My desire to know this place was fed by those stories, and in an unhappy childhood I read a great many, more or less uplifting tales, not least the Belgian detective known as Tintin.
He had adventures all over the world including the Balkans, possibly a Ruritanian version of ... I liked to think it was Albania which to a 20th century traveler, was far beyond the horizon, as distant and unreachable as the moon. Until 2007.
The sun was setting and the light was golden as we drove away from the unusually lengthy passport inspection at the border between Montenegro and Albania. Montenegro seemed amazingly sophisticated compared to the Albanian goat herders cluttering the main road to Shkoder, 23 long slow miles inside the country.
We were filled with wonder- where were we going to sleep? What currency did they use? What on Earth were we going to find round the next corner? Why in hell did we choose to come here? My wife has never harbored lunatic desires to visit Albania so this side trip was all on me.
The closer we got to Shkoder the thicker the traffic became, and traffic was an absurd mixture of ox carts and Mercedes Benz cars. The only in between vehicle was our modest Ford diesel station wagon which was an entirely inadequate weapon to carve a path between the indifference of the ox cart drivers and the imbeciles in the Mercedes.
God looks after drunks and idiots and once again, as the sun got close to the horizon and we got close to the center of chaos that is the heart of the provincial city of Shkoder we found paradise. No, it wasn't a palm tree but it was five star hotel rising up above the dust and swirling noise of a busy little town. The Hotel Europa, a small squat skyscraper rose up glistening in the fading sunlight. "We get a room there," my wife whispered, and later she confessed she was ready to pay $400 (300 euros) for a room up there.
As it turned out we got a palatial room with hot and cold running water and Italian television programs for 60 euros or $100 with free car parking in the secure basement. I sat on the bed and watched Fawlty Towers with Albanian(?) subtitles to try to forget where we were for a short while. Driving in Albania quite takes it out of you.
We went out into the streets of Shkoder and wandered through the park, kids were running around, mothers in scarves sat placidly on blankets while the old men huddled over upturned cardboard boxes and slammed down dominoes. We watched for a while and when they asked something we said "America" the universal word and they gave us big, stubbly, gap toothed grins.
Dinner was a slice of some sort of Albanian pizza, spinach wrapped with strong cheese and wedged between slices of flaky Greek-style pastry. It was very greasy and good. The scarfed lady in the doorway took a Euro ($1.30), for we had no Leks, and the nature of our brief visit meant we likely wouldn't get to buy any local currency either. We wandered down the main street as darkness descended. The sidewalk was lumpy, the traffic endless and the little stores were filled with varieties of universal plastic gewgaws. It was entrancing.
We bought me a pair of $15 shoes, the lady clerk grinning like she was going to die of amusement at these strange creatures. My wife looked for a set of metal dominoes among the plastic and failed. We sat at a sidewalk cafe and drank crisp beer, across the street from a mosque, and the domino players sat at a neighboring table and grinned cheerily. We wanted to ask if they used family heirlooms in the park, but we lacked the Albanian to ask where they got their dominoes. We went to bed exhausted and slept like zombies, so deep was our state of unconsciousness the morning call to prayers from the neighboring mosque did nothing to pull us out of our coma.
The hotel put on a breakfast worthy of far more than the Italian engineers who shared the buffet with us in a sumptuous ballroom. We ate syrupy fruit, sweet cheese, salamis of every type, pastries with sugary jam and yogurt of some strange Balkan variety. We took a few pictures of downtown Shkoder and dropped off an English language book Layne had finished reading in a little bookstore. We also picked up a picture book about Shkoder which revealed to me that this was Scutari, famous in the Crimean War of 1855 for the arrival of nurse Florence Nightingale and the creation of the first modern military hospital. 
The shopkeeper, thin and aristocratic had no knowledge of this slice of Shkoder's history. We chatted in French and he told me of his life as an agronomist, skirting the realities of life in a closed country. He bought us coffee and we parted best of friends. He went back to being a bookseller, we set our sights on the Balkan fastness to the north of us.
