A few months ago, I visited a place that had been recommended to me for years. I came away with the conclusion that I should have visited much earlier, much closer to when I was initially told about it.
Well, at the beginning of August the same thing happened. After first hearing about a spot about 7 years ago, I finally made the 3-hour drive to see it. And the entire time I just kept thinking: I should have done this sooner.
Summer in Pogradec has a way of making time feel softer. The lake turns clear and inviting, stretching out under the heavy sun, its surface broken only by swimmers and the slow rhythm of paddleboards. The promenade is alive each evening, humming with the mingled voices of locals and visitors, laughter echoing between cafe tables. In winter, the streets speak almost entirely in Albanian. But in summer, they become a mosaic of languages, each adding its own thread to the season’s tapestry.
This year I’ve tried to lean into it - to say yes to dinners even when I’ve already eaten, to stay out later than I should, to choose connection over a little more sleep. It’s the kind of summer where a paddle on the lake at sunset can flow naturally into pizza at a friend’s pizzeria, where the glow of the evening stretches long after the plates are cleared.
Not everything follows a perfect plan. The morning I was meant to leave for Ireland, I found a flat tire waiting in the driveway. It was a small problem - just a tiny screw lodged in the tread - and the tire shop had me on my way soon enough. A week later I was back, carrying memories of reconnecting with my cousin at his wedding, and falling back into the rhythm of work and life here.
One of my first stops was to photograph a friend’s newly renovated Airbnb - a bright, airy space on the second floor of his house. That evening we sat in the garden with another friend, sharing food, stories, and the kind of easy laughter that carries late into the night. Three people from three different countries - Albania, Northern Ireland, and the United States - finding common ground under the summer sky.
I did a consulting session over coffee. I haven’t done many yet, but each one makes me realize just how much I have to offer - and chips away at the quiet doubts I’ve carried about my own expertise. Later, a walk through town revealed something unusual for this time of year: restaurants dismantling their outdoor seating areas in the height of tourist season. My friend Marjo was doing the same at his cafe, and I helped him take down the patio in exchange for one of the best breakfast burritos I’ve eaten in years.
Not long after, work took me into the mountains to the village of Voskopoje. A team from Nashville had come to help run a junior high camp, and I spent the week documenting their days. One evening we lit a fire on the hillside and roasted s’mores. After the kids went to bed, I stayed behind, looking up at a night sky scattered with stars, thinking about the meteor shower that’s on its way.
The summer heat had left my plants parched. That first morning back was spent watering, cleaning, and catching up on all the unglamorous but necessary work of keeping a home. It’s not the part of summer anyone photographs, but it’s as much a part of life here as the sunsets and long lake evenings.
We’re halfway through the season now - halfway through the hot days and the cotton candy skies. I hope the rest of summer holds more of the same: good work, good company, and moments that linger long after the days grow shorter.
It feels weird to upload these videos weeks after certain things happen, but that's just how it is sometimes, I guess. For example, I went swimming in the lake almost 3 weeks ago, and yet now is the first time I’m putting it onto Youtube.
The beauty of what I try to do on my channel is that in five or ten years time when someone is watching these videos back it won’t matter. The timeline in the videos will be the timeline of the story. The fact that it’s a little delayed won’t matter in the long run.
Frankly, it probably doesn’t matter to anyone that isn’t involved in my day-to-day life either. If you’re watching from the US, you likely have no idea when I did these things. And if it’s put online a bit later than it happened, that’s okay.
At the end of the day, I have to live my life in order to document it.
And here’s a bit of that life:
I went on another photo walk, as I have the habit of doing when visiting a city in Albania. It’s not only a way for me to practice one of my hobbies, but it also provides content for me to create a video for my YouTube channel.
In Gjirokastër, I spent basically the entire walk wandering around the bazaar area. It’s the main attraction of the town and most tourists only see this part of it. So much so, in fact, that sometimes I forget that there’s much more to the city further down the hill. In any case, I elected to go with a particular color this time which was yellow (in case you couldn’t tell from the photos below…).
I really pushed out of my comfort zone on this one. First, asking the owner of the restaurant I ate dinner at if I could take her photo. I just had to because the yellow shirt she was wearing just fit too perfectly into the entire project that I was doing. The fourth photo has a fun story behind it as well, that you can see if you watch the video, but simply put a guy saw me taking photos and when I explained in broken Albanian I was taking photos of things with yellow in them he led me into the upstairs of his shop. His son came running in to translate for us, and it was really just a lovely experience.
As I mentioned, if you want to see the interaction with the shopkeeper and his son, or if you want to watch me wander around struggling to find decent frames that had yellow in them, the video is linked below.
About every 6 months I travel to the southern Albanian town of Gjirokastër. The NGO I work for operates a soup kitchen and after school program for some children there and I go in order to update the photos we have in our archive. For the last three or four times I’ve made the drive, I have tried to connect with a friend of mine. He runs a tourism agency called Experience Gjirokastra that explores the area surrounding Gjirokastër, Përmet, and Tepelenë. Because of weather, other responsibilities, or even just lack of time, we were unable to go out exploring. We had met a couple of times to have a coffee and chat, but never left the main bazaar area of the city. That is, until a few weeks ago…
I’ve been trying to use my platform and craft to help promote tourism in Albania, and featuring places to stay around the country seemed like it fit perfectly with that goal. After dozens of messages to hotels and guesthouses around Albania, I finally got a positive response; Hotel Nertili.
Hotel Nertili is a family owned hotel, restaurant, and bar in Sarande, Albania. It was originally built in 2001, but has some ongoing renovations that began in 2020. The management of the hotel kindly offered me a three night stay to experience the hotel and to show it to the world in my own unique way.
Because of where Pogradec is situated, to get to the southern parts of Albania there are two options. You can go north, to Elbasan then across the center of the country (where there aren’t any mountains) and then down a relatively new highway to the south. According to Google, it would take about four and a half hours. The second option is to go south along SH75, a windy, pot-hole filled road that is typically about one and a half lanes wide. It skirts the border of Greece, while passing by village after village and through the mountains in the south. It typically takes closer to five hours, if not more. If you know me, you know which road I take.
Driving this route had me thinking about an article I published a few weeks ago about why, if you’re visiting Albania, you should get outside of Tirana. More broadly, though, the kind of traveling I’ve fallen in love with. Granted, it would be a much easier, simpler, and smoother drive to go the northern route. It’s the route that almost everyone takes to get to Gjirokaster, and has some nice views along the way. It’s also the route that has exactly what you would expect along the way. That’s not me. Why take the highway when a more exciting route exists? Not only that, a route that you’re not quite sure what the next turn will bring. One that the majority of people in Albania have never been on, nor ever want to try. That sounds like a real adventure.
As I think about these two routes in terms of my life as a whole, it’s a fitting example. Although some day to day things can get monotonous, I like to think that my life is far from ordinary. When I think about the fact that my monotony is happening in this tiny country on the Adriatic Sea, I wouldn’t change it for the world. Little decisions throughout my life and my travels - like taking the road that other people wouldn’t want to just to see what’s along that journey - has shaped and changed my entire existence.
After all, didn’t Robert Frost say “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.” If I could go back to my 16 year old self sitting in American Literature class and show him this practical example of these poetic words, I would have immediately understood.
A few weeks ago, I had a few hours in Tirana before my flight to Germany. So I decided to try to spend some time practicing one of my favorite hobbies; photography. Because I had to be in the city anyways, I elected to go on a photo walk and see what sort of images I would be able to capture.
I decided to challenge myself. In more ways than one…
First of all, my go-to way to take photos is to just wander around and snap as many frames as I possibly can and find the good ones later. So the first way challenge was to only allow myself 5 frames. I did not use a burst mode, or try multiple angles of the subject, I found the frame I wanted, and waited for the right timing.
The second challenge, was confining myself to a determined space. In the center of Tirana you have Skanderbeg Square. A large open area, mostly for pedestrians, that many people will pass through on their way to and from work. I set the square as my boundary, and forced myself to find the five photos in the confines of the general vicinity of the square.
And if you’re interested in watching me try to pick out the frames I wanted, the video is below.
