The Cool Girl’s Guide to Albania

My name is Sofia and I’m a 30 year old British-born Italian, with a love for this small country in the Balkans. It’s a weird, wild and wonderful story as to how I visited Albania for the first time, but that’s a story for another time. Let’s just say a few chance encounters and a series of events, or KISMET, as they say in Albanian, led me to meet my best friend Dea, who invited me to spend a week with her in Vlore, in the south of the country. We saw incredible beaches, we ate, drank, partied and explored and to put things simply: I rebooked another trip for a month later and have been going over a few times a year ever since. Dea and her sister Nella, as well as many of their friends, welcomed me into their lives and deserve a special shoutout for unknowingly helping me to put together the guide and letting me in on the best kept secrets.