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TRAVEL MEMOIR
My Accidental Date with Pope Francis
Two Jews walk into a parade…
The first sign that we’d stumbled into something big was the banners flooding the arrival hall. My Albanian vocabulary extended to exactly zero words, yet the airport’s energy needed no translation. Groups of excited visitors cluttered the terminal, their voices a global symphony. Many wore uniforms, waving signs with a familiar face I hadn’t expected to see. The face belonged to Pope Francis, smiling benevolently from posters and flags, an unexpected greeter in a country I knew almost nothing about.
“This might be our luckiest decision yet,” I told Belik, my traveling companion. We’d been wandering the Balkans with what I’d call an anti-itinerary — the skeleton of an idea without commitment to specific locations or timelines.
Fresh from Kosovo’s unexpected hospitality, we’d made an impromptu decision to visit Tirana. Hotel options were mysteriously limited, forcing us into a musty two-star room on the city’s fringes, which smelled of cigarettes. The mystery solved itself quickly.
We’d accidentally arrived during Pope Francis’s historic visit to Albania. The timing couldn’t have been more perfect—or less planned. In my traveler’s past, I’d meticulously orchestrated trips around world events, the Olympics, and…
