The Epic Legend Of Scanderbeg Unveiled At Our First Bazar! -Van Life in Albania

We have made it to the city of Kruje. Kruje. K-R-U-J-E with two dots over the E. But in any event right away we are greeted with narrow windy roads. Now there are some amazing things to see here so we're excited. We got to find a camp spot and I can tell you this is as interesting as most cities we've ever been in in terms of driving so buckle up. You see it says camping up here. It's painted and it looks like the gate is closed. We'll take this to the next one. This takes us to the other campground. It looks like we can wrap around. option was closed. We had to do a 20-point turn on a dead-end road. Our second camping option it had bad reviews because the road was in bad shape. Now we've come up here to the road and it looks like they've paved some of it. It's very narrow where it was paved and we've just come to the part where it is no longer paved. But I don't think we have far to go. Y'all cross your fingers because it's been raining. So far it's not too bad but it is bumpy and rough. G is meowing. He doesn't like it. Some bumps. Some good ones. There are some washouts too. Some big rocks and it's narrow but let's see here. We got a lot of experience driving on worse roads than this at least so far. We'll have it to ourselves. I think you want to park down. So I mean I'd stop right here while you talk to them because to get to town they have a restaurant. You walk down the stairs to that road over there to the restaurant so yeah but you're definitely gonna love it a lot. So what's our best way to explore the city? To park downtown? This is the Harlequin. Okay and if you just take the step up you are on my restaurant. That's the restaurant yes. And from there 800 meters. Here is the castle. You see the old town? Yeah 800 meter by feet you are in the town. Okay. This place is made for the people stay quiet here and they can reach the town very easy. Okay. Good morning everyone. If you can see that little spot up there on the cliff there's a little building up there. Way on up there. I will be taking a hike up there but not today. Today we are gonna explore the beautiful city of Kruje. So we are off. It's a bit of a hike. This is a hilly mountainous city so it's gonna be an uphill walk. They have a really cool bazaar here and well they got a castle and a unique story that we're gonna be able to learn about about the whole of Albania. So we do have a really nice camp spot but it is down in a valley or down the mountain. It's in a canyon. It's in a canyon and even after you get up and they have nice stairs to be fair. It is one hell of a climb to get up to the main road where the hills start. Yeah and if you guys can look ahead we still got hills but it's gonna be a good time. How you doing? Persistent pays off. We made it up to the town. All right the first order of business is some food and this looks like it's a local restaurant with local food. So let's go try it out. Yeah that's fine. Do they have a place in the shade? All right lunch with a view. We found our spot. And you can see all the way out to the sea over that row of islands. We were just out there not so many days ago. Snow is using google translate. This is a... I'm having to use google translate half the time but half the time it won't translate these foods and you have to google it and look at pictures and try to figure it out. So google translate is helpful but we're learning that in Albania it does not translate all of the words. What would we do without the google? Google is our friend except when we're driving and it puts us on scary roads. We got some stuff that we've tried before and some new items here. What do you got Snow? I have a stuffed pepper. It came with a side salad and some rice. I love tomato soup and they had it on the menu so we're gonna try a creamy tomato soup. They ordered a side of feta because the feta goat cheese here is unbelievable and you want to put it on everything. Looks like a little greek salad and I got dolma which is grape leaves um like a grape leaf roll with rice and some form of cheese and you can see they have the tomatoes and the olive oil drizzled all over it and then I got moussaka which is like a little lasagna so that hasn't arrived yet. So one thing about Albanian food they use a lot of olive oil. It's good olive oil. It's great and you literally you're walking under the trees where those olives came from. That means my tomato soup is not like a creamy basil tomato soup we would get back in the states but it is really good to dip this fresh bread in. And I should say that a lot of people here have olive trees in their yard and they can just take the olives usually there's a few places in town or whatever that will press their olives into olive oil so you go into a lot of shops and people sell their own olive oil and it's not like the filtered kind you get in the stores. It is like raw fresh olive oil and has a distinctly different taste than what you would buy in the store. Yeah we had some in the van we bought from one of our campsites in Montenegro. From the 600 year old olive trees. This is the moussaka with meat so I think it has eggplant I don't even know we're about to find out. Let's take a bite. Hot. So it's like potato eggplant and maybe like a bechamel with a little light cheese on on the top so yeah it's pretty good. So much flavor in this food the stuffed peppers stuffed with rice and onions and leeks and peppers all kinds of goodness and it's just got so much flavor here in Albania. I was gonna go for the stuffed peppers I'm kind of kicking myself but I'll be quite all right. Lunch was delicious and I don't know if we took the time to show you this beautiful view. It's a little hazy if it wasn't we'd be able to see the sea from here. Right over here behind Kurt is a castle. The plan is if the rain will hold off to take you up there. Did you enjoy your lunch Kurt? My lunch was delicious. I'm excited to see the castle but I'm more excited to see the bazaar. Yes next up before the castle we go through the old bazaar where we're supposed to see some really cool local handcrafted things all kinds of things. How bizarre. All right we made it out of lunch alive it was $22 and now we are off to the bazaar. So when we get to the castle we're going to tell you a little bit more about this area and how it came to be and the Albanian flag which is a really cool flag but I wanted to go ahead and point it out because unintentionally I match it so I may blend in here at the market with all the black and red Albanian color. Look at all these things they make the coffee they put the the coffee in there and the water in this and they put it and heat it in the sand and it expands the coffee. I don't know if you guys have ever seen that or not. All sorts of Reiki. Do you see any of your colors there? Guys if we had a house snow would be buying all these places out. And look there's a Pinocchio here. Oh slippers. These clothes are like 150 years old right here and it's old tradition and they're they're authentic I mean these were worn by people they're not new they're old. 150 years old. Oh that is shoes but that's a hat though right? Oh for lamps oh look at that. More yeah yes I see. I have the others but 500 more. Oh okay. Brown because don't have much black sheep. Yeah oh true. Are they comfortable? Very light they're very light they are very light. There's more in the window behind you. So you guys that have been following us for a while may remember that Kurt bought some wool slippers in Chiloe, Chile and he loves them but he wears them so often that they're starting to wear out. So he's trying these on and seeing what he thinks but we're not quite sure it's exactly what he's looking for. Thank you. And then they have the city with the castle. Yes this is our city and the castle. So there are many shops through this little old bazaar area and you can get a wide variety of things. There's a mixture of of course the standard tourist things, magnets for your refrigerator, shot glasses but then there's some more authentic like tourist things, the bowls that say Albania in them. There's lots of the purses and the backpacks but then they also have a lot of antiques or the authentically made traditional dress of Albanian. So it's a really good variety but when you live in a van there's no room to buy stuff. There's also a lot of hand weaving of these bright and colorful rugs and when you're driving through the countryside it seems like every house has one and you see them out on the porches washing them, scrubbing them, cleaning them. Really cool stuff in this bazaar. Oh this is all antiques. Oh I see, I see, yeah, yeah, yeah. Wow, what what year was that? This is 1970. Oh that's German right there. Original. Got you a new hat, looks good. There you go. 500 right? Thank you. Thank you. Have a wonderful day. All right guys, Kurt doesn't get a new hat in every country but he likes to pick one up every once in a while. And I got a match, snow today. And the red and black and their flag is just really really bright and happy and it's a cool flag. So Kurt is sporting him a brand new Albania hat. What a walk through time in this little bazaar. I gotta tell you with all the history, the antiques, all the old clothing, all the new stuff, the handmade stuff, just a really cool experience. We're about to go in the museum up here and I look back up to the top of the mountain and after this walk today I realize that is gonna be a long steep walk tomorrow. I hope you guys come with me. About four and five hundred years ago this market was known for selling goats and leather goods. Now today we've already showed you all the different kind of things that you can find here. But we're heading on up the hill now and I actually, there's so much elevation climbing up the 25 to 30 minute walk from the campground up here to the market that I have pushed my heart just about as much as I can today and I'm feeling quite tired. So I'm gonna let Kurt take you guys up to the castle. Without me I'm gonna peel off and have a coffee in a coffee shop, which the rain kind of helped me make that decision too. But it was for me to rest. So Kurt is taking you up the hill to the castle. Now as we get up here this is known as Skanderbeg's castle and if you want to understand Albanian history in the slightest you need to know who Skanderbeg is. Now we covered a pretty good bit of his story in our last video but just to give you a recap. In the early 1400s the Ottoman Empire, which just think down around Turkey, so south of here, the Ottoman Empire had taken all of this area over and was working their way north in the hopes of taking over all of Europe. Now Skanderbeg was kind of a captive of the Turks or the Ottomans but he escaped, came back to Albania, rounded up a small army and set up base right here in Kruje. What he is so famous for and why he is such a massive war hero and Albanian hero is this small army held off a huge Turk or Ottoman Empire coming up in here with just two to three thousand soldiers at this very location right here. So that's why he's so famous. He held it off for years so he's given a lot of kudos, for lack of a better word, of helping Europe you know by stalling them right here helping Europe to kind of hold off the Ottoman Empire. He actually regained control of the Albania state area for I don't know maybe one or two decades and this was his home base. So here in this castle there's just a few little facts I'm going to tell you. Kurt might tell you about a few more but I want to point out this giant olive tree. It's said that it was planted on the day of Skanderbeg's wedding and from that point on he required any newlywed couple to plant one olive tree the day they got married and they were required to do this instead of paying the marriage tax. So that may have something to do with why everywhere you look down here there are giant ancient beautiful olive trees. In this castle right here is actually where for the very first time the beautiful red and black brightly colored Albanian flag was raised. Skanderbeg picked that flag and raised it right here in 1443 and still all these centuries later it is still the symbol of Albania. So this old clock tower that you see has been here for a very very long time. It was built by the artisans that worked in the old bazaar so think 500 600 or 700 BC that some sort of a clock tower was built right here. Now the bell that still remains here is the bell. It was, you know, it was used to keep time tell people when to open and close their shops and stuff like that but it is the bell that rang when they made the announcement of Skanderbeg's death. So to come to Kruje and come up here and see this you are walking through a timeline of the war hero Skanderbeg and it is pretty pretty cool to literally get to walk through history like this. If you like this video be sure to subscribe to our channel and hit that notification bell so you guys know when we put out new videos. And don't forget you can always follow us over on Instagram to see what's going on in between videos. Cheers guys!