Overcoming Obstacles to Move into our Albania Villa

Where's the fun in things being straightforward?

I shared how we found our villa in Albania. Here’s what the process of taking possession looked like. Let’s start back in the middle of the summer.

We were at the end of our stay in the UK and got a message from the landlord’s son (since he speaks English), who said we needed to pay our deposit by wire transfer to secure the villa. This confused us a bit since we thought we’d be paying cash for everything. But since we were abroad, I guess they wanted a guarantee that we’d show up, and wire transfer was the only way to send the money. We had never made an international wire transfer before; fortunately, it was easy via Schwab. (In case you’re wondering, options like Venmo and Zelle only work from US accounts to US accounts, and we already learned we couldn’t do transfers via PayPal to Albania.)

All that was left to do now was arrive back in Tirana and move in. Mostly. To do that, we had to be ready to pay the first and last month’s rent, in cash. This presented some complications. The first is a bit of a sidebar, but it’s somewhat relevant.

Complication 1/Sidebar:

With about a week to go in Copenhagen, I got a text message from our bank asking if I had made a transaction at CVS (drug store in the US). Most definitely not. They immediately froze my card and said they would issue a new one. I asked how quickly they could ship it to Copenhagen and they said it usually took 5-7 business days in the US, so international would be longer. I took a deep breath and lay my head on the table. Crap. We wouldn’t be in Denmark at that point; we’d be in Albania, where it’s very difficult to get mail or packages. It’s like Argentina (and Uruguay) in that regard. The cost of shipping is high (due to customs and import taxes), the delay long (there are limited carriers), and the chance of actually receiving something 50-50 (tracking isn’t reliable and there are no addresses in Albania). Basically, unless it’s something super important, it’s not worth trying.

You could argue that getting a new debit card was important. Albania is cash based, so having an ATM card is critical, but I didn’t want to chance a replacement card floating around somewhere and never making it to me. Couldn’t this fraud have happened earlier in our travels (if it had to happen at all), when it would’ve been easier to get a replacement card? Sigh. For the vast majority of our adventure, we hadn’t even used our debit cards much; we had mostly used our credit cards (paying them off each month). The timing of this was less than ideal. Fortunately, we had other debit cards, but one likes to have options/backups when they’re outside of their home country.*

The second complication is that we needed either Albanian lek or Euros to pay our rent in Albania. Obviously, lek aren’t available outside of the country. Yes, we could’ve gotten some upon arriving in Tirana; however, many ATMs in Albania have low limits for how much you can take out (plus high fees) and we weren’t going to be able to extract the amount we needed in the time we had. (We were arriving late Wednesday and needed to pay rent on Friday.) Since we were still in Denmark, that meant our best bet was to try to find some Euros. Of course, Denmark doesn’t use Euros; they use Danish Kroner. That would’ve been far too easy! (And no, we hadn’t been in any other countries over the summer that transacted in Euros.)

We leveraged a FB group to ask about which banks allowed you to take out Euro instead of Kroner in Copenhagen. There were some. Unfortunately, we discovered that just because an ATM says it dispenses Euros doesn’t mean it actually has any available. We ran into this issue at the first couple of machines we tried. Shoot! Finally, after more than one excursion into the city to attempt to get cash, we found an ATM that gave us Euros. Hallelujah! Of course, it would only let us take out some of what we ultimately needed but, still, we had some cash.

At this point we realized we were still traveling with US Dollars we had taken out for visiting Argentina, plus we had some leftover Danish Kroner. Clearly, we weren’t going to need either, so we headed to a currency exchange and traded them for Euros. Was it a smart move? Not if we wanted the best rate, no (especially for the Dollars because we had to change them first to Kroner and then to Euros), but for our purpose it helped solve our challenge. We were able to do one more ATM withdrawal for Euros before we left Denmark and, at that point, we had what we needed. Phew, crisis averted.

While Denmark and Albania are both very safe countries where the incidence of pickpocketing is relatively low, we took precautions traveling with our stash of cash to make sure we didn’t lose any of it in transit. It was the first time I had worn my money belt in all of our round-the-world travels!

Now we were ready to take possession of the villa. We had arranged to head there the day after we flew in. Laura was still there for that day, so it gave us time to do a walkthrough with her and learn any particulars about the place before she headed off on her next adventure. We had agreed to meet with the landlords the day after that to handle the payment and finalize the contract.

Except, we got a message from the son the night before we were supposed to meet saying that the rent would be higher if we signed the contract. We were super confused and started to worry about the arrangement. We messaged the son and asked if we could talk with him. Chris is a good judge of character and felt this was a lost in translation situation, not one where the family was trying to take us for a ride. Indeed, it ended up being the former.

I had asked over the summer to see the contract for the rental agreement because in the US that’s what you do. The family we’re renting from took that to mean we wanted to pursue the official rental path, with them registering the villa with the government and us notarizing the contract together. I didn’t realize this; I thought we would have a contract regardless and didn’t realize that by asking for it I had changed their understanding of what we wanted.

In the end, we worked it all out, but it raised our anxiety for a bit. We met at the villa to exchange the money the next day and all was well. Now we could relax into our new life, at least for the next school year. Of course, anyone who’s ever moved (and that’s pretty much everyone) knows that it’s never quite as simple as you think it will be…

*I’m still working on how to get a replacement card. I think I have a solution. If it works out, I’ll have it in mid- to late October! Wow, do I miss easy shipping. I never truly appreciated free trade agreements until we traveled to countries without them.