Peshkopi: bad roads, good meat and splendid landscape

Life is contrast in Albania.
Yesterday and today are almost synonyms in some areas of the country. This is my finding after a short trip to the North East. Yesterday, life was hard, "we did not have much, we had little to eat, it was cold, no leisure activities", locals said in Peshkopi...but today "we have TVs and satellite dishes that only work some hours per day because of electricity cuts, there are few jobs and the future looks rather gloomy...still, we have good meat and the people and the atmosphere are much better than in Tirana". Again, contrast...we have good meat!! even if we have to cook it in a communist-era wooden oven!!, they said.

People from Peshkopi are Dibrans (from the district it belongs to: Diber) and I breathed a certain degree of nationalism there, and felt support for the very conflictive idea of Greater Albania. Despite being only about 200km far from Tirana (it takes 5 hours to get there!!...by car not by bicycle, I swear) I felt in a Muslim city, where Ramadan keeps men away from bars for a month and women remain at home, baking in that wooden cook and devouring 'telenovelas' (soap operas) when, needless to say, the electricity allows so. Despite the local Chief Officer telling me that 95% of the inhabitants pay the electricity bill...a probably more reliable source in this country - random people from bars and mini-supermarkets selling nuts apples and chinese screwdrivers (again, CONTRAST!)-, told me that few in the area pay the bill and the goverment has taken aggressive policy measures to force them to pay: to cut it.

Take a look at the men-only boulevard of Peshkopi...girls' paradise!! some would say...
can you imagine a blond Swedish tall lady in red strolling down the boulevard!!