As part of our ‘Travel Writers Test AI Travel Advice Series,’ we tested ChatGPT’s ability to plan a night out in Albania’s edgy yet exciting capital city. What could possibly go wrong?
Christopher Hitchens, the famously bibulous British author, described alcohol as a good servant, but a poor master. Could the same be said of AI tools like ChatGPT? With a majority of travelers now relying on artificial intelligence to help plan their journey, we at Intrepid Times consider it a solemn duty to put its advice to the test. So on a recent rainy Saturday night in Tirana, Albania’s rapidly gentrifying capital, I bravely ventured out into the city, suspending my critical faculties and letting the mystery of AI take me by the wrist into the awaiting night.
This was my prompt:
“It’s Saturday in Tirana. It’s January, cold and raining. This evening, I’ve negotiated a few hours alone to breathe in the city. I want an authentic experience. A story worth telling. Good food, but not high-end, I want to eat like a local, not a tourist. Drink. See some sights and a bit of the history and flavor of the city along the way. Maybe music at the end. Atmosphere. After a long work week, I’m done making decisions. Tonight, you are in charge as my knowledgeable local guide. I’m staying near Bllokku. Take it away. No options, just instructions please. Give me detailed guidance. Blow my mind. I’m happy to be challenged.”
ChatGPT’s instructions came quick and clear.
“18:00 — Walk out of Blloku like you own the city”
Stop One: Komiteti Bar
Walking with confidence is always sound advice, especially in strange lands. Blloku is not exactly unsafe, but there’s a tang of something metallic in the air. This is the former home of communist dictator Enver Hoxha, once a sealed-off paradise for the party elite, now the wild, clubbing district of a city that’s quickly gaining its confidence. I first came here in 2019. In the last seven years, the city seems cleaner, brighter, the people better dressed, even happier. A ghost-white Mercedes reversed aggressively out of a driveway. I hopped quickly to avoid it. Cars don’t even stop at crossings here, so crossing the street is a battle of wills between you and every driver. I cut through an alleyway, turned left, and found myself at the first stop of the evening.
Go to: Komiteti – Kafe Muzeum (Rruga Papa Gjon Pali II).
Before ordering the prescribed raki, I was instructed to walk a “slow lap” around the bar. This wasn’t possible as I was soon accosted by two waiters who directed me to a table. Ordering at the bar doesn’t seem to be a thing in Albania, and even at the shiftiest pubs, table service was de rigeur.
Komiteti was all atmosphere, lit by the flames of gas headers, decorated like the living room of a 19th-century hoarder, with teenagers smoking cigarettes. I was seated next to the only table whose conversation was in English, not Albanian. Did they do this on purpose, lumping the gringos together?
I took out my analogue companion for the evening, Philip Marsden’s The Crossing Place, about his journeys among the Armenian diaspora in the early ‘90s. As the night wore on and the contrast between my meanderings and his adventures became ever more clear, I felt gently mocked by his daring and erudition.
The raki, sweetened with honey and cinnamon, was less offensive than I feared. Past experiences with this foul spirit usually meant a vast plastic jug sourced from a toothless chap up the road, but here they’d clearly gone to great lengths to make it palatable. Its punch was partially absorbed by a cold and slightly stale spinach byrek. The rain intensified outside. The roof leaked. The seat I’d sat on was wet. A raindrop fell on my neck. Phillip was hiding in the back of an ambulance, zooming between districts of war-torn Lebanon to interview sources. I finished my raki in one swig and headed out into the rain.
The only raki drunk that evening (officially)
18:40–19:55 — Go underground: Bunk’Art 2 (the short, sharp history hit)
Komiteti was a perfectly respectable option, and clearly a favorite of locals. But now, things started to go a little off the rails. Bunk’Art 2 is a museum excavated out of one of the many (some say as many as 175,000) concrete bunkers Albania built in the fevered frenzy of its communist era. The trouble is, it was already closed. This shouldn’t be surprising, afterall, museums are not typically open late on Saturday evenings (and remember, ChatGPT knew exactly when it was). However, this mistake could be AI’s chance to shine. Unlike a printed guidebook, ChatGPT is a live source. I simply informed it of my predicament. It adapted quickly.
“The night just bent, so we bend with it.” It said, somewhat threateningly. But if AI tells me to bend well, tonight at least, I bend.
19:10–19:40 — Walk 6 minutes to Hemingway Bar
Another swing. Another miss. Hemingway Bar was also closed. Not just for the evening, but seemingly for good, or at least for some months. I complained to my (apparently not quite) omniscient guide, also mentioning the worsening rain, begging to be taken somewhere closer. It directed me to a place that it said was a three-minute walk from where I was. Because of what happened there, I won’t tell you its name. But it contained three out of the four letters in the word Nazi.
The walk (15 minutes, not three) took me along the Lanë, the stream that cuts through the city. The rain crashed into my face, headlights from oncoming traffic blurring in the wet night. To my left was the Pyramid of Tirana. Last time I was here, it stood in all its crumbling, infamous glory, a vanity project of the Hoxhas, left to ruin. It has since been dressed up and transformed into some kind of civil project, all prefabricated boxes and bright colors. It’s less horrible, but also much less interesting. AI did not mention this point of interest on our route.
The bar was a generic, corporate-y place you could find anywhere in the world. The beer was fine. The American country music just slightly too loud. The cigarette smoke dense in the air. Smoking is prohibited in pubs and restaurants by a law which, everyone knows, is not enforced, so it is generally ignored.
Things got weird when I asked for the bill. The beer was 350 lek, about 4 euros, a lot for a beer in this country. They didn’t take a card either, and the only cash I had was a 5,000 lek note. This engendered quite a fuss. Eventually, my change arrived. It seemed a little light. I counted. They’d given me 1500 lek change, overcharging me by more than 30 euros.
I summoned back the waitress, who rolled her eyes, shrugged, and then snapped something to a colleague who stood behind the bar, looking bored. She lit a cigarette. I tapped my bill again, getting annoyed not just by the “mistake” (if it was a mistake) but also by the way they were acting as if I was causing them inconvenience by pointing it out. Eventually, another, even more grumpy and bored-looking waitress arrived and hurled a couple of cash notes down at the table. They all formed a phalanx behind the bar, staring at me as I scooped up the bundle of currency and hurried out of there, into the rain.
An unscheduled beer tasting at AlBar disrupted the evening; the only place I went to not on AI’s list, though it quickly adapted when informed of the detour.
19:40–21:15 — Dinner at Oda
Oda was not a bad choice if you like lamb and don’t mind making eye contact with your food. I’d eaten lamb’s head there on my first visit to Albania almost a decade ago, and was curious about returning. The challenge was that it was a solid 25-minute walk away from the scam pub (which I’d taken to calling the Nazi Bar in my head), and the rain was now quite brutal, drenching my glasses and making it hard to navigate. I walked down Rruga Myslym Shyri past the pharmacies and shoe shops and fast food joints and then, as if through a parting of the clouds, a little black sign loomed out of the darkness. Albanian beer, it promised. An arrow pointed down an alleyway. Hoping that AI wouldn’t mind, I turned, followed it, and found myself in paradise.
Soon, I was warm, dry, and being served a flight of four Albanian craft beers by an enormous Belgian man. We got to chatting. “Beer is not linear.” He explained how one 8% beer packs significantly more than twice the punch of two 4% beers. “It will fuck you up,” he said. Sage advice. He’d been here some months and spent his days sipping beer, wiping tables, and serving customers as his beard got longer. He told me about some flowers he liked to buy online and smoke for the gentle high. Old people like them for their gardens, he said.
Before paying this bill, I took stock of the state of my wallet. To my surprise and horror, I found that the previous bar had overcorrected their mistake, and I was now a couple of hundred lek in profit. This was awkward, and I seriously thought about going back and fixing things. But their rudeness, which bordered on hostility, plus the rain, made me think twice. I reassured myself that it was a large, corporate-run place, not a family-owned hole-in-the-wall, and they probably wouldn’t notice. Or if they did, they would at least learn not to rip off the next tourist.
ChatGPT was understanding about my detour. We recalibrated. I pleaded for a restaurant somewhat closer. AI rose to the challenge.
20:05 — Leave AlBar. Walk 3 minutes. You are going to Era — the Blloku one.
The lonely view from my table at Era, which I ‘discussed’ with ChatGPT.
Of course, it wasn’t three minutes. And by this stage, it was barely a walk. The rain. The raki. The beers. I am thoroughly out of practice when it comes to nights out, and this was the most drinks I’d had in one sitting for a while. It took at least 15 minutes to get to Era, a busy yet informal place back in Bllokku. White tablecloths. Booths separated by white wooden barriers. Waiters in white collared shirts. I hesitated on the threshold; entering restaurants alone requires boldness, especially in a foreign country on a busy Saturday night. But I had my orders.
A waiter seated me in a large booth in the back corner and brought me a menu I didn’t need because ChatGPT had already told me what to order. When Thom Brown followed his own AI instructions in Tallinn, he was made to order items that did not exist. Would I be similarly embarrassed? Safest to hedge. “Do you have fërgesë?” I asked. “Yes.” So far, so good. Do you have “Tavë kosi.” “Yes. But together, is too much.” “Oh…” “Just have the fërgesë.” And so I did. ChatGPT had directed me to order a hot plate of liver, peppers, cheese, and tomatoes. It was more of a starter than a meal, despite what the waiter said, but with ample bread and the red wine (consumed at AI’s insistence), it made for a pretty decent meal.
Phillip Marsden stayed in my coat pocket; he was in Syria now, and the gulf between his research and mine was looming wider with every morsel of bread I consumed, doused in Albanian olive oil and a balsamic so tart it reminded me of the raki with which the night had begun.
Was I truly alone? I am often self-conscious when eating by myself at restaurants, but for some reason, I did not feel like that now. The challenge, the confidence of instructions, had somehow insulated me from awkwardness, given me permission to be where I was, and liberated me from the burden of decision-making.
In what may have been one of the loneliest acts of my evening, if not my life, I snapped a photo of the dining room and shared it with ChatGPT, asking it to tell me what it observed. “You’re in a working Tirana dinner room, not a performative one,” it said. “Foreground left: the two men in black. Close-cropped hair, fitted black tops: contemporary Balkan urban style. Clean, assertive, understated. Friends or colleagues, mid-20s to mid-30s. Possibly work-adjacent: construction management, logistics, small business, security-adjacent fields. Not flashy money. Not broke. Comfortable here.”
I put my phone away. Outside of the shot, an American man was on a date with an Albanian girl. Him thin, dark shirt, neatly trimmed beard. Her blonde, full lips, heavy make-up. Theirs was the only conversation in English. I drank in the clumsiness of their exchange, the flawed humanity of it. I paid the bill, tipping generously to compensate for the extra cash accidentally acquired earlier. The waiter was genuinely grateful.
A brief nightcap at a bar called Nouvelle Vague followed. It was expensive. But the night was no longer mine. The potential of the evening out had moved to the particular. I felt a vague sense of ennui. The evening was not a failure. The choices were safe, steady, and predictable. I ate and drank well, and was only ripped off once. But something was missing. A backpacker in a dusty border town, reading their Bradt or Lonely Planet, at least knows that someone else was here. That their adventure is the continuity of a tradition, of a story. There’s a communion between writer and reader that takes place with even the most utilitarian of guides. I wanted to imagine the person on the other end of the text.
