We arrived in Albania, and it’s been a bit of an emotional period for me. The minivan took us from Ulcinj (Montenegro) to Shkoder (Albania). We walked to the highway to Durres, and eventually got there with two different ‘rides’. I felt more at home than I have ever felt in the past five years. From the skyline with the palace on top of the hills, silhouetted by the setting sun behind it, to the crazy traffic everywhere, to the strange combination of ugly communist buildings and modern highrise; everything was so… familiar.

I noticed how everyone stared at us, and remembered how it used to be when I was a kid. Being stared at had become so normal that I didn’t even notice anymore. I remembered how odd, and even uncomfortable it had felt to not be stared at when I returned to Holland.

That evening, I took a long walk through the center of town. Like five years ago, it was bustling with activity; old people, young people, complete families going for a walk ‘giro’ along the boulevard. I remembered how on many nights, we would go swimming, or go to a restaurant, or just take a walk.

At times my slippers would get dirty because of muddy patches. Without noticing, I had started to walk differently, lifting my feet ‘vertically’, so as not to splash drops mud on the back of my pants. I remembered how, as a kid, I would always laugh at the ’silly foreigners’ who didn’t know this, and usually had mud all over their pants.

And yet, it didn’t all feel familiar. Apart from a few landmark locations, most of the buildings had changed in some way. Office buildings in places where there had been nothing before, asphalt where there used to be nothing but muddy roads, new shops that had replaced old ones.

I also noticed how limited my knowledge and experience was; it had essentially stopped when I was sixteen. Everything a sixteen year-old knew of did felt like second nature to me, but everything else made me feel like a foreigner. My vocabulary was limited to that of a teenager, and I had trouble with such basic things as using a public phone.

I realized that I really didn’t know all that many people in Durres, despite having lived there for nine years. Most of my friends had left Albania, and moved to Italy or the States. Most others had always been ‘a grown-up’, which was a rather uninteresting group of people.

I guess the past few days have been amazing, but very strange. I feel like a foreigner, but often more at home than I do in Holland.

I guess it’s true what they say about MK’s/TCK’s:

Since the term was coined by sociologist Ruth Hill Useem in the 1960’s, TCKs have become a heavily studied global subculture. TCKs share more in common with one another, regardless of nationality, than they do with non-TCK’s from their own country. - source

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