We've Been in Albania for Two Weeks. Here's What's Real.

It's been two weeks since we landed in Vlorë.

Moe talks about his first weeks in Albania.

Some days it feels like we just got here. Other days it feels like we've lived here for months. Both of those things are true, and we're not sure how to explain that to anyone who hasn't done a big move before.

We're sitting on our balcony as we write this, looking at the Adriatic, drinking coffee that costs less than what you'd tip for a coffee back in Florida. We sold pretty much everything we owned to get here. People keep asking us how it's going. So this is the honest version.

Not the highlight reel. Not the regret post. The real version of what fourteen days in Albania has actually been.

We got the country completely wrong

Before we left, Moe pictured Albania as a place still hardened by communism. Abandoned buildings. Broken windows. Empty streets. He thought every block was going to look like one of those FBI buildings in Arlington, Jacksonville. Beige concrete. Graffiti. The kind of place you'd cross the street to avoid.

It's not that.

Vlorë is alive. The Lungomare — that's the long promenade that runs along the water — is full of people walking, eating, talking, laughing, and watching their kids run around. There are palm trees. Coffee shops. Restaurants with tables right on the street where they pull up a chair for you when you arrive. There's a quality of life happening here that's hard to describe until you see it.

The mistake we made was watching too many travel videos before we came. People with cameras tend to film the dramatic stuff — the empty bunkers, the unfinished construction, the rough edges. What they don't capture is the everyday energy. The neighbors walking their dogs at sunset. The grandmother sweeping her front step every morning. The teenagers crowding into a café on a Wednesday afternoon. That's the real texture of this place. And we couldn't see it until we were standing in it.

The food has wrecked our diet plans

We came to Albania thinking we'd lose weight. The plan was to walk everywhere, cook simple meals at home, and lean into the Mediterranean lifestyle.

The first three days we ate breakfast, lunch, and dinner out. Every meal.

Here's why: the food is so good and so cheap that going out doesn't feel like a treat. It feels like the default. There's a place a few blocks from us called Star Bite that makes a smash burger that ruined every other burger Moe will ever eat. There's a tiny restaurant where they grill thin-sliced pork chops to order on the street and the meat is so fresh you can taste the difference. There's a pasta dish April had three nights ago that she's still talking about.

And the pizza. We're so close to Italy here that the pizza is the kind of casual everyday excellence that Italians take for granted and we don't. Moe is on a personal mission to eat more pizza than Dave Portnoy. He's losing, but he's trying.

This is the trap nobody warned us about: when food is cheap, you eat more of it. Not less. We thought we'd save money on food. We've actually spent close to what we used to spend in Florida, just spread across way more meals. Lesson learned. We're going to start cooking at home now. Probably. Maybe. After this pizza.

The coffee is its own religion

There are as many coffee shops in Vlorë as there are pizzerias. That's not an exaggeration. You cannot walk a block without passing one.

The coffee is espresso-based. Almost nobody does drip coffee here. It's small, strong, dark, and they bring it to you on a little tray with a glass of water. Moe drinks two or three a day. Sometimes more. Café Americanos for him — espresso with a little water added — which buys him time before he wants the next one.

He's become a regular at Café 1912. The team there has started to recognize him. Last week we went to music trivia night and met an entire group of expats from France, Norway, Australia, and Poland. By the end of the night, we had four new dinner invitations and one offer to join a book club.

That's a thing here we didn't expect. People want to know each other. Strangers introduce themselves. The expat community is small enough that meeting one person plugs you into a whole network within a week.

We pay for water at restaurants. And we walk everywhere.

A few things have taken some adjustment.

You pay for water at every restaurant. It's not free. They'll ask still or sparkling, and you'll get a small bottle and pay a euro or two for it. The first time this happened we waited for fifteen minutes for the water we'd ordered before we realized that's just how it works. You order water like you order wine. It's a beverage.

Cash culture is real. A lot of smaller places only take cash. We carry more physical money on us than either of us has carried since we were teenagers. The ATMs work fine but they charge fees, so you take out larger amounts at a time and you suddenly have to think about wallet security in a way you didn't when everything was tap-to-pay.

And we walk everywhere. In Jacksonville, on a normal day, we'd hit two thousand steps if we were lucky. Here, we're hitting ten thousand without trying. The walking is the best thing that's happened to our bodies in years. Moe's joints are barking. April's legs are sore most evenings. We both feel better than we have in a long time.

There's no stress when you're walking. That's the unexpected gift of it. In a car, you're managing traffic, lights, gas, parking, navigation. On foot, you're just moving through a place. You notice things. You stop for coffee because the shop looks nice. You pet a stray dog because she's friendly. You see your neighborhood instead of driving past it.

The friendliness almost broke us

We were warned about a lot of things before we came to Albania. Crime. Scams. Difficult customs. None of it has been true so far.

What is true: people here are unreasonably kind.

Our first day, Moe was wheeling 350 pounds of suitcases down an airport ramp in Tirana. He hit a curb, the cart tipped, and everything went flying. Five Albanians standing nearby smoking cigarettes dropped what they were doing, ran over, and helped him collect everything. They wouldn't let him put it back on the cart. They just carried it to the taxi for him. They didn't want money. They didn't want anything. They were just there.

That set the tone for the entire two weeks since. The taxi driver who drove us from Tirana to Vlorë for two and a half hours, watching Moe sleep most of the way, helping us unload at our apartment, accepting a tip that was probably too generous because Moe couldn't do the currency conversion fast enough. The café owner who remembers our drink orders after one visit. The man whose rental car started rolling driverless down a hill in front of us — and the ten strangers who immediately ran out to push it back up to safety.

We didn't expect this. We don't quite know what to do with it.

Moe says it's the thing that's made him most sure we made the right decision. He spent decades in environments where strangers don't make eye contact. Here, people look you in the face and ask how you're doing and actually mean it. After everything he went through last year, that warmth is medicine.

Two weeks in

We're tired. We're a little overwhelmed. Our Albanian vocabulary consists of "thank you" and "hello" and a few mangled phrases we attempt and people graciously pretend to understand.

We've also never been more sure we did the right thing.

The life we left in Jacksonville wasn't bad. It was just stuck. We were working hard for a future that we were promising ourselves we'd live in someday. Then Moe had a stroke last October at fifty years old, and someday stopped feeling like a real address.

Two weeks in Albania, and we already know more of our neighbors than we did after eight years in our last neighborhood. We already have a favorite café. We already have a routine that involves more walking than driving, more cooking than ordering in, more talking than scrolling.

This isn't a vacation. We're not on a trip. We live here. And the life we wanted is already starting to look like the life we have.

We'll keep documenting it. The good, the hard, the parts that surprise us. The parts we're still wrong about. The parts we're going to look back on in six months and laugh at how naive we were.

If any of this resonates — if you're sitting on the couch thinking about a big change of your own — we see you. We were you in February. The math probably already works. The fear is the only thing left.

If you want to follow the rest of this story, you'll find new YouTube videos every Sunday and Wednesday on our channel, and we'll keep writing here as we go.

— April

Passports & Plans Vlorë, Albania