St. Thomas' Church

It took two buses to get to Berat and despite the massive traffic in Tirana, we got here fairly quickly. There is no bus station in Tirana. Supposedly they're building one but boy is that parking lot a mess.

Berat is called the city of a thousand windows, and it's absolutely magical. It's an Ottoman City with a huge castle on the hill and ottoman-style houses built on the hills in terraced streets. There are a fair amount of us tourists here but not too many. We immediately fell in love with it, as opposed to Shkodra, which we really didn't like.

Deanne scored a great apartment in the center for a very cheap price. It's in a kind of ugly practical concrete building, but the inside is very nice and has some older furniture and a dated kitchen. We love it. The apartment manager met us at the bus stop and helped us with our bags. From our 4th floor bedroom we're overlooking the Orthodox Cathedral plaza and mountains. From the kitchen window we can see the castle and the 18th century Ottoman pedestrian bridge. What a score, and for less than 25% of what you'd pay in the United States!

A lot of people want to stay in guest houses that are in these ancient buildings up on the hills. While that sounds romantic, it also means that the rooms are very small and you have to carry your luggage up a bunch of cobblestone streets and steps. No thanks! We'll visit those places during the day without bags.

We booked two nights and within 18 hours we knew we wanted to stay longer and just booked two more nights. Luckily we have the time to build in extra days when we find a place like this. We usually just book lodging one or two days in advance, at most.

We had shifted gears because we were planning on going to the beach but the whole country has a rainy couple of days. We figured a rainy day in a beautiful city would be better than one on the beach.

We just had two excellent meals. Again, we haven't had a bad meal on this trip yet. What you call organic, Albanians call food. We're trying to sample all the local specialties: lamb, stuffed eggplant, local wine, meatballs, soups, salads, etc. I can't get enough! Thank god we're walking it off. At least I hope so.

We spent Wednesday morning exploring the castle on the hill overlooking the Osum River. It's more like a village that is within the castle walls. People still live there. At one point in history there were dozens of churches and mosques and now there are about eight that are still standing.

It was fun to walk around the narrow cobblestone lanes: very Game of Thrones-esque. The cistern to hold the castle water was literally within the Last Bastion. After a couple hours of that and a visit to a church with a large collection of Byzantine icons, we headed back to the main city and grabbed a light lunch. There were quite a few tour groups that got dropped off of buses up there so we were glad to get away from that.

On our last full day we decided we just didn't have the energy to book a tour to a waterfall or go hiking. We just wanted to chill and enjoy slow travel. We walked around town again with a free tour and learned some interesting facts about the area. Afterwards we went to a great restaurant and I ordered Tave Kosi, the Albanian national dish of lamb and yogurt. We made it in the Tirana cooking class. Let's just say that the restaurant version was much better!

We hiked the mile back up to the castle for sunset and we're glad we did. It was cool at the top and the views were stunning. Tomorrow we got to a beach for 4 days on "The Albanian Riviera.". Yuck it up, but remember that people used to make fun of Croatia not too long ago. It's just up the coast.

More photos and videos are here.

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