I Made a Mistake...
So here’s how this went down…
I know a handful of guys that went to high school here in Pogradec, but they are in Romania for university. Since they went, almost a year ago, they have been telling me that I should come visit and see how things are in Romania.
Me, being me, thought that was a great idea, especially considering I had never been to Romania.
So I tried to text them and grab a coffee when they were back in Albania to nail down details. Well, for various reasons they couldn’t make it. And when I saw cheap(ish) tickets, I pounced. It wasn’t until a few weeks after that I realized I had booked on the biggest holiday of the year in Romania: Easter.
Many of you may be wondering how on earth I didn’t know when Easter was, well there’s a reason for that too.
In Albania, there are two Easters celebrated. The Orthodox Easter and the Catholic Easter. In the seven years that I’e been here, they have always been on separate Sundays - sometimes a week apart, sometimes multiple. Well, guess which year they both fell on the exact same Sunday?
I saw on my US-based Google calendar that April 20 was Easter, but in past years the US Easter has always fallen on the same day as Catholic Easter, so naturally I assumed that the Orthodox Easter (the one observed in Romania) would be a completely different date.
I was wrong.
And that, is the true backstory as to how I ended up solo traveling to Romania over Easter. Here’s the rest of that story: