As a graphic designer, I am used to seeing the months of the year by colors. For most of my life, October was painted in the warmest and most joyful shades there are. This love for this month goes with me all the way back to childhood. It was always our month, the absolute peak of the year for us. This coming Monday,

As a graphic designer for 30 years, my brain doesn't really know how to shut off. Every walk down the street here in Albania is like wandering through a massive canvas, one where the colors spilled a bit outside the lines. The relocation to Tirana sharpened my gaze, and suddenly the most mundane things become a crazy composition of culture, history, and absurdity. Here is the second compilation from my visual diary, a collection of moments that demanded I stop, observe, and c

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.