Category: Albania

CHOFF-tah / grilled meatballs

Finishing up our time in Seattle today so it’s really time to start looking forward to Albania and anticipating the return to our wonderful weekend routine of sitting in a taverna, drinking Aperol spritzes and snacking on whatever we can turn up from the other places around the Pazari i Ri (old bazaar) of Tirana.

There are a couple guys in the bazaar proper who sell nuts, dried fruits, and other trail-mix-esque snacks, and an older couple who sell fruit and veg who often have grapes or other small, handheld fruit that doesn’t require a knife. Good snacks if you’re just a little peckish.

But the real score is to go to one of the zgara around the periphery of the market and get a plate of qofte, which are sort of like the answer to the question “what if you made meatballs into cigars and then grilled them up?” Some times drinking requires meat snacks, what can I say.

fah-leh-min-DARE-it / thank you

Confirmation today that H will not need to show her face in Vegas at the end of June, so we’re solidifying our plans to head to Tirana for the most part of the summer. There will be a week or two in June where we will be in Paris but the plan is going to just be to keep our apartment in Tirana and fly in / out for the event.

Faleminderit is the Albanian word for “thank you.” Albanian is a tough language to learn — it doesn’t follow the logical sentence structure that English has (that pretty much all Romance and Germanic languages also follow) and it doesn’t have a lot of carryover words from the languages around it — but Albanians also love America so a lot of them speak at least enough English to make communications at least passable.

(Obviously that gets less when you get out of the big cities, lots of pointing and hand-signalling when I tried to get a snack driving out in the sticks of Albania.)

If you want to read more about last year’s time in Albania you can go here: https://dave.themeesons.com/category/albania-2024 or you can check the Albanian videos on the Season 1 playlist on Youtube. (We’ll see if that works I guess.)