Castle Walls, Wet With Milk

 "On the day of her jubilee, Paddington Bear offered the queen a sandwich."

Albania was a trap door opening suddenly beneath Montenegro, and the heat of Shkoder covered me like a wet eiderdown. A heavy, flat heat. Sharp somehow as well. Kotor had been hot, but the high walls of the old town and the proximity of the bay brought a degree of shade and breeze. Shkoder, having nothing to hide, is open. 

It's the gateway to the Accursed Mountains, the Albanian Alps, and there is a thriving trade in hostels here, dense chambers of bunked beds stacked high with gap-year Zoomers. Active and serious, the city was my first exposure to Albania and its people. 

With long avenues of infinite cafes, it was fairly representative. I would come to find it similar to many of the Balkan countries I've visited, but the sheer number of cafes, side by side, continuing on for blocks left a distinct and unique impression. 

The ride had been easy, notable mostly for the company of a British man, an ex van driver, who wanted to complain about the casting of Tom Cruise as Jack Reacher, a film from ten years ago. He brought this up unprompted. 

"First time in Albania, is it? Aye, it will take some getting used to. I'll tell you I can't get over your Tom Cruise being cast as Jack Reacher. It's unforgivable. A sin of the flesh." 

It was rando but also of a piece with other conversations I was overhearing. Strangers were filling their seatmates in on the pop culture important to them. I heard someone discussing a promotion for a Paddington Bear film featuring the Queen of England and the very worst plot summary of the last season of Game of Thrones. It was sweet, but it also made me feel like the people were desperately lonely. 

The customs building at the border was a strange, brutalist structure with rising concrete shelves with no purpose other than to provide space for swallows to build their half-coconut nests. I'd never had to opportunity to see these nests up close before. They looked more like something a wasp or mud dauber might construct. I loved watching them dart around, the swallows. 

Shkoder, when we arrived, had no real bus station to speak of, it was one of those situations where everyone just agrees this is where the buses stop. My host was absent, but I had been given a treasure map to the key's hidden location. In her message, she apologized for the "dolorous entrance," to the building, but I found it quite like most rooms I book. Which is to say, dolorous. 

I bought an enormous bag of fresh cherries from the neighbor and lived off of them.   

                                           

In the morning, I read Olivia Manning on the balcony then took a long walk to Rozafa Castle which looms slightly outside of, but sort of over the city. It has a fantastic mythology attached to it:

Witch says castle will stand forever if one of the brothers in the ruling family bricks his wife up. He doesn't really want to do it, but she's just had a kid, so she's served her purpose. He breaks the news to her, and she's like, "Sucks, but if you make a little hole in the wall for my breast to poke through, I can still feed the kid."

He agrees and the masons leave space for her nipple when they make her little Amontillado room. 

And even now, centuries later, the walls still drip with milk! 

Which is actually limestone deposits. But, you know, print the legend. Young Albanian women to this day, it is said, visit the castle to rub their breasts on the bricks for luck in fertility. 

During my visit, I was not fortunate enough to see this, but I did hold my hand to the wall and whisper the names of my elderly friends who are trying to conceive.

It was quite a place, a ruin most picturesque. Intact in pleasing ways and crumbling in poetic ways. Something old Ruskin would have written about. In the distance was a curving river and a very loud mosque with large, bubbling domes. It looked like a greenhouse on the moon. 

Beautiful hill with a gorgeous view of the city, the shadows of the Alps rising on the horizon. The heat was such, the souvenir vendors were hiding in rocky alcoves leaving their tiny rugs and castle-branded thimbles unguarded. There weren't very many tourists, but those there were shook and wavered like Saharan mirage stripes. 

This is what happens when you take a stranger to the Alps. 

On my way out, I passed an old Albanian with his cheeks puffed out and his shirt pulled over his belly. I huffed at him, and we both laughed dry helpless chuckles that reached the base of the defense towers and died.