Solving Problems Caused by Muslim Holiday

Saturday, Sept. 10, 2016--Prizren

I ran into a transportation problem here.  I went to the bus station yesterday to try to plan my trip to Tirane in Albania on Monday.  There is no central ticketing area there.  Instead, there are travel agencies everywhere advertising buses to various places.  I tried to find one going to Tirane, but there was confusion.  One man said that the bus I intended to take left at 7:30 and showed me where.  But I still wanted more confirmation.  I found a web page for them this morning and wrote them an e-mail.  They replied that they will not run on Monday because it is a Muslim holiday--the celebration of Eid el-Adha, the Muslim feast of sacrifice which represents the end of the hajj this year.  I tried to find a way to contact other bus companies, and they had only Facebook pages with none of them having an e-mail address available there.  (Since I am not a member of Facebook, I cannot see full Facebook pages--one of their ways of trying to force everyone to accept and participate in their website.  Companies should never use Facebook as their primary business location on the Internet.)

(Note:  The holiday causing this confusion was not set at the time that I planned my trip.  It is not a set date each year, it is a floating date which is decided by a group of imams based upon their decision of when the moon enters a certain phase, so the date is set only a few weeks before it occurs each year.)  

I went to the hotel desk to ask them for help, and they were great.  They looked up the companies that were going to Tirana and called three of them.  Only one was running a bus on Monday, and that bus was not running until the middle of the afternoon.  I considered leaving tomorrow when there will be several morning buses (as there always are on non-holidays), but the desk clerk explained that my reservation with booking.com made it difficult for them to make a change in my reservation--that it could be done easily if I had reserved directly with them; apparently they have to pay a fee to booking.com that covers the entire period of the reservation.  So I asked them to call back and make a reservation with the one bus company that had told them it had a bus Monday--Albeni.  Even that company, which normally has several buses each day, has only this one bus running that day, and it goes from Pristina to Tirane without even stopping here in Prizren.  But the bus company took my name and told us where to be on the highway (about 6 miles from Prizren).  The father of the owners of the hotel will drive me there to wait for the bus to stop and pick me up at 15:00 Monday afternoon.  The bus will cost me twice as much as the regular buses from Prizren would, but it will allow me to go on the day I had planned, and, therefore, does not require me to change my hotel reservations either here or in Tirane.  I still feel a bit uncomfortable about the lack of certainty of it all, but, as I said, the company took my name and told us where they would stop to pick me up on Monday, so I guess all is well.  Will see.

The only reason for going to Tirane is to take a bus from there to Greece that leaves each day at 3:30 (in the morning)--the simplest way for me to get from Kosovo to Greece.  I had hoped to take a morning bus from here to Tirane Monday so I could go to the bus office in Tirane in the afternoon Monday to make plans for my trip from there into Greece..  But since the day is also a holiday in Albania, the bus office probably will be closed there Monday.  Therefore, my next step in trying to solve my travel problems was to contact the bus company I will take from Tirane to Greece to see if they would reserve me a seat for the bus leaving Wednesday morning (at 3:30 a.m. which is really late on Tuesday night).  I was afraid to wait until Tuesday when I am in Tirane; if I did, I might find that the bus for that night was fully booked already.

Fortunately, in writing Crazy Holidays to make that reservation, I got a reply that said a place had been reserved for me but also said that their office is not in the location in Tirane that I had been told when communicating with them back in May or June.  They gave me the correct street name but no number for locating the office on Tuesday.  I wrote back asking for a number, since the street is a major one that is quite long.  Their office was closing at 14:00 today, and I didn't hear back.  But the main office that I was writing is in Greece and should be open on Monday to send me a reply that I should have before I need it on Tuesday.

That's a long story, but it shows how complicated things can become unexpectedly when traveling.  And the longer a trip is, the greater the chance that a glitch like this one will occur.

Before settling all of that, I had my breakfast that comes with the hotel.  It is not a buffet like many hotels offer.  Instead, I had a choice of five menus.  I chose the "Three Eye" menu representing three fried eggs with ham, cheese, cucumber slices, tomato slices, and olives on one plate; a slice of watermelon and a container of yogurt on another plate; and orange juice and a choice of either coffee or tea.  It was quite good.

It was already 13:00 before I settled all the travel complications.  I went to a park I could see on the map on my phone.  Unfortunately, it is a rather horrible place.  Many of the benches have been destroyed, and the areas around the benches are greatly littered with trash.  I did find a decent bench (with surrounding trash) near a playground though, and I sat there and read from my current book.  I left a couple of hours later when it started sprinkling some and returned to the room.

The sun was back out soon making it possible for me to wander through the center of the city watching people and seeing more sights.  I saw two of the major ones--the Sinan Pasha Mosque from the 1600s which is the main mosque in the city and the Gazi Mehmet Pasha Hammam, the old bath house from the 1500s which is undergoing restoration and is not currently open for the public to enter.