The frugal traveller visits Tirana for the New York Times: “I had arrived in Albania hoping to discover an untrammeled paradise hidden in the Balkans. What I found instead was a deeply weird place…” I was at a dinner on the United Nations Day Against Torture last week (the anniversary of the day, 6/26/1987, that the U.N. Convention Against Torture went into effect) held by Boston Medical Center’s Boston Center for Refugee Health and Human Rights to honor political refugees who had gained asylum in the United States. By far the most uncomfortable and isolated people in this room full of political refugees from oppressed nations all over the world were an Albanian family, I felt.