Most everyone has a travel bucket list. It could be regional, national or international, from a trip to Glacier National Park to the Grand Canyon to Japan.

One of my wife’s desired travel destinations was Albania.

To understand why, we have to go back to the fall of 2006 when my wife, Mary Pat Treuthart, took a volunteer position to help teach law students in Kosovo. During our several-week stay there in the country’s capital, Pristina, we met several people, most of whom were ethnic Albanian.

That fact was what made Mary Pat interested in visiting Albania itself. The problem was that her teaching schedule limited us to just a weekend jaunt, one that required her to return for an early-morning Monday class.

Complicating the situation, flights from Albania’s capital, Tirana, back to Pristina weren’t all that regular. The one flight on Sunday afternoon reportedly was often canceled. So we decided not to chance going.

But thoughts of Albania lingered in Mary Pat’s mind. So, several months ago, egged on by friends, she again thought about traveling there. Since she had planned on heading to Florence, Italy, to attend the 60th-anniversary founding of the Gonzaga in Florence program, it proved to be the perfect opportunity.

In my previous post, I wrote about our arrival, late at night, and the initial problems we had connecting with the driver that Mary Pat had booked to take us to our hotel. I even wrote about our first full day there, walking Tirana’s streets.

I wrote this in my notebook: “Tirana, this part of it anyway, has the same feel as many other (foreign) cities – Pristina, Stellenbosch (South Africa) and some parts of Italy.”

It reminded me of Pristina for some of the weathered buildings that I saw, Stellenbosch for the charming and tree-shaded streets that fed off Tirana’s main avenue (Dëshmorët e Kombit Boulevard, translation: Boulevard of Martyrs of the Nation) and Italy for both reasons as well as the numerous outdoors cafes filled with people eating, drinking and sometimes smoking (though you seldom see smokers anymore in Italy).

One of the things that I always search for in a new city is bookstores. And during that first day’s city walk-through, we stumbled into Adrion Bookstore, which sits just off Skanderberg Square and claims to be the city’s biggest. That’s where I found more copies of the writer that I’d just become obsessed by, Japan’s Haruki Murakami. I bought two, wondering how I was going to squeeze them into my already over overstuffed suitcase and/or backpack.

The capper of the day, though, was our first dinner that night. Mary Pat looked online and discovered that a highly rated restaurant, Era Vila, was barely a block away from where we were staying, the Marriott Hotel Tirana. At around 7, we asked the hotel concierge to make a reservation for us, and he said it would be no problem to just go there then.

We walked over and were promptly ushered to a table on the patio. The evening had cooled from its former 80-plus-degree heat, and though we were sitting among other diners we were able to feel refreshingly private. The server, who spoke perfect English, helped us with the menu, which was just his way of being courteous because the menus he’d handed us had full English translations.

The capper: We ordered a selection of traditional Albanian dishes, though I couldn’t begin to decipher the spelling of any of them. It’s safe just to say that they were meats, grains and vegetables immersed in a variety of sauces. All that, plus a half carafe of merlot, bread and some sparkling water to go with it, was as fulfilling as anything I’d eaten during our most recent trip to Florence. It ended up consisting of some six courses and yet cost less than $50 for the two of us – about half or more of what we would have paid in Italy … or the U.S. for that matter.

Enough about food. Let’s skip forward to our second day in Tirana, which was when we encountered one of Albania’s featured attractions, a throwback to its communist past. Just off the main boulevard, and only a couple of blocks from Skanderberg Square, we came upon one of the city’s main bunkers.

I should point out that bunkers are all over the country. Estimates are that the shelters, which were built between the 1960s and 1980s, number somewhere near 750,000. To this day, they represent the paranoia of the country’s former dictator, Enver Hoxha.

As Wikipedia reports (taking its info from the Lonely Planet travel guide), “Most are now derelict, though some have been reused for a variety of purposes, including residential accommodation, cafés, storehouses, and shelters for animals or the homeless.”

The one we visited, Bunk’Art 2, is a curious blend of an art installation and historical collective. We paid 1,400 Lek (about $16) for the two of us, which is expensive by Albanian terms. But the price was worth it.

Throughout the massive underground facility, a couple of dozen multi-use rooms – from sleeping chambers to jail cells – are filled with references to Albania’s communist past. Some of the most touching involve videos of people recounting their sober experiences of the time.

Few if any of the bunkers that litter the countryside are as large as Bunk’Art 2. But all, as I wrote in my notebook, “are like what you can find in other European countries, reminiscences of past horrors of history – but with a specific and unique Albanian flavor.”

We kept that in mind as we returned to our hotel, where later than afternoon we finally were able to connect with our friends, Ann and Matt, with whom we were going to travel over the next full week.

But more on that in my next post.