Everyone ready for a quick blitz through Def Leppard's underrated third album after Pyromania and Hysteria: Albania? Too bad, we’re doing it anyway!

Getting from North Macedonia to Albania was one of those spots on my itinerary where something was just going to have to work out on the fly. There were no flights or bus routes from where I was leaving and sketchy reports on ten-year-old internet forum posts about shuttles leaving at 4 in the morning from undisclosed locations, maybe. I got the names of all the local transport companies and paraded from office to office as soon as I got into Ohrid, having one after another tell me in broken English that no, of course they don’t take people to Albania, are you crazy? Uh-oh.

I wandered into a travel agency down some back alley and found a truly helpful dude who made some calls and arranged for a van to pick me up at some crossroads out in the middle of nowhere and take me to Tirana. Wow, that was lucky! Thanks dude.

The taxi dropped me off at the crossroads, and I waited. And waited and waited. I glanced hopefully at each van-shaped thing that trundled by. None stopped. I walked up the highway to a dirt lot up the road. Maybe this is where they’re going to stop? Nope. Back to the crossroads. No one came.

This entire time, taxi drivers were occasionally pulling over and trying to get me to get into their cars. Are you crazy? I’m not going to pay for a taxi all the way to Albania. Get the hell out of here with that nonsense.

After an hour it became clear that my ride was not coming, ever. I sheepishly approached a waiting taxi and began the process of negotiating a taxi ride all the way to Albania.

The guy was nice and through broken English we worked out a surprisingly fair price of 50 euros for the ride. He even drove me to an ATM in town since I didn’t have that much cash on me.

“Hey, you mind if we stop by my house?” he asked. The sweater he was wearing was too warm for a drive all the way to Albania. Sure, whatever dude. Hey, you want to come in and meet my wife? Uhm, sure?

Hey, you mind if my wife comes with us? I’ll be bored on the long drive back otherwise. Sure Macedonian taxi guy, sure. The drive took several hours longer than I was expecting because we kept stopping to run errands and shit, but what was I going to do, walk?

The drive itself was quiet, since neither the guy nor his wife really spoke English at all, but it was pleasant, and it beat the living shit out of being left for dead at a crossroads in North Macedonia with no way home.

After several hours of driving they dumped me off on a random street corner in Tirana, a piece of straw protruding from between my teeth like Axl Rose at the beginning of the Welcome to the Jungle video, and Albania was my own personal playground for a few short hours.

Granted, I was going to have much, much less time in Albania than I had planned because I’d waited an extra night in Macedonia to accomodate the van that wasn’t actually coming and then had the day-long adventure in getting to Albania. But that’s okay, I’ve done more with less before. I then proceeded to waste my precious Albania time by visiting their National History Museum.

It was not the most interesting museum I have ever visited. Why is it mostly graphic photos of dead revolutionaries?

Who knows! I guess you just roll with the history you've got. Albania was not real big on translating anything into English or any other languages. And by not real big I mean intensely averse to doing it even once.

The best I could figure, Albania was invaded by Italy in 1939, then occupied by the Nazis during WWII. It was communist until 1991, then underwent a revolution after the fall of the Soviet Union and once The Beatles song Revolution finally made its way to Albania.

I was impressed by this WWII mural, which was either evidence that Albanian women fought the Nazis or that Albania had some gloriously metal dudes in the trenches.

They also went way out of their way to claim Mother Theresa as their own, even though she was from North Macedonia next door. This reminded me of Ohio and North Caronlina having a license plate battle over who could claim the Wright Brothers.

Wandering through the streets of Tirana, I visited a cool glowing church on my way to dinner.

I also enjoyed their weird traffic lights, where the entire pole would light up green or red making it very clear whether you could go or not, so all the people jaywalking would feel extra guilty.

I also wouldn't kick their fountains out of bed for eating crackers.

Then after dinner I completely failed in finding the right bus to get to my airport hotel for my flight out early the next morning. None of the buses in Tirana had numbers, the locals just seemed to know that they wanted the blue bus that Charlie was driving. The yellow bus with Antov? Screw that guy! I’m not going anywhere he’s driving.

This was not at all helpful for a first-time visitor to Albania. After waiting a long time behind the museum where the internet said the airport bus stopped, I asked three locals where the airport bus stopped. Actually I asked more than three, but only three of them spoke English. They gave me three different answers, but the most confident of them said it was behind the Opera House. OK. I proceeded over that way and made small talk with some local dudes while I was waiting.

“Oh, the airport bus? No, you want to wait down there” a beefy local dude explained, pointing way further down the dark street. OK.

I proceeded past the crowd waiting for the bus when suddenly somebody grabbed me. What the hell-

I looked over and some wild-eyed young Albanian dude had my jacket balled up in his fist, and he backed up his crazy eyes with a bunch of yelling in Albanian that I didn’t understand at all. What the hell, dude?

He continued to yell as, purely on instinct, I swept my arm around in the circular motion Daniel LaRusso uses when he wax off and twisted the crazy dude's wrist in a direction wrists aren’t meant to twist. I kept twisting until I broke his grip on me, and in one continuous fluid motion shoved him toward the ground with the same hand. Whoa, what the hell? That was some Tai Chi shit right there! I did martial arts for a little while when I was a kid and have always wondered if any of that stuff would ever come back to me unconsciously one day like Matt Damon in The Bourne Identity if the chips were ever down. Apparently it did!

I wasn’t about to press my luck though and wasn’t at all in the mood to see how this street fight turned out, so I continued up the sidewalk without breaking stride, headed for the other bus stop. Halfway up the street I looked back over my shoulder and the crazy guy had got up and was now pursuing me, continuing to yell in indecipherable Albanian. What is this dude’s problem? Was he trying to rob me, or just warn me about the lizard people? It didn’t look like he was carrying any magic sunglasses he wanted me to try on.

I continued to walk and suddenly realized the direction I was walking toward the other bus stop took me down a dark set of alleys where I definitely did not want to be if I was going to have to fight this Albanian dude. Better to be around a crowd of people in case that either discouraged his craziness slightly or in case anybody felt like joining in to help me not get stabbed in Albania.

I slowed my pace slightly and let him catch up a bit, then suddenly doubled back past him, headed back toward the first bus stop. This caught him off guard and his yelling took on a confused tone for a second (“blah blah bl- blah? BLAH? BLAH! BLAH BLAH BLAH!”) as I zipped past him. I looked back and he had turned around to continue pursuit, now skipping along at a healthy crazy Terminator clip. Oh goddammit.

I began to work out the logistics for having to fight this guy in the street. I was going to have to take my pack off so I didn’t fall over like a turtle on its back the second he took a swing. God. I haven’t fought anybody since the eighth grade! I had done some Tai Chi courses a few years back just because I found it to be an interesting form of moving meditation. It involved a lot of centering your balance over your hips and throwing people who were lunging at you, but I didn’t think I was ever going to use it on an actual person. I guess I can just keep throwing him on the ground until he gives up, hits his head enough times to forget what he’s doing, or shoots me? Goddammit Albania.

I got back to the bus stop and the beefy local dude who’d told me where the airport bus stopped immediately asked me what was up. I explained that there was a crazy dude following me and within 1.5 seconds he had gestured to another beefy dude who was waiting in the wings and the two of them marched straight up the sidewalk to the crazy dude and got right in his face.

The crazy dude clearly had no interest in the beef brothers, he was looking between their shoulders at me with his wild eyes and continuing to yell about the lizard people or whatever his problem was. But these two dudes were huge and formed an effective beef wall that crazy dude could not pass. The first guy got crazy dude’s crazy attention and said what I presume was a bunch of bad-ass Albanian shit in a no-nonsense, calm and low tone of voice. The crazy guy continued to crazy for a minute until my new best friend in the entire world finally got through to him that whatever he was planning wasn’t going to happen tonight, and the clearly frustrated crazy Albanian stalked off into the night, disappearing into the darkness.

Well then. That shit was bananas.

I thanked my two new friends, one of whom interruped me briefly to pull me out of the street right before I was about to get hit by a passing bus. I was standing and waiting for the airport bus for another few minutes when I suddenly snapped out of it. Wait a second, that asshole could just come back at any time, what am I doing waiting for this bus? I stepped out into the street and flagged down a passing taxi, and within half a second I was in the back seat and pulling away.

My taxi driver asked how I was enjoying Albania. It’s maybe not the best time to ask me that, my man! I think I said something like "It’s lovely" as I looked over my shoulder to see if the crazy guy was running behind the cab like Robert Patrick in Terminator 2. God that was weird. Lesson learned: taxis aren’t that expensive.

OK I need to stop thinking about that crazy guy, it’s over. Most probably it’s over. I chatted with my driver about my trip through the Balkans and he hated all the places I had just been to. They were all shit! Uhm, calm down dude, you live in Albania.

I chuckled to myself since when I had mentioned to a friend that I was going to Albania, he had been very worried about my trip because the Taken movies were set in Albania. I teased him about his fear of unknown places, and then of course promptly went to Albania and got attacked in the street by a madman.

Albania was the first place I’ve ever had an advertisement printed on my boarding pass.

On my flight, the Lufthansa flight attendant was going through the plane row by row and asking in his thick German accent:

"Any Jews? Any Jews?"

"Uhmmmmm... why are you asking?"

OH JUICE! He has juice. Okay.

When we landed, an American dude behind me was losing his shit because the flight attendant asked him to sit down until his row was called, to maintain some sense of social distancing as we got off the plane.

"This is bullshit! What difference does it make? Are you going to tell them to sit down? It's because I'm American, isn't it? I'm sick of this engineered virus bullshit! Come on everybody, let's do what we're told, like robots! Fucking bitch!"

Okay, I get it now. I get why people don't like Americans. Thanks for helping me see that, fussy douche.

He went on like this until we were off the plane, as I mentally tallied how many hundreds of people I was going to have to be extra nice to in my future travels to offset the impression of Americans that this guy was making everywhere he went.

In Frankfurt I had to go through security again, where my crystal skull set off the bomb detector because of course it did. The airport security guys decided to spice things up by calling the police. When the police got there they went through my bag, marveled at my crystal skull, made all the crystal skull jokes that every security person in every country I’d traveled through also made, and let me go. They were nice guys.

The woman checking passports at the Frankfurt airport was extremely confused by my itinerary. You were in Albania? Are they even letting people in? Americans? Yes and yes and yes. And you’re going… wait you’re not going to America. You’re going to Costa Rica? Her mind boggled.

I paused briefly and considered the possibility that I was the first person to ever fly from Albania to Costa Rica. Huh. Maybe I am.