The craziest weather is just the amount of rain that they get in some places. It's so crazy and it's insane trying to walk through it with an umbrella that is a cheap umbrella you bought there and breaks every time you go outside. But it's awesome, it's fun!
The weather in Albania is all over the place. If you're in the north in the mountains it gets super snowy and cold, but then if you're in the south but in the beach town like in Vlorë, it's really hot.
I served in the city of Pokradec, and it's right along a lake. And when I was there, as you can imagine, there's lots and lots of water. We had downpours all the time, and the roads aren't that great, and so they just got filled up. And I just remember, like, trying to like slosh through the rivers in the streets. I'm not kidding. Like, I wasn't even wearing boots, too. We were just dancing in the rain and in the rivers that were throughout the streets. And it was definitely a blast, but definitely lots of rain. So you'll find rain and super cold winters.
The weather in Albania is basically just really hot during the summer and then pretty nice the rest of the time. It gets kind of cold in the winter, but usually not too cold. I was serving in a city called Tirana, which is the capital city of Albania, and it snowed there when I was there for the first time in years. And it was crazy, everybody was out taking pictures, they hadn't seen snow. There were, you know, younger kids who had never seen snow in their entire life, so that was really cool. And then the second year, my second December, I was living in Tirana at the time and it snowed for days and it was insane. You don't get that very often.
Albania, the weather there is definitely very extreme, so in the summertime it's super super hot, wintertime super super cold, especially depending on where you are. I was never in Tirana, but I heard if you're in Tirana, especially in the summertime, because there's all those tall buildings, it just traps in the heat and so you get very sweaty, it's very hot, and then the more up into the mountains you go, the colder it gets for winter.
The craziest weather experiences that I had, one was when I was living in Schoeder. And in Schoeder, I guess they have some pretty decent thunderstorms. And I remember just one day thinking that someone had set off a bomb. I went outside, I guess I went up to our balcony and looked out the window from our apartment and didn't, you know, see any explosions, but it was just apparently a thunderstorm and it was just so loud and it shook the whole building. And then I guess the other crazy story that I can think of is one day heading back to the capital city, the roads had all flooded. And so we had to drive through these floodwaters that touched the bottom of our car, like halfway up our wheel well. It was pretty wild.