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It is the 8th of February 2017, and I am standing with B on the terrace of a building in Swieqi. The weather is unusually hot for this time of the year, even for Malta, but I don’t know it yet. Nor do I know that B is a hoax, a swindler, a dishonest but…
Where the hell am I? The main railway station in Athens is exactly what I would expect from late-stage capitalism times we are currently going through. But as I get closer to the city, and eventually leave the subway at the Omonia station, I feel like I got transported to somewhere more eerie, like Baltimore…
There was a boy once, myopic and with a crooked spine; though physically frail, he was unusually curious about the world, and able to absorb knowledge like a sponge sucks the water out of a bathroom floor puddle. As an adult, he no longer remembered whether it was for his birthday or for Christmas, or…
Are you stuck here too? I ask some British girl sitting at the bus station coffee shop with a resigned face. Seems so, I wanted to go to Sarandë but there are no more buses going there today. She’s been sitting there for quite a while, as if trying to teleport herself to a different…
…and then there are places that momentarily turn my trip into a disaster. I should have already smelled trouble when I arrived at the bus station in Tirana. Complete and utter chaos, cigarette-smoking men with three-day stubble and unhealthy levels of tan wave at me invitingly, that’s the bus you want to get into, come…
There is a group of people sitting under the umbrellas and erupting with laughter at least once every five minutes. Who are they? A bunch of random travellers who just happened to be at the same place, at the same time? An exclusive clique who will react to my arrival with disdain? Are they smashed,…
I roll out of the minivan that took me to Skopje, and I pierce through a crowd of dubious Balkan grandpas offering taxi services. Just outside the station gate, there he is. The Swedish-Chinese-Muslim-American guy is standing right in front of me with a look of utter shock on his face. What the hell, and…
I have arrived at the Podgorica bus station to get a bus that will take me all the way to Kosovo. Of course, just like anywhere else in the Balkans, I had to pay a station fee to enter the platforms the buses depart from. A small shuttle is already waiting, and I take a…
I haven’t enjoyed Budva long enough, and I already have to go to Podgorica to visit the embassy. The presidential elections, an important event for the highly polarized Polish society, are happening this weekend. The division is an almost perfect fifty-fifty, so every vote counts, and the choice is between a pro-European candidate (sadly not…
Just like in Matt Sweeney’s song. The sea has been my home for the last eight years. I need the sea and I am unsure what to choose. A Polish girl I met while in Bosnia tells me to circle back to Croatia, she’s there, she’s renting a flat in Makarska. I have to decline…
Luke, around the world. 