We have spent a peaceful, restorative handful of days in Korçë. This city of 60,000 feels quiet and urban and much more sophisticated than where we stayed in northern Albania.

We have taken time here to enjoy the fresh mountain air while walking around town. We still attract attention and leave a constant trail of double-takes in our wake, but perhaps we are growing accustomed to it. We have seen only one other foreign family during our five days here.

Streets vary between narrow cobblestone streets, leafy pedestrianized boulevards with shiny storefronts, and crowded shopping areas with good displayed outdoors. Around every corner awaits a new quintessentially Albanian view: a few laidback stray dogs, a man driving a little motorized cart yelling to advertise his wares, a crumbling building inhabited only by cats and trash, a car struggling to maneuver through the narrow roads and honking pedestrians onto the tiny curb, an old woman carrying her market purchases home. Yet even with all the life going on in this decent-sized city, peace reigns over all as soon as you get off the main road.

Now that we are all healthy (thank you, Jesus), we have been able to enjoy some local cuisine. We fumbled through the language gap to order lakror, a popular local food consisting of a filling baked between very thin layers of dough. I suppose you could call it a thin type of pie, but it doesn’t compare well to anything I’ve eaten before. We liked the spinach, egg, and cheese filling most. Having figured out what we liked and how to order, we visited the same place twice and got a ton of food for a very low price – yum!

I also finally visited a tiny market to obtain produce. You can find a few pieces of fresh produce in some grocery stores, but most people buy produce straight from the tiny little markets you see literally everywhere. For the equivalent of a few dollars, you can buy amazing oranges, pomegranates, cucumbers, peppers, and much more, just a few minutes’ walk from your doorstep. And if you need a few eggs, packaged snacks, some milk or yogurt, or corn flakes by the kilo, these little markets carry those too. On our third day in a row visiting my favorite market, the shopkeeper was asking the kids’ names in her extremely limited English.

We spent part of a morning at the National Museum of Medieval Art, an important archive of Byzantine and post-Byzantine art from the 13th to 17th centuries. Everyone but Jude enjoyed the vibrant and intricate religious icons. Laila enjoyed pointing out the many versions of John the Baptist’s beheading, and we learned some interesting facts about Orthodox tradition from paintings of saints and things like Mary’s Dormition. These paintings could tell some amazing stories, as many were carefully and cleverly hidden to avoid destruction during Albania’s decades of Communist rule. I guess the Albanians don’t mind visiting cold museums – after about an hour we could feel the cold seeping into our bones.

We move farther south to Permet tomorrow, and we hope to find more fresh-air adventures, good food, and peace!