Three Hours in Tirana

The traffic ringing Tiranë was just about what you’d expect: back ups, confusing street signs, shouting drivers, horns, diesel fumes. My cabbie decided that he’d had enough – and I can’t blame him: what with a drive back across the border to Macedonia and all, it had turned into a 5-6 hour adventure. He found a relatively safe street and dropped me off, luggage and all, and told me to be very careful and to take an “Albania taxi,” but being who I am I chose to walk into town instead.

Not the best plan I ever had. 

In truth, I felt very safe the entire time. My sketch-o-meter is highly highly attuned from my years in the Mission District, and nothing about Tiranë set it off. However, my arms were about ready to fall off after 20 minutes (the joys of lugging camera gear around?), and I stopped at Parku Rinia for a quick snack and some light sunbathing. It felt amazing in the sunshine after some chilly time in Macedonia. After a quick respite, I gritted my teeth and made for a luggage storage facility I had found with some quick googling at the hotel.

Luggage storage nearly always seems to be a trial, even in a good-sized city like Tiranë. I’ve had so many ridiculous run-ins over the years (dragging a rollaboard across the sand in Viareggio is a standout) that I suppose it’s no surprise I moved to backpack-exclusive travel for the vast majority of my adventuring.

Given this illustrious track record, I was surprised and pleased to find an excellent solution in the simply named Luggage Storage Tirana. It was having a soft opening of sorts (lucky me!), and I was able to leave my bags for a nominal fee. I got doubly lucky in that the proprietor, who first apologized for his command of English, saw my surname and asked, “ma non parli italiano per caso? - you don’t happen to speak Italian, do you?”

What I learned later that day is this was not a particularly unique occurrence – Italian is still the most widely spoken foreign language in Albania, a remnant of fascist invasion and communist-era pirated Italian television – but this was still a remarkably welcomed turn of events. And should you ever have need to find luggage storage in Tiranë, I would highly recommend you do the same. Bags safely deposited, I made my way to the center square.

I was greeted by a busy fun fair and Christmas market in Sheshi Skënderbej – the aforementioned center square, named for the Albanian national hero Skanderbeg. It seemed slightly smaller than it actually is with all the goings on of the day, but was massive nonetheless.

The square is gorgeous: pure pedestrian paradise, ringed with key civic and cultural buildings including the brilliant old Et’hem Bey mosque which was unfortunately (for me) undergoing renovation. The majority of the architecture is no doubt a relic of the Hoxha regime… decidedly socialist, but somehow lighter or less imposing than some of the heavy-handed brutalist relics one might encounter in, say, Podgorica or Zagreb (which, incidentally, I adore, but the beauty of Tiranë’s buildings felt more universally accessible).

I was absolutely enthralled with that contrast of harsh architecture and the palpable warmth radiating off the people I encountered. The square rang with laughs and shouts as it sparkled and gleamed in the surprisingly bright sunshine. There was something to be said for the incongruity of a massive and hideous conical Christmas “tree” with – I kid you not – “Feliz Navidad” emanating from one of the many food stalls in a majority-Muslim country. (Proving, as always, that we can all just get along, should we so choose.)

The building I was most looking forward to seeing in my quick tour was the Piramida, a UFO-looking thing from the end of the communist era, originally built in memory of Hoxha, now abandoned and decaying.

If decrepit communist ruins and discussion of photography aren’t your thing, you can probably skip to the end of the post. In fact, I probably could make this its own post, but what’s the fun of that?

There have been plans to rebuild the thing for years, but here it sits, all broken windows and garbage and graffiti.

While the sunshine had at first been a welcome antidote to all the cold, it did lead to some photographic challenges. What’s the fun of an endless blue sky and harsh midday shadows? I’m not sure how I would have liked to have shot the pyramid, but what I got certainly didn’t capture much of what I was hoping for. At the time I remember being frustrated I had nothing wider than the Q’s 28mm, though I’m wondering if that would really have given me what I wanted.

Black and white didn’t seem to absolve the images of their sins either, and it’s all a bit frustrating in reflection. All the same, it was exactly as impressive in person as I’d hoped – something I should probably try to keep in mind.

The most delightful part was just how accessible it was: 10 minutes south of the square on foot, just across the river. Something like this in the states would be fenced in, boarded up, inaccessible (I mean, relatively inaccessible), but here people climbed freely up the sloping concrete sides for the view over the city.

I wanted terribly to join in, but my footwear was suspect and tumbling off a building to crack a tooth or worse hours before an international flight seemed like a bad plan, even for me.

It may finally be time to give up the ghost and admit that I’m an adult.

All too soon, my time was up, and I cut a quick path back to the luggage storage to grab my bags. Across the street was a cab stand, and after some quick haggling in Italian (The best kind of haggling, if I do say so myself. That language was made for furiously fast negotiation.) I was on my way to the airport.

My quick Albanian tour felt almost like a gift with all the hassle it took to get there. I’m glad I toughed out the trip in, and am thoroughly looking forward to return visit some time in the future. Faleminderit, Shqipnia – thanks, Albania!

Sveta Sofia

“The city is a marvel of Byzantine Revival churches sprinkled amongst a mishmash of rote 19th century neoclassical bores and Eastern Bloc bulky brutalist monsters, with surprising Secessionist and Ottoman turns here and there. I was instantly in love.”

— From my last post. Yes, I just quoted myself.

And love it was with beautiful Sofia—which, incidentally, is pronounced with the emphasis on the first syllable (i.e. SO-fee-ya) and not like the name as I had previously assumed. I settled on it as a destination as I so often do: finding a cheap flight. In truth, I had wanted to see Macedonia but Sofia was a mere bus ride away and so it was settled.

I arrived on an early Qatar Airways flight from Doha, easily the emptiest I’ve traveled on in years. The emptiness, it would follow, came from the fact that it was of course Christmas morning and most people taking that route had already showed up.

In my defense, most Orthodox-predominant countries celebrate Christmas after the 12th day (so, January 7th), and I quite reasonably assumed Bulgaria was the same. Thankfully, I figured it out prior to departure, but that was little consolation for the hauntingly quiet void that was the city center.

This proved a double-edged sword for my travel passions, which is to say what I look for when I evaluate any destination:

1. People

2. Food

3. Architecture

4. Music

Nº 3 was of course much easier than it would otherwise have been and Nº 2 was not a problem as my hotel was lovely and accommodating. Nº 1 was a near impossibility – everyone was home with families and those who were out and about seemed to be either going to their families or to church – which meant that Nº 4 was an actual impossibility.

So it goes.

I had more than enough architecture to occupy my time. Sofia is astonishingly rich with religious architecture, and I happened to be staying within a ten minute walk of a synagogue (pictured above), a mosque (pictured below), the Catholic cathedral (an altogether hideous building that I don’t think I attempted to photograph), and of course numerous Orthodox churches.

The name of the city itself comes from the church of Света София (Sveta Sofia, meaning either “Saint Sophia” or, as its contemporary the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, “Holy Wisdom”), so it should come as no surprise that the religious tradition runs deep. The Banya Bashi mosque is a relic of Ottoman rule (as one so often finds in the Balkans), and its congregation is primarily Turkish (I had assumed Albanian which is true of neighboring Macedonia, but as it turns out the Albanian population in Bulgaria is very low).

You truly couldn’t have picked a more stereotypical weather pattern for this part of the world. While I find the urban decay (no makeup pun intended) sublimely beautiful, I can see how one might find it too evocative of post-Soviet melancholy. It’s worth mentioning, for the record, that Bulgaria was indeed not part of the USSR but was Eastern Bloc nonetheless and bordered Yugoslavia.

One last thought on the weather – as previously discussed: it’s interesting how different the sky color ended up in each of these photos. Some of that was caused by the light or angle thereof, most of it the victim of my creative editing. In retrospect, there is something to be said for a stylistically consistent set of images… and something else to be said for the platonic ideal of a singular image standing alone.

I’m happy to say I here achieved neither. And, as ever, so it goes.

Post-Processing, the spectacular crutch.

Is it a digression if you start from that point? Post-processing is one of those lovely photographic terms that serves as both an analog holdover and a misleading descriptor of digital workflow. Originally, it happened after processing (i.e. developing) the film. Today, it could be argued that taking a digital raw file and finalizing settings is in fact the processing; in that sense, one could deem Lightroom/ACR/etc. the processing and Photoshop the post.

It seems to me so often the pretentious gearhead semi-novices who argue for and pedestalize a platonic ideal of a photograph that come in critical of manipulation. The type of people that – if I’m being catty – produce technically perfect, soulless, story-less images. You’ll see the judgment thrown in hashtags like #SOOC or #nofilter.

Is it important to learn how to use your tools? Yes

Is it important to maintain some rigid orthodoxy around what the tools produce? No

By the same token, I disdain a “fuck it, I’ll fix it in post” mentality as well. My feelings are this: become a master of the camera you use, digital or analog. (You will miss photos if you don’t.) Craft images that tell stories. As long as you’re not a photojournalist or selling a product – two areas where realism and fidelity are key – the world is your oyster in that quest.

Why does any of this matter? Well, because I hit bad weather in Sofia, of course.

More to come on Sofia itself, but as a quick fly by: the city is a marvel of Byzantine Revival churches sprinkled amongst a mishmash of rote 19th century neoclassical bores and Eastern Bloc bulky brutalist monsters, with surprising Secessionist and Ottoman turns here and there. I was instantly in love.

Pictured here is the view from my hotel (the shockingly charming Sofia Balkan) of the church Света Неделя – Sveta Nedelya – a name which refers either to the term “Holy Sunday” or Saint Kyriaki but is somewhat debated.

This is what my brain goes through when I’m dissecting an image. There are a million and one things to consider when getting to the final image. My first concern was the final aspect ratio (more thoughts on ratios here) as I’d decided a crop was necessary, given the excavations and cars in the foreground. I also wanted to brighten the church without losing the definition in the clouds, particularly since the clouds above the church weren’t much to look at in the first place. Finally, I knew that way-too-modern logo would get in the way.

After some quick cropping and some equally quick exposure adjustments, I had a fairly workable subject and thought first that I’d try monochrome. This would both hide the Huawei logo and allow me to bring down the blues to have more cloud definition. The resulting image is fine, but I missed the hallmark green of the domes.

I returned to color and played with the greens. Is it an exaggerated image? Quite. At the end of the day, it was a much more interesting composition than the original image and as one of many pieces in a tale of the architectural identity of Sofia, it would do the job. However, that bright dab of red kept drawing my eye away.

A quick pop into the shop and voilà, a finished image. It was all about removing distractions to focus on what actually mattered: this gorgeous, storied edifice.

La Rossa

Bologna has three nicknames:

• La Dotta - the learned, as it's home to the "oldest" university in the world (debatable, but let's go with it)
• La Grassa - the fat, due to the Emilian cuisine: rich in butter and absolutely wonderful
• La Rossa - the red, said to be a reference to the color of the city, but there are naturally tongue-in-cheek implications around her politics

I've never really understood the latter from the physical sense - Bologna is red, but it's also tangerine and rose and salmon and cantaloupe. I tried to search for the red this trip with little success, but enjoyed the thrill of the hunt.

Barajas y el infinito

An appreciation for airport architecture is a fine thing for a constant traveler to develop. Learning to appreciate the beauty in angles, curves, light, impact - the specific visual language and the visceral feeling of place. The ability to experience moments of solitude, calm, or delight in an otherwise hectic environment never goes unnoticed.

El Aeropuerto Adolfo Suárez Madrid-Barajas is easily a masterwork - clean, airy spaces to diminish inklings of claustrophobia; graceful, swooping curves and warm golden wood to drive out the sense of the clinical; playful and practical dashes of color to draw in the eye and give weary travelers an idea of how much farther they have to walk.

While the building could easily lend itself to moody monochromatic abstract detail shots, it seems a crime to eschew its color and not celebrate it as it is.

(My favorite airport in Europe.)