Shkodra

We walk around the city, but there are almost no people around. “Everybody is out of the city”, Saimir explains. It is summer holidays, so most people are at the coast. Some cars pass by, a few people still try to sell something in the shops, but most of them are closed. It’s three o’clock and the sun is high in the sky.

I have to change some money. Here you don’t find exchange offices, you just change on the street. You can find men waving with big packages of Lekes and Euro’s in the center, in Shokdra they are in Dollar Street, across my hotel.

Dollar Street sounds more prestigious than it looks. It’s a dusty road with at large modern mosque on one side, and a bar at the other. A man is standing in the end of the road. Saimir ask him if he changes money, he confirms. “50 Euro’s”, I tell him. He reveals a packet and hand over 6 notes of 1000 Leke, and coin of 100. Exact what it should be.

We decide it’s too hot to walk the whole city, and without anyone around it is not attractive. So at six thirty we meet again. Still not many people on the street, but at least it is not the ghost city like before. Saimir shows me some attractive sites like the school, church, mosque and the park.

Four men sit on boxes around a cardboard table. They are playing domino. We watch and Saimir explains me the rules. It turns out to be more complicated then I thought. You have to loose all your stones as fast as possible. If you want, you can put a stone on the table (there are no turns). But it is also strategic; you want to block the other players.

I want to make some pictures. First a bit shy, because I don’t know if the people in Albania like to be photographed. “It’s not a problem”, Saimir says. The men notice me and start to smile. I lower myself and make a portrait of a man with a hat. Another man starts to talk with me, he also wants a picture. Not a problem. The third one also wants one, and the fourth. I end up with four portraits of old men.

We walk on, another group of old man playing domino. This time they got shine metal stones. I want to photograph those, I tell Saimir. And again I make some pictures of the game and the men playing. “Now we go”, Saimir tell me. He’s afraid that the whole park wants to be photographed by me.

Life is returning in the city. The temperature is a bit lower, but still around 25 degrees. People are everywhere. Kids playing in the parks, people walking on the street or having a coffee at one of the many bars.

You can find two kinds of bars in Shkodra. One only filled with men, not a woman anywhere. The other kind is for couples, where they just meet. Something similar was in Kosovo Mitrovica. A dance club filled with young men. And they are, from western European point of view, very intimate to each other. Dancing, touching, kissing goodbye. This is a different culture.

Saimir and I take a seat on a terrace of one of these men-bars and drink a coffee. Always coffee. And talk about life, study and the great time we had in The Netherlands last May.