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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…
I decide not to take the 4pm train to Mostar, choosing the pre-booked bus instead. I mean, I can always meet JA and that Scandinavian guy at the station, right? But fate has intervened this time. As I am savouring an astonishingly scenic route, some young guy who has just boarded the bus plonks right…
You look a little bit like Jack Kerouac, is how I strike up a conversation with a guy unwrapping little bottles of rakia and mixing their content with concentrated orange juice. At closer inspection, any similarity is fleeting: his smile is different, more unhinged, the ears do not fit the size and the shape of…
Banja Luka is the first town I visit on my way across Bosnia, and it’s also the angriest town I have seen so far. In Polish, the expression plesc banialuki means to talk balderdash, but when I leave the bus station I realize the city and its name are no laughing matters. I can’t be…
Luke, around the world. 