More features:

• Expat activities

  New expat arrivals and any stray foreigners that find themselves wandering Tirana are welcome to mingle with Tirana's small but active group of expats....

• Southern Albania

  
  Most Western visitors to Albania travel for business, and unfortunately don't see more of Albania than the road from the airport, and Tirana's bllok area....

• Driving & Surviving

  Driving in Albania could be the ride of the lifetime - though it could easily be your last ride too. Until 1990 it was only the elite that was allowed to use the total of 600 cars that were in Albania....

• Travel terms

  airplane - avjon ferry - tragetiairport - aeroport car - veture, makinëtrain - ...

• Tirana In Your Pocket staff

  Tirana In Your PocketPublishers Gazmend Haxhia, Jeroen van Marle, ScoEditorial management: Rentapocket....

• The Bektashi sect

  Albania is often characterised in foreign media as a majority Muslim country, despite being rather secular in practise and also having significant numbers of Orthodox and Catholic believers....

• Café talk

  May I have a...  - A mund të kem një...espresso - kafe ekspresturkish coffee - kafe ...

• Headstone

  The Commonwealth Military Cemetery in the park is marked by a large block of polished red granite. Look closely and you can just see three small holes above the second plaque....

• Drink ujë, not aqua

  Order a bottle of mineral water with your meal, and chances are that you'll get sparkling water that was shipped all the way from France, Italy or further away – usually at a high price for both the environment and the diner's wallet....

• Albanian cuisine today

  All that fat, all that sugar and all that drippy oil, once the stamp of 500 years of Ottoman gastronomic excess, if not decadence, had been purged from the cuisine along with other purges of Albania’s past, when the communist regime took over in 1945....

• Traditional dress

  Albania's rich and varied cultural heritage is perhaps best demonstrated by the incredible range of traditional clothing....

• No smoking

  With one of the highest levels of smoking in Europe and cigarettes available on every street corner, many people were sceptical when the government announced a complete ban on smoking in public places from 26 May 2007....