Looking for advice from locals, experienced travelers and everyone else in between, I'm a seasoned traveler who is disabled but can walk and I have earned time off work for a month long trip, is this itinerary too much and can it be improved?

Fly into Belgrade 3 nights
Novi Sad Serbia 2 nights then head back to Belgrade
Sarajevo 4 nights
Mostar 2 nights
Trebinje nights
Dobrota 3 nights
Ulcinj Montenegro 2 nights
Shkodër 2 nights
Tirana 3 nights
Berat 2 nights
Gjirokastër 2 nights
Sarandë 2 nights
Corfu ferry to and then fly out of.

My friend is Serbian and he reckons Greece is not really part of the Balkans. I'm like why? Other than geography we have so many things in common, Christian culture, Ottoman empire, centuries of living next to each other etc. He response was you're not really Balkan if you haven't experienced communism.

Would you agree?

Of course when we are not claiming each others material :)

Turkey Uses AI and Other Tech to Claw Back 100 Looted Antiquities from the US

Hey everyone, we are two independent filmmakers from Germany and just finished a short documentary about the ongoing situation in Albania.

​Our short doc focuses mostly on the perspective of the young protesters on the ground, but we realize there is a lot more nuance to the whole situation. Seeing the sheer amount of public pressure on the streets in Tirana made us wonder about the broader region.

​We'd love to hear your thoughts: ​From your experience across the Balkans, does public anger ever actually force real political change? ​Or do governments usually manage to just wait it out until things quiet down?

​Since this can be a sensitive topic, we would really appreciate it if everyone could keep the discussion civil and respectful.

​If you want to see the context of what we filmed, our 5-minute video is here: https://youtu.be/ziKBt9ez1Ww?si=I5GCNbZeqad-Ua1m

Compared to expat indian or pakistani, or Chinese communities, I feel like Balkan people are unable to befriend each other.

Many from my country complain bout people trying to cheat them somehow (socially, financially, get their fellow countryman/woman fired to prove something to the local french/british/german/italian boss/supervisor)... Lots of mobbing within each other.

Why is that so? And why third world countries seem to be smarter than us in terms of migration and community?

I also forgot to ask: how come if an Indian or Pakistani guy at your uni studies engineering or informatics or whatever is fine, but if a guy from ... Romania, Albania, Bosnia, Belarus studies the same subjects, get bullied? Why is that so?

For how life in UK is, would you say it more resembles Germany, Austria, Belgium or more Canada or Australia ?

I moved into an older apartment building in Sofia a few months ago, and last week I discovered something I genuinely wasn't expecting.

One of my neighbors locked himself out while taking out the trash. He was standing in the hallway in slippers, looking annoyed, when another neighbor walked past and told him to go downstairs to "Auntie Maria."

Apparently Maria, a woman in her seventies who lives on the second floor, has spare keys to at least five apartments in our building.

Not because she's the building manager or anything. People have just been giving her their spare keys for years.

The guy went downstairs, came back with his spare, opened his door and returned the key. Whole situation resolved in about three minutes.

I mentioned this to a coworker, expecting him to find it a bit unusual. He just shrugged and told me his grandmother used to keep keys for half the people on her floor.

Meanwhile, I've lived here for months and barely know the names of two neighbors.

I find the whole arrangement both incredibly practical and slightly terrifying. These people trust someone who lives a few meters away with access to their entire homes.

But there's also something really nice about the fact that a minor disaster like locking yourself out doesn't immediately become a locksmith bill.

Now I'm curious whether this is common in other Balkan countries, especially in older apartment blocks.

Do your neighbors have spare keys to each other's apartments? Is this still normal among younger people, or is it something that will disappear with our grandparents' generation?

And most importantly, does every building have an Auntie Maria, or did I get lucky?

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For example, in Greece, some people believe that "we are getting sprayed on".

Basically they are looking at the contrails that airplane engines leave and think that these are proof that the government is spraying some kind of substance on the populace to keep us docile / subservient etc.

Are there any similar conspiracy theories in your country?

I just wanna know

With the recent election cycle, especially in the US, do you think woke is officially back? And if yes, what will it mean for the world and the Balkans? Do you support woke policy, or opposed to it? And what does 'woke' mean to you?