In October 2017, Alice Taylor boarded a flight to Albania for what was meant to be a brief three-day escape.
She had no long-term plans. No apartment waiting. No vision of building a life in the Balkans. Just a last-minute holiday to a country she barely knew.
Then came the “rakija”.
“I accidentally extended it for three weeks” she says during her interview with ATLANTIKU.
By the end of that unexpected stay, something had shifted. She had made friends. She had wandered through Albanian cities and mountains. She had seen enough to feel something many foreigners still struggle to associate with Albania: comfort.
A few weeks later, she returned — this time with her cats, her daughter and the belongings she could carry.
Nearly a decade on, Taylor has become one of the most recognizable foreign voices speaking about Albania online. A journalist, author and television host, she documents daily life in the country for an international audience that still often views Albania through outdated stereotypes.
For Taylor, the fascination with Albania is not rooted in some fantasy of cheap living or endless beaches. It is something quieter and harder to explain.
“The quality of life here means more to me than money” she says.
She speaks about Albania with the kind of affection usually reserved for places people are born into, not places they stumble upon by accident. The mountain roads. The cafés full of conversation. The closeness of families. The feeling, she says, that people still have time for one another.
In Britain, she says, life often feels fragmented by distance and routine. In Albania, she found something slower and more human.
“I love that people take time to sit for coffee, to talk, to spend time together,” she says. “That’s something very special.”
There is another part of Albania that continues to surprise her: safety.
As a woman raising a child alone, Taylor says she feels safer walking through Tirana at dawn than she ever did in parts of the UK.
“I travel the whole country by myself” she says. “I’ve never had any issues.”
The contrast between her experience and Albania’s international reputation is something she encounters constantly online. Through social media videos that now generate millions of monthly views, she spends much of her time responding to misconceptions about the country — some harmless, others absurd.
“People ask if there are cash machines outside Tirana” she says. “Or if the north of Albania closes during winter.”
The questions make her laugh, but they also reveal how misunderstood Albania remains abroad.
For Taylor, Albania’s greatest strength is not tourism or affordability, but people themselves. She speaks admiringly about Albanian hospitality, the way children are embraced by entire communities, and the cultural instinct to stay connected to family.
“Albanians do many things better than we do in the West” she says.
Still, she does not romanticize life in the country. She warns foreigners against arriving with unrealistic expectations or treating Albania as a cheaper version of the places they left behind.
“Come with an open mind” she says. “Don’t come here trying to recreate America or the UK in Tirana.”
And for Albanians living abroad, especially the diaspora watching the country change from afar, she has a message that feels both personal and hopeful:
“The time is now to come back home.”/ATLANTIKU
