Our second week in Albania. Night fell over Tirana, and we sank into the kind of deep sleep that only a fresh relocation can bring. The bedroom in our apartment features a floor to ceiling glass wall, with a door leading out to a small balcony facing the front of the building. Nothing prepared me for what happened next. Without a rising and falling siren, without a Home Front Command alert on my phone, suddenly and out of nowhere, terrifying explosions tore through the silen

Living in a foreign country means your eyes are always wide open. As a graphic designer I communicate through visuals, my brain automatically translates every image into composition and shape, but through the iPhone lens, I capture the dissonance in particular. The gap between what I knew in Israel and the reality I meet here on the street. I collect these moments - moments of local focus.

Relocation brings challenges that appear in the most unexpected places. One of them happens to me at the local gym I found right near my house, where I join various workouts. This place quickly became my anchor and made me feel like a local here, because fitness has always been an inseparable part of my life. But when I lie there on the mat, in a Pilates class facing an instructor who speaks fluent Albanian, I suddenly realize how hard it is to simply breathe in a foreign lan

We have been here for two and a half months now. We settled in a new and modern building in the heart of Tirana, in a vibrant area that always keeps us in the center of things. Since we arrived, we take advantage of the weekends on Saturday and Sunday whenever possible to go out and explore. Albania offers diverse nature with a special combination of formidable mountain ranges, giant canyons, lively turquoise rivers, and pristine beaches. Out of all this beauty, the thing tha

From my previous posts, you probably got the impression that Albania feels a bit behind sometimes. I told you about quite a few situations that take us back to the Israel of the seventies and eighties. But this week, when our son Nimrod came to visit, we experienced something else. We went out to absorb some of the local nightlife, and we discovered that Albania is completely a cocktail of contrasts.

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 It took me a moment to realize that these small, outdated booklets are used by us, in 2026, to pay our apartment's water and electricity bills.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.

Tucked away on our street corner is a small time capsule in the form of a local "grocery stall". it is not a neat, well-lit store, but rather a small niche in a wall whose produce simply spills out onto the sidewalk. After 30 years as a graphic designer, my eyes instantly capture the color palette, the cluttered crates, and the textures of the fruit in the afternoon sun. It is a sight impossible to miss, especially since there are countless other bazaars in Tirana.

September 2025. Etai comes home from work and out of nowhere asks, "What would you say if I told you I got a job offer in Albania?" These words, returning to me now from a distance of ten months, resonate differently. Back then, when he dropped this bomb, my first reaction was straight to the point, and out of pure shock: "Albania? Where is that?"