Mercedes, Mercedes, Mercedes, Audi, BMW, Mercedes

If cars are any indication, prosperity has come to Sarande Albania. Everywhere you look there are Mercedes Benz cars – some old, some new, some in disrepair, some in perfect shape.

Ross and I love a TV show from the UK called “Top Gear” – apparently we aren’t alone as they’ve been on the air for 20 seasons. A couple of seasons ago Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May, did a show about “What type of car should an Albanian Mafia boss Want to Own” and took a Rolls Royce, a Mercedes S Class 6.3 Liter and a “Bentley” (actually Bentley begged off at the last moment so they substituted it with a decrepit Lada and called it the “Bentley” for the remainder of the program – or until they rolled it off a cliff).

Anyway there were two stories that I distinctly remember from this episode: One where Jeremy Clarkson in a close-up turns to the camera and says something like “Albanian Mercedes owners take their cars’ performance very seriously and reduce weight wherever possible – so many of them have filed off their VIN numbers to save weight and go faster.” Apparently Albania is where many of the knicked cars from Europe find their way to. The second story was that the Albanian minister of justice was meeting with his Greek counterpart on how to reduce the level of car theft in Western Europe with the cars ending up in Albania. When going through the Greek border, the Albanian Minister’s car was put through a routine check and the Greek border police found that the Minister’s car had been stolen from Austria six months earlier.

So when travelling to Albania, it’s probably better to 1) leave your Mercedes behind locked in your heated garage; and 2) if you own a Mercedes dealership in Albania, forget about selling cars … the real money is in the Service department.