THEY LEFT DENVER FOR DURRËS.
NOW THEY ARE LEAVING DURRËS FOR TIRANA.

I met Rob near the beach. A good American man, and he told me the whole thing standing up, in the street, without once sitting down.

After he and Anita watched a man get stabbed to death on a street in Denver, in the middle of the afternoon, they were finished with the country. Six months later they were living here, with Mike who is 7, Mary who is 13 and Amanda who is 15, and Rob works in marketing while Anita is at home with the three of them.

WHAT THEY DID NOT CHOOSE.

They looked at Poland and they did not feel welcome there. Rob will not say more than that and he does not have to. They looked at Portugal, which is where half of America looks, and they found it expensive and buried in paperwork. So they came to the country nobody had recommended to them.

WHY HERE.

There were three reasons and Rob does not pretend there were more: it is cheap, and an American can live here for a year without asking anybody for permission, and there is the sea. That is the entire list, and it is a more honest list than most people will hand you.

HE OVERPAID FOR THE FLAT.

Rob pays $800 a month. He volunteers this, and then he says he paid too much, and that he could have found it cheaper. He does not say how much cheaper, because he does not know. That is the arrival price, and you will pay it too. It is what a flat costs when you have nowhere to sleep and no Albanian in your mouth.

WHAT ACTUALLY SURPRISED HIM.

What surprised him was not the money and it was not the paperwork, it was the people, who cross the road wherever they like and whenever they like, with the cars still moving. It took him weeks to work out why, and then he stopped watching the road and looked at the pavement instead.

He took this photograph on his own street, and the whole answer is sitting in it: there is no pavement left to walk on, because the pavement is where the cars are kept. So the people are in the road, and the children selling roses are in the road with them.

In Tirana they sat down wanting nothing more complicated than a beer, and the waiter would not serve them, and then he took the tablecloth off the table while they were still sitting at it. In Durrës they were refused a coffee after 7 in the evening, with the machine running behind the bar, because the manager had said so and nobody was going to argue with that.

Then there is the menu he sent me, from a restaurant that is not cheap, where a margherita costs $5.50. Somebody had drawn a box around the Parma by hand and written NO inside it, and that is the service, in one sheet of paper.

This is a country where a man will drive an hour out of his way for you and take nothing for it, and then a waiter will refuse to pour you a coffee because of a rule that nobody can explain. Rob's own word for it, after six months, was contrasts.

AND NOW THEY ARE LEAVING.

They are not leaving the country, they are leaving the city, and they are going to Tirana to be near the business centre, because Durrës is slow and slow is not what a working man needs from the place he lives in. The pace that sells this coast to a pensioner is the same pace that was quietly costing Rob his week. They are going now, in the summer, while the children are out of school, because that is the only window a family ever gets.

This is what they look at in the evening, from the flat they are giving up, and I want you to see it before you decide that leaving was obvious.

I am not going to dress that up. Durrës is slow living. If you need your day to move, you need the capital. That is not a failure of the city and it is not a failure of theirs. It is a mismatch, and nobody warned them, because everybody who writes about this coast is selling it.

What the flat, the internet, the doctor and the bills actually cost, in names and numbers: Moving to Albania.