Time machine in Albania

As a mother to two kids born in the early 2000s in Israel, the first time I saw the two booklets in this picture, I was sure they were baby health tracking books I used to have. It took me a moment to realize that these small, outdated booklets are used by us, in 2026, to pay our apartment's water and electricity bills. This feeling of holding such paper in my hand truly feels like stepping into a time machine in Albania.

Once a month, this ritual repeats itself. I take the booklets and walk to the nearest currency exchange branch. Yes, the place where you exchange money is also where you pay bills. After 30 years as a graphic designer living and breathing digital, screens, and user interfaces, the encounter with this manual system is one of the most distinct characteristics of our life here. Albania is a bit behind, and everyday life here throws us decades back, to the Israel of the seventies or eighties, where things happened slower and on paper.

A lot of paper... Take opening our bank account, for example. This process forced us to sit for a total of about five accumulated hours in front of the clerk at the branch. She just sat and typed and typed and typed again. Occasionally, she stopped to ask a question and immediately went back to typing. After she finished, she sent everything to print. Every two minutes another clerk walked over to the printer and collected piles of pages. At the end, a long signing ceremony awaited us on these mountains of paperwork.

At the same time, they are really trying to move forward. The local bank where we opened the account has an app, but figuring out how it works or finding the simple action you want to do in it is a whole different story. The digital shell exists, but the logic behind it is still trying to catch up.

The exact same thing happened to us with the local cellular company. They have an app that is supposed to allow monthly payments with a click. In reality, every time we tried to pay through it, we reached a stuck page from which there was nowhere to advance. When I went to the service center to understand why the payment failed, the sweet girl at the counter looked at the screen and was even more lost than I was.

So yes, these bureaucratic experiences take up our time and are sometimes a bit frustrating. But alongside all this, there is one thing I can say with full confidence. Albanians are very nice, warm people, and they truly try to do their jobs the best way possible, even when the tools they have are still creaking. Embracing this pace with love and taking a deep breath is an inseparable part of life inside a time machine in Albania.