Usually, the first question people ask when I tell them I came here is, “Why Albania?”
And I totally get it. Before I first visited, I didn’t know much about Albania either. I’d met a few Albanians abroad over the years and seen the occasional 90 Day Fiancé episode featuring Albanian cities, but that was about it.
Before Albania, I had been living in Dubai for 3 years, and I absolutely loved it there. It was my favorite place I’d ever lived, and leaving was genuinely painful.
Why I Knew It Was Time for a Career Change
But by that point, the writing was on the wall for the influencer career I’d been building for 13 years. The industry was changing, my own priorities were changing, and new business regulations for content creators in the UAE made me realize I needed to start thinking seriously about what came next.
The problem was, I didn’t actually know what next looked like yet.
I knew I wanted to shift into something new, but I also didn’t have the bandwidth to deal with another round of visa applications, fees, paperwork, appointments, and bureaucracy. I needed somewhere I could land for a while, stay flexible, and figure out my next move without immediately committing to another complex process.
Why Moving From Dubai to Albania Made Sense for Me
When my chapter in Dubai finished, I went back to the US for a few months to see if I could re-integrate there, but pretty quickly realized that was NOT going to work. Thankfully, Albania was already familiar to me. I had visited during a Balkans road trip in 2023, and I’d known for a while that Americans could stay for 1 year without a visa.
That made it an easy option to come back to. I already had some sense of the country, and it gave me the flexibility to stay based in Europe, explore new business ideas, and figure out what I wanted my next chapter to be.
Albania wasn’t originally some lifelong dream of mine, but it made sense for the season of life I was in.
What Albania Gave Me
So far, it’s done exactly what I needed it to do.
It’s given me time and space to rebuild, experiment, change direction, and figure out what I want the next chapter of my career to look like.
I may not have arrived here because of some grand plan, but Albania ended up giving me something I desperately needed: room to start over.
~Natalie
