No departure occurs without first kissing my son on both cheeks, and without taking a moment for prayers and gratitudes…

The language is a little lighter than the other times. When you get used to traveling, you also get used to carrying even less, as according to the philosophy “Less is more”. What a mystery hides on traveling during the night… Those lights of the city when you are above the clouds… That moment as long as a blink of an eye when you find yourself in another land. Your eyes open in front of the greenery of Slovenia. Especially when you are used to being surrounded by skyscrapers, the green blinds you. Suddenly your eyes open and you become aware of what a gray reality we spend our lives in: why don’t we know how to preserve and cultivate such greenery?

Bled reminds me of Ohrid, a typical small, fairy-tale lakeside town with fortresses and a hilltop castle. A town in whose streets you never get lost, because wherever you go, all roads lead to the starting point. A town with everything nearby: school, hospital, cemetery, post office…

A town where even small children say “hello” on the street, where even though the elderly probably make up the largest percentage of local residents, tourists give it the right liveliness that befits a town by the lake. Where most shops close before sunset, which probably shows that the locals prefer joining the family dinner table to the capitalist craze to grab a few more customers. Even though we as tourists feel frustrated from this phenomenon and we vent and ironize the fact that basic services such as supermarkets are not offered, but once we get used to the local’s routine we agree and let it go, just as we turn a blind eye to the expensive prices.

All of us Albanians agree that Bled is the ideal place to live when you retire. Who wouldn’t want to spend their retirement days in such a peaceful place away from the stress and chaos of big cities, in a fabulous oasis where, among other things, the fact that you can hear the chirping of birds is enough. A natural activity already forgotten for us who live in our chaotic capitals such as Tirana, Pristina, and Skopje.

While walking, an inner thought came out loud to me, as if unintentionally: an exclamation of the type “it’s good that there aren’t dogs around”. And there we all agree that such traumatic phenomena have not only become part of our local but also of our mental “urbanism”. A collective trauma that leads you to appreciate such basic things as the fact of walking safely through unknown streets, even at late hours or even during daytime hours with very little movement. To walk on the street secure that you will not be attacked is a blessing, to walk to the white lines with the certainty that you will not be hitted is a super blessing.

And perhaps the locals here may not be aware of these blessings.
As we return to our realities, we carry with us a new sense of calmness that only Bled knows how to give you!