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134. Drunk Driving in Albania

  • Writer: Dylan Smith
    Dylan Smith
  • Mar 14, 2023
  • 2 min read
Day 134
Location 25: Tirana, Albania
Mar. 14, 2023

Winter has slush, hypothermia, and seasonal depression. Summer has the beach, barbecues, and asking an adult man in a white van for a "two ball screwball" (my go to ice-cream order). Since I was a kid, I've always preferred summer.


Apparently, so do the Albanians. Every year on March 14 they celebrate Dita e Verës ("Day of Summer"). What an advanced society they have created. Today in Tirana, I attended the city's festival for the beloved holiday. (Note: Technically the summer solstice is in June, but also Jesus' actual birthday is in April even though Christmas is in December, so get over it nerds.)
On route to the festival, we passed street art that I can only assume had been up since a corresponding Winter Day, a festival where (again I'm just assuming here) you celebrate by cozying up near a fire to (1) eat hot soup, and (2) watch cartoons, while serendipitously (3) finding loose change in the crevasses of the sofa you're lounging on.


At the actual Summer Day festival, there was a car you could sit inside as it slowly rotated 360 degrees. Kids waited on line with bated breath to enjoy the whimsical ride.



Except this was no ride. It was a demonstration meant to show the violent consequences of drunk driving. Instead, it had the opposite effect: kids walked away thinking "that was fun, I want to do that again!". Oof. They might as well have given out snow cones to warn against frostbite.

Lastly, I played some basketball with a kid named Elvis (not that Elvis, obviously). At night, there was a street concert where I noticed the guy in front of me was cosplaying as the DJ. All of that is in the video below.




 
 
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