Not sure why Albanian bunkers are on the front of HN, but I've been living in Albania/Kosovo for the last couple of years working to use nickel hyperaccumulator plants to mine nickel (phytomining), while removing carbon with olivine minerals (enhanced rock weathering), with my company Metalplant...

I can confirm the bunkers are real. Albanians are some of the nicest people you will meet and are very friendly. Pretty much every stereotype you may have heard about them is wrong (except that they love Mercedes, that is 100% real). The country is beautiful with mountains in the North to beaches in the south that are pretty much the same as Greece and Italy (though rocky), with 3 Star Hotels for tens of Euros per night (they use a currency called Lek which is ~100:1 euro).

Everyone in the country seemingly knows each other and they are all like one big family. You'll notice things differ from other European countries in that they don't like lock up chairs from cafes, or have big like metal gates at bars and open air restuarnts. After hours everything is just like wide open its kind of wild to see. No one locks car doors, there is almost no petty crime, women will get up from the table to go smoke a cigarette outside and leave their purse at the table, etc...

The Albanian language is unique as well, look up a language tree and you'll see its the only one on its branch, they call it Shqip (and never Albanian, which was very confusing to me at first). Though nearly all of the young people speak English, and a good amount up to middle age, but not the much older people... One thing you would never know either is how much Albanians love America especially relative to how much Americans know about Albania.

Albanians have a deep gratitude to Americans because for 2000+ years they were stuck between the Roman and Ottoman Empires and had been fighting to protect their territory and keep their culture alive. But after the Ottoman Empire fell and WW1 was over they were occupied by Italy and others, and the "Great Powers" were about to carve up their territory. But at the League of Nations in 1919, Woodrow Wilson intervened and made sure they had a sovereign state.

So back to the bunkers finally, after WWII Albania was allied with the Stalinist communists and Enver Hoxha (who they call the "Dictator"), became increasingly paranoid about invasion from all sides including the Russians and NATO, so he started building these 700,000 bunkers. Some of them are small enough for only a couple of people, and whats crazy is where we are up in the mountains, you see just very small ones up a hill and in random spots. Later on, Hoxa allied with Chinese communists to keep Russia out, and then it stayed a closed country until the early 1990s, which explains a lot about why everyone feels treats each other like family and most outsiders don't know really know about Albania...Some people compare them to being a North Korea of Europe, though I don't like this description, but they were isolated and had to become self-dependent including growing nearly all of their own food etc.

But again, it is an amzing place that welcomes foreign tourists, especially Americans. I first traveled there at the end of 2020, during peak pandemic winter, and on the travel map of places you could go, it was one of the only countries that was Green and accepting Americans...

Okay that's a lot of fun facts about Albania. AMA on any others.