over half an hour – but I wasn’t about to take my chances with the notoriously strict Italian rail service. So here I was, stuck at a random station in the middle of nowhere, with no ticket office or shop nearby, all to save about 6€.

So, lesson learned – if you want to be stingy and do it this way, just buy a rail ticket online. It’s not worth the stress of whatever this nonsense was, or then having to worry about where to validate the ticket. Of course, in the end I didn’t have to show a ticket at all, so all of the stress was for nothing.

Anyway, I finally made it to Reggio Emilia, where it was another half hour walk to my B&B. I didn’t mind at all though, as Reggio Emilia’s Old Town is charming. Wandering is half the fun in a place like this!

There were churches peeking out around corners, and it was a world away from the packed streets I’ve experienced in the proper tourist towns of Italy.

I stayed at Cantarelli B&B, a very charming B&B owned by an equally charming man called Alberto, who barely spoke any English and brought breakfast to my room in the morning.

He seemed surprised that I was visiting Reggio Emilia, and told me about a few things to see and do, including a restaurant recommendation (Canossa) which I’ve noted for next time because it felt like a better place to go with Ash. They come round with a trolley of meat to choose from!

And besides, I had somewhere else on my list, Tabarin Osteria Popolare, which he agreed was also very good. (Unfortunately, it turned out to be shut on Mondays…)

The B&B cost 61€ which is insanely good value, and I had a top floor room with en-suite. I honestly felt like I could have stayed there for a week living my best Italian life.

I ended up eating at Matilde Bistrot, a charming restaurant with outdoor seating, perfect for people-watching even on a quiet street. I tried their special Passatelli dish with truffle butter and Parmesan cheese, and it was deeelicious.

I also wound up eating later than expected, because I decided to sit down for a quick cup of tea in one of the main squares. Having only seen one other tourist the whole time I’d been there, I heard the man at the table next to me speaking into his phone in English.

“Where are you from?” I asked, curious about who else would be visiting.

Well. A simple question led to one of the most interesting conversations I’ve ever had in my life. He was from North or South Carolina, I forget which as we discussed places in both.

He was also 92, travelling around Italy by himself for an entire month. GOOD FOR HIM!!

What an absolute gem. We chatted for a good hour, about the work he’s previously been involved with in Italy, his church at home, his family, Scotland, our travels. Certainly one of the most interesting people I will ever meet, and in such an unlikely place. I can only hope that’s my future.

The following morning, I got caught in torrential rain on the way to the train station – and then, having hidden for a little too long, missed the train I was aiming for and had to wait ages for the next one. By the time I got to Bologna, I caved and paid the exorbitant price for the express train to the airport, only to find myself on an eight minute rollercoaster! The Marconi Express is only two carriages, so everyone is packed in – and this was for the best, otherwise I would have been flying all over the place. No pun intended!

Nothing like ending a trip of madness soaked through while being thrown around, anyway. I honestly thought it was going to come off the track!

This was certainly a rollercoaster of a trip too, but Reggio Emilia was a FANTASTIC find. I will absolutely be back, as it makes a really great base for other towns in the area, such as Modena and Parma. And I LOVED Alberto and the Cantarelli B&B. It’s somewhere I 100% want to stay with Ash for a few days.

So there we go – not only an unlikely pairing of two totally different destinations, but two places you might be surprised that I want to return to for two very different reasons!

Read more about Italy, the Balkans and some unique European destinations:
⭐ Highlights Of Venice – On & Off The Beaten Path
⭐ Milan & Lake Como: Two Days In Northern Italy
⭐ Complex History On A Day Tour From Albania To Kosovo
⭐ Sunshine, Lakes & Statues In North Macedonia
⭐ A Bonkers Day Out In Transnistria, The Country That Doesn’t Exist
⭐ A Relaxing Five Days In Malta: Our Itinerary