Nothing spectacular today — just human maintenance. And that’s exactly what Day 14 needed to be. A month on the road catches up with you in small ways, and today was for taking care of them: a haircut, a beard trim, one last loaf of bread, and a map spread open with tomorrow’s plan. Some travel days are about the grand vista. This one was about the barber’s chair and the bakery counter.

✋ Unwind — Barber Shop Day

Today was barber shop day. A haircut and a beard trim — 1,500 Lek (about €14.35). There’s something grounding about getting a haircut in a foreign country. The rituals are the same everywhere: the cape, the scissors, the mirror, the small talk you mostly don’t share because you don’t share a language. But the result is universal. You walk out feeling like a slightly more put-together version of yourself, ready to face whatever the next week throws at you.

After a month of movement, a barber’s chair is a kind of anchor. For twenty minutes, someone else is in charge. You sit still, you let them work, and you emerge sharper than you went in — literally and otherwise.

👅 Palate — The Final Bread, and the Curry Principle

I also went to my local bakery to buy my final bread. I’ve been ordering Bukë me maja natyrale — sourdough — the past few times, and I wanted to try something different. The options were posted above the counter:

• Integrale — whole wheat / whole-grain bread
• Bukë Masive — large loaf
• Bukë Fshati — country / village bread
• Bukë Misri — cornbread
• Bukë Thekre — rye bread
• Margarita — margarita bread
• Kulaç — traditional loaf

Seven kinds of bread. A genuine selection. I asked for Bukë Fshati — country bread, the one that sounded most different from what I’d been getting. And she handed me… the same bread I’ve been getting the past few times.

It reminded me of a time in Singapore, when we went up to a stall that advertised red curry, yellow curry — and no matter what you asked for, you got the same curry.

I call this the Curry Principle: the menu is a suggestion, and the kitchen already knows what you’re having. It’s not dishonesty — it’s confidence. The bread was 130 Lek (about €1.24), and it was, of course, excellent. The same excellent bread I’d been eating all week. Why would she hand me anything else when she already knows what’s best?

🧭 Wander — Planning the Final Days

As my time in Tirana comes to an end, I took the day to plan my final day trips. The map came out, the routes got traced, the timing got worked out. Tomorrow I’ll take a day trip to Kruja Castle and the Old Bazaar — the birthplace of Skanderbeg, the medieval market town perched on a mountain above the plains.

There’s a particular kind of melancholy in planning your last trips in a place. Every decision feels heavier, because you know you’re choosing what you’ll remember. But it’s also clarifying. You stop trying to do everything and start doing only what matters. For me, that’s one more castle, one more bazaar, and a proper goodbye to Albania.

By the Numbers

Item	Amount (EUR)
Barber — haircut + beard trim (1,500 ALL)	€14.35
Bakery — Bukë Fshati (130 ALL)	€1.24
Day Total	€15.59

A haircut, a beard trim, and a loaf of bread that was the same bread no matter what I asked for. The Curry Principle holds: some places already know what you need. Tomorrow, Kruja. Today, a slower kind of necessary — the kind of day that doesn’t make the highlight reel, but keeps a traveler upright and moving.