Day 140b: Podgorica - Shkodër

Aug 21 - Unlike at previous borders, our passports are collected on the Montenegro side by an immigration agent and he disappears into the building. We progress to the Albanian side, where we sit again. Eventually the driver’s assistant gets back on with his hands full of passports and just hands them all to the people sitting in the front of the bus. We all have to sort out what goes where and I don’t hear anyone complaining, so I guess everyone gets the correct document.

I don’t immediately perceive any fundamental difference along the road south from here, except for the number of Albanian flags everywhere, and the lack of any Cyrillic signage.

After weeks of basically using Croatian phrases (which suffice for Bosnian and Montenegrin), we are now out of that language family. Albanian derives from its own branch of Indo-European, and has no close relationship with anything (one of the four European languages with this distinction). It is hypothesized that Albanian is similar to the ancient Illyrian language spoken in this region, but lack of archaeological evidence has made this impossible to prove.

Off the bus in Shkodër, not at a station as I was expecting, but just at the roundabout in the middle of town. Hardly anyone else gets off, as the primary destination of this bus is Tirana.

The city has a rough feel to it, a veneer of glitzy modernity but all old and worn underneath. We go in a local supermarket and there are perhaps 5% of the products we are used to seeing in a store of that size.