Sarandë, peaceful paradise.
LINKS FOR THE WEEK
Walking Tour Video: Durres Shopping District
YouTube Shorts: Saturday Night | Enjoying Ruins | More Pirate Ships | Nomad’s Creed | Bunker in Sarandë | Nice drying racks
Beautiful Sarandë
The pictures and videos we have shared communicate how beautiful the “Albanian Riviera” is, and in between the long hours of work and job searching, we are trying to carve out a couple of hours here and there to take it all in.
What probably does not come through is the relaxed vibe of this town. It is tangible but hard to quantify or explain.
Tirana was a big city, vibrant, and a place we loved.
Durres was a little smaller, added the waterfront, and was still a semi-busy city.
Vlorë was a little smaller, but still a decent-sized city with an Old Town area, a nice long waterfront, and a long, beautiful beach.
But Sarandë is more of a small town, not a city. And the sense of urgency, well, it just doesn’t exist.
But it is also a tourist town.
Tourist town pros and cons
As I mentioned, the laid-back vibe is hard to beat. It balances our frantic pace of work and helps us to decompress.
And as beautiful as Vlorë was, the half-crescent waterfront in Sarandë is a level up. The clearest water, nice cafes and restaurants, the backdrop of hills, boats coming and going, and the island of Corfu across the sea.
The prices are still surprisingly good here in Sarandë, despite it being a tourist destination. Granted, that is largely because we targeted shoulder season rather than the non-stop busy summer season approaching. Prices can be double or more on most expenses during the summer.
The people are nice and the food is delicious, so it is easy to relax and enjoy your time out in the town.
For the first time since we launched our nomad life in October of 2022, we also have heard more people speaking English on a regular basis than any other city we have visited. Why? It is a tourist town.
Because English is the common language, even those traveling from other parts of Europe tend to speak English to communicate. It is surreal actually, and hard to explain, what it is like to be accustomed to not understanding the vast majority of comments, conversations, and side-discussions occurring all around you most of the time. And then suddenly to have that shift has been surprisingly refreshing.
At the same time, you have to watch out for certain vendors in town. There are a few markets and stores where the check-out person manually made up the price, quite clearly. Sometimes as much as double what the real price should be. The only way to avoid it is to know what you are buying and have some idea of the cost, and we were bitten by this once or twice.
And as we move into the edge of summer now in late May, we have seen some places start to move toward summer pricing, so it is not a perfect plan for shoulder season.
This can also be a destination for young people, which I completely get. However, that might mean you have some neighbors who are on the loud side late into the night and early morning.
And while this town is mostly peaceful, on a Friday or Saturday night, expect some fireworks off the pier around midnight, which are always fun to watch from our balcony.
Onward and sideways on media production?
Another week of our media learning curve is behind us. And I’m a little bit tired, but feel like we are getting there. Wherever “there” is.
I realized that the schedule for new weekly content needs a little bit of work, as I think ahead to Friday when we will take a ferry to Corfu, Greece, spend two days exploring Corfu (and not getting anything done), and then flying to Serbia on Sunday.
As a result, I am shifting the regular weekly cadency of blog/YouTube/podcast out to next weekend. I need to be a full week ahead on content to properly balance the schedule and ensure we don’t miss a date, at least as a general rule.
We’ll see where this plan takes us, but we should have a new set of content coming out next Saturday, and hopefully each Saturday after that.
Until next time, have a good one.