Weekend plans...um yeah

To answer my friend Caromello's question about musicians: there are sometimes street performers but for the most part, it is pretty quiet on the streets. There is a break dancing group (I think they are Roma), and a clown. I'll be sure to let you know if I hear anything in my adventures.

Last night, I went out with Dao and we had a fantastic time. We split the biggest sandwich of all time, in terms of circumference, then went to her place and chatted on the porch while the rain and thunderstorm put on a show. I realized sitting there that we could have been anywhere in the world because it was dark outside, all the while we are talking in English, listening to American music. Behind Dao's cement balcony is a courtyard that looks like it could be a forest. You can't really see the other apartment buildings, especially at night. I am so grateful for Dao's friendship.

My weekend is going to be exceedingly boring, I believe. Well, I am rarely bored, but by other people's standards, it will seem ah dull. I am going to pick out yarn to start Boban's scarf. He'll be 30 next month. Manuel and I are going to try to chat at noon tomorrow so I'll be in a cafe. There is a slim chance I will go to a beer festival in Prilep or go swimming at some mineral springs, but I sincerely doubt either of these two things will happen. So I will explore my cafes, vacuum up some spiders at my house, clean and just relax. Until next time, aye de ciao

Vertigo-go

Dobro Utro (Good Morning)! Today is an odd day because, basically, we are the only people at work. It is some Orthodox holiday, recognized by everyone but the UN. I had forgotten this fact so when I walked out of my apartment building, I was surprised by the stillness on the street. Yesterday, there were cars backed up, zooming past me, etc during my walk to work. Today, nothing of the sort. My walk in was peaceful, minus the guy pointing to the crosswalk sign from his car. I think he thought I needed some help or something concerning the walk/don't walk sign. It's not like I walked out in front of his car or anything!

Making the day that much odder is my serious case of vertigo. I tilt my head back when drinking my coffee and I get it. I even feel it a bit sitting here typing. Vertigo=change in weather. We had a huge rain/thunderstorm last night. It's supposed to rain today and tomorrow so who knows if my vertigo will go-go.

I keep looking for my Street Dog. I even dreamed about her a couple nights ago. She is so sweet. I hope when my parents come, they get to meet her.

Liquor and Plastic Bags

There are two major changes arriving in Macedonia in the next 4 months. Beginning September 1, you won't be able to buy beer, wine or liquor after 7PM except from "authorized" sellers - i.e. the supermarket and coffee bars. In theory, the little convenience store/bodega by my place will no longer be able to sell me my Skopsko after 7PM until 6AM the next morning. I do not anticipate much of a lifestyle change for me, but this could be quite serious for other residents, if it is actually enforced. On Fridays and Saturdays especially, some men sit at my little bodega near my house, drink Skopsko and talk well into the evening. They have not been publicly disruptive, at least that I am aware of. So, it will be interesting to see if this law is enforced and if there will be less people walking around City Park with beers after 7PM.

The next big change will be the ban of plastic bags at "shops, business premises and markets that deal with retail trade of foodstuff and products of general consumption" on January 1, 2009. I have noticed that it is almost impossible for me to leave my wee bodega without a plastic bag, even if I buy only a tomato. Despite my refusal for a bag, people always try to push them on me. Imagine buying a candy bar at the gas station and the attendant automatically putting it in a plastic bag. This is the plastic bag culture of Skopje. So, my canvas shopping bag may become the next vogue fashion expression here in Skopje. I wonder if the stores will all just switch to paper. I am not sure if I will be here in January to see the change, but it sounds pretty progressive, at least on paper. It will be a cultural shift.

To the Libraray! Lentils! Street Dog!!

I just finished filling out my application to join the British Council's library. This means I can check out books, DVDs, attend chats, etc. Some of you may know that I have 5 movies that I watch over and over again. Imagine, getting caught up on some other movies! And, they might have these 2 books by a Croatian feminist, "Balkan Express" and "How we survived communism and even laughed". Even if the library does not have these 2 books, I am sure there are others that will capture my attention. I will go there after work today to sign up.

In other news, in my feeble attempts to improve my cooking, I am going to try my sister's boyfriend's recipe of lentils and sausages. I have had said dish and it is delicious. So, here goes nothing. I'll let you know if I should hang up the apron in defeat or of my triumph. My cooking is not as bad as I thought and I make killer sandwiches. Mmmmmm...

Finally, you remember the street dog that I wanted to adopt? Well, I saw her yesterday for the first time in a long time. I happened to have some sandwich meat on me so I gave her a piece. She followed me home. I call her simply Street Dog and she is such a good dog. I gave her some of this pate that I don't like so much and some water. I made my sandwiches for lunch and she just sat there and watched. Eventually, I took her back to her "home". While she is exceedingly dirty and probably has fleas and worms, somebody is feeding her. She is not super skinny. We walked back to where I always see her and it appeared, at first, like she would follow me forever. Then, a dump truck passed and for the first time, I heard Street Dog bark. She chased the dump truck away than ran into the yard of her apartment building. She was not out when I walked to work this morning. I really want to get her cleaned up and to a vet. We'll see.

In the cafe

Skopje has many coffee bars. I am on the quest to find my favorite coffee bar. You may wonder why this would be such a difficult task. Well the reason is, they all look the same, they are just located on a different part of the river, or on Macedonia street. They all sell gelatto and coffee along with beer, wine and other alcohol libations. So, in an effort to get myself out of my apartment on the weekends, I will try to see if there is something unique, a place where I love plugging in my computer and typing away. I have a lot to do, when you think about it. All my pictures need to be transferred from my camera, labeled and uploaded so you can see them! Then, there is my attempt to write down all my childhood memories and the on-going job applications/getting my resume, etc. in various databases - the UN, USAID, OSCE....my job search has cooled for the moment but I want to get everything in those places so when that great job comes up at the end of my internship, I will be there as a candidate. I still have no clue when my internship will finish nor when I will make it back to the States. This uncertainty used to unnerve me, but now, I am pretty zen about it.

As you are probably aware, my life here is very quiet. I spend most of my time outside of work by myself. I have found great friends, but it is hard to connect in person. I watch a lot of tv and found myself relating to Ally McBeal. On last night's episode, her friend asked her what makes Ally's problems more important than everyone else's. Ally responded the reason was because they were hers. I think sometimes I get down because I don't think my problems are any more important than everybody else's so instead of reaching out to my friends, I sit in my apartment and watch Ally McBeal. This is another reason I am trying to find my cafe of choice - at least I am out and not feeling so isolated in my home. I find that I enjoy my solitude, most of the time, but it can get stifling in and of itself. I notice in the cafes that I am the only person who is here alone. There is not a coffee culture similar to the US - well not that I have found. Macedonians LOVE to go out for coffee, but never alone. I brought my Macedonian homework so I can study for a bit. It is hard to self-teach, but I hope I will improve.

Here I Am...

Here I am, sitting in a coffee bar, listening to "I will always love you", "hotel California" and other ditties for the 3rd or 4th time. The cool thing? I have been catching up on emails to those long lost friends. The lame thing? I am still sitting here listening to the same loop. Has it seriously been that long?

Blissful Ignorance

I must make a confession. I haven't had a Macedonian lesson in a month. I keep putting off studying, even though when my parents come, I intend to dazzle them with my command of the Macedonian language. So, why am I not studying so I can at least order my parents a nice meal in a restaurant in Makedonski? Honestly, I think it is because part of me likes walking around in my ignorant state, not understanding what people around me are talking about. I do not hear if there are lewd comments being made, obscenities or just idle chit chat. I can ignore most people around me on the street and not feel guilty. It is easy for me to tune things out and get lost in my own thoughts. In one of my feeble attempts to speak Macedonian to Bea, I miss pronounced a word and it turned out to be an explicative in Serbian. Yes, I am gifted at stumbling upon obscenities in other languages. Ask my German friends. In an earlier blog entry, I said was learning Macedonian because language is access to the culture. It is time for me to make good on that entry. I have no illusions about fluency. I simply want to be able to respond to people when they ask me a simple question. I understand much more than I am able to communicate. Here goes nothing!

Nostalgic

I am exceedingly, almost annoyingly content here in Skopje. This place is my home and I love just walking around, listening to my ipod. I met my friend, Sabina, last night and we had way too much fun and conversation. She is my the friend I met when I went to the mountains on the Albanian border. She is a citizen of Macedonia, home visiting her family but she works in Denver. Sabina has the feeling we are going to end up working together one day and I hope her hunch is right. Time will reveal all.

I was chatting with my friend who is returning to Penn for the fall semester and I realized that part of me would like to be returning to Penn for the fall semester. So much has happened in a year. I moved from Denver to Philly, learned more than I ever thought possible and suddenly, I find myself in Macedonia. It makes me wonder where I will be next year. Or even in six months.

Adding to my nostalgia, I decided to begin to write my memories from childhood. I wrote down all the remembrances from when we lived in Malawi and flew back to the States. I was age 1 to 4 when we lived there. I know seeing the man with polio on his porch is why I do what I do today. I experienced a heaviness in my chest when I saw him.

Duty calls, friends. I am going to make a table on outputs and indicators for our domestic violence proposals. Try to not get too jealous.

At home in Skopje

Well, after 3 nights in Dubrovnik, we decided to stay the night in Herzeg Novi, Montenegro. Our bus from Dubrovnik stopped there and it is a little beach town. Our hostess was very strange, having a lot of little rules that we had to follow. Dao and I also realized that we somehow always managed to be walking uphill for most of our travels. When we were walking to our accommodation for the evening, it was seriously steep. I tried to not hate my rolling, carry on suitcase that I was using as my only bag, but it was difficult. We went and lay on the beach for the day then ended up getting the restaurant's special platter for dinner at a Bosnian restaurant. Turned out to be mostly meat with fries. We had pork, chicken and beef! Atkins diet delight! The local Montenegrin beer was delicious and refreshing. The next day, we caught a bus to Kotor, Montenegro.

Kotor is surrounded by mountains on 3 sides and this means it gets super hot. Their Starigrad (Old City) was very cool, but reminiscent of the one in Dubrovnik and Split. In the Middle Ages, they built this wall on the side of the mountain behind Starigrad. Why? Dao and I were never quite sure. We had fried calamari, salads and white Montenegrin wine for dinner. Delicious. Our room was nice and pitch black. If only the guy would quit hacking...we decided to go back to Skopje after one night in Kotor instead of heading down to Budva. Dao and I were simply tired ladies. We prefered to think of ourselves as mariners, even though we know nothing about sailing. In fact, when we were trying to figure out how to get to Starigrad from our room, I told Dao that I could only navigate by the stars at night, channeling my inner Mariner. As you can tell, the heat began to get to us. We took a night bus to Skopje from Kotor. This was only a 12 hour bus ride, I think. We almost cried at the bus station in Kotor because when we were waiting for our bus, there were all these beautiful, new, functional buses pulling in. Except in our peron (gate). Then, this junky, old uncomfortable bus whose air brakes kept making noise even at a dead stop pulled into our peron. Of course this is our bus. We told the bus to get out of our peron (to ourselves of course) and, finally, got the nerve to ask the driver if this was the bus to Skopje. He said no. We were saved! Our bus was super! We even got our own row. Imagine that! I arrived at the Skopje bus station, avoided the super sketchy cab drivers, found a non-sketchy cab and made home to my lovely flat.

So now, I am back at work, doing some work on a Domestic Violence proposal (actually 2). I will try to get pictures online soon. Be patient, my friends. Until next time...

Live from Dubrovnik!

Greetings from the port in Dubrovnik! If there are spelling errors, I apologize. The "z" and "y" keys are switched on this keyboard. I will attempt to catch you up. After our surreal day in Sarajevo, we headed off to Mostar. The bus ride was absolutely amazing and the mountains are huge! We found accommodation in Mostar the way we have been finding accommodation since- we get off the bus and there are people offering rooms so you figure out where the room is (usually they have maps to show you) then figure out if it is a price you want to pay. Our room in Mostar was great! We walked down to the old part of the city where the streets are made of stones and saw the Old New Bridge. This bridge connects the Turkish side to the Christian side of the city and was destroyed in the war. People were devastated at the destruction of the bridge and when they rebuilt it, they did not use modern technology. They used the 15th century craftsmanship. The destruction of the Bridge in Mostar symbolizes how bad things got during the war. There were some shelled buildings along the river. The river was an amazing shade of aqua and men dived from the bridge itself. The streets of Mostar in the old part are narrow and made of stone. There are lots of balconies and terraces covered by grape leaves and it was on such a balcony Dao and I ate lunch. In the evening, there happened to be a music festival so we watched a local Bosnian band then a Croatian funk band called Soul Finger. It was a fun evening under the stars, by the Bridge, on the river bank.

We only spent a night in Mostar then we were off to Split, Croatia. The bus ride was miserably hot and we had the strangest non-line forming border crossing. Upon arrival in Split, we found a room we thought would be great. Turned out it was sweltering hot and super loud as the window opens onto the busy street 3 floors down. At any rate, we saw the palace of Diocletian, found a sculpture that if you rub the toe, you get good luck and took a ferry to the island of Hvar. What we quickly realized in Croatia is that the beaches do not have sand, they have big rocks. At first, I think Dao and I were disappointed, but then we quickly realized that no sand means no sand EVERYWHERE so we made ourselves comfortable on the rocks. We went to Starigrad (Old City) on Hvar and had an amazing dinner in a little alleyway. We rode the ferry back to Split and after our second night, we left and came to Dubrovnik.

So here we are. Yesterday, we walked around Old City and were amazed at the level of tourists. Our first night here, we stumbled onto a music festival on the port here and ate fresh grilled calamari. In the Old City, we went to a war photo museum that had an exhibit on child soldiers. You can probably imagine how horribly sad it was, but it was very moving. We had another dinner in a little alleyway and then went back to our cool, quiet room.

We are waiting to catch another ferry to an island to lay on a sand beach. We leave for Kotor, Montenegro tomorrow and from there, we will head back to Skopje. I will try to write soon!

Surreal in Sarajevo

Greetings! I am not sure where to begin because the past 2 days have been fairly surreal. Let's start with the 16 hour bus ride from Skopje to Sarajevo. 16 hours! The ride was so long because we got stopped at the Macedonian/Serbian border to have our bus completely inspected by customs, which 2 hours. Apparently, the owner of the bus company was caught smuggling coats so now, his buses are on the black list. This makes it really wonderful for all of us who have no choice but to take this bus company to Sarajevo. At any rate, the bus was almost completely full so I had to sit next to someone and boy was she a character! Her name was Fatima and she's a 58 year old Albanian woman from Tetevo. She looks much older than that. She speaks almost no English so we manage to communicate in Macedonian with a lot of pointing and hand gestures. As it turns out, Fatima is diabetic. So, at some point on our ride, I had the privilege of witnessing her giving herself an insulin shot in the arm closest to me, while just riding along. I am glad needles don't freak me out or make me sick. Fatima loved to talk and informed me that she had no intention of sleeping on the bus ride. I should have asked if we could switch seats since she was sitting by the window, but I didn't. At any rate, at some point, I put on my sunglasses to block the light since I forgot my eye mask and attempt some sleep. Fatima then tapped my arm so I looked over at her. She then motioned that when I put on my sunglasses, she took out her teeth. The teeth never went back in her mouth so now, I had to understand her Macedonian pronounced without teeth, adding to the challenge. When we finally arrived in Serbia, we stopped at a restaurant and Fatima bought me a machiatto. It was the most delicious macchiatto ever. She continued to ask me if I wanted a sandwich, juice, etc and I kept politely declining. She bought a sandwich and proceeded to eat it on the bus. All night, she ate and smoked. I was dozing in and out, never actually falling asleep. We crossed the Croatian border around 5:30 in the morning (I think) and that was totally uneventful. Then we crossed the Bosnia-Herzegovina border an hour or so later, again uneventful. Fatima got off the bus at a town prior to Sarajevo and, at that point, I finally was able to really sleep. When we rolled into the Sarajevo bus station at around noon, I was exhausted. I sat and waited for the hostel folks to pick me up and, as it turns out, Dao and I's private room is in a private residence, next door to a police station. Dao arrived later in the evening and the next morning, we woke up and decided to take the tour of Sarajevo offered by our hostel.

The tour coupled with our evening made for the surreal day. We rode in a car over to Republica Serbska and toured a tunnel that was the lifeline of Sarajevo during the almost four year siege of the city from 1992 to 1995. Over 11,000 people died in Sarajevo during that time and there were constant shelling and sniper attacks. Where the grenades hit the sidewalk is called a Bosnian Rose. You can see the Bosnian roses at the tunnel and at various points throughout the city. I cannot fathom the terror the people who could not flee experienced those 43 months. After the tunnel, we walked down the old bobsled track from the 1984 Olympic Games. It was huge and cement. Then, we went to see an old garrison post from the Austro-Hungarian days which was used as a prison by the Bosnian Serbs and an area to shell the city. There was a WWII memorial in the same area that was completely desecrated. I couldn't bring myself to take a picture of it. There is graffiti everywhere, and the compound is crumbling, the ground covered in broken bottles and glass fragments. After our tour, Dao and I went in search of a Thai restaurant and the bridge, the Latin Bridge, where Franz Ferdinand was assassinated, sparking the first world war. We found the restaurant and we are pretty sure we saw the bridge. It was unmarked, which I found strange. So my dream of having my picture taken on the Latin Bridge remains unrealized as I am not sure which bridge it is. After dinner, we walked by the river that runs through the city and saw buildings that were shelled, Bosnian Roses in the sidewalk and people enjoying their evening. Sarajevo is a vibrant, lively city, yet has shelled, bullet riddled buildings. I don't know how to explain what it is like to see and hear about such destruction and fear, yet go and have a pleasant evening strolling throughout the historical part of the city, enjoy Thai food and eat ice cream. We are off to Mostar today, but I sincerely believe this is not the last I have seen of Sarajevo. I feel connected to this city.

Preparing for my travels

I am sitting in the mall where there is free wireless attempting to install updates on my MacBook and trying to download some new tunes from iTunes. I am fairly unsuccessful in this quest because the internet is so incredibly slow. I would have to wait 13 hours to download one podcast. Boo!

In the meanwhile, I am looking at what to do in Sarajevo and Mostar, the first 2 cities in Dao and I's Western Balkan Adventures. I am excited and nervous about visiting these places. There is so much history and the recent history is tragic in Bosnia Herzegovina. I am hoping that Dao will be open to going to Medugorje, near Mostar. It is a Catholic pilgrimage site where the Virgin Mary appeared to children in the city. My Dad went there in 1988 or 1989 and witnessed miracles. My friend's brother went there and he became a Catholic priest. I want to join the ranks of the Medug Heads (those that visit Medugorje). It is a holy place and I want to go - not to mention I was a pilgrim in Spain. I get to skip purgatory, I think, because of my pilgrimage through Northern Spain. If I make it to Medugorje, who knows what will await me in heaven! And to think, I am not even Catholic! What about Anglicans/Episcopalians? That's me. I think Dao and I are pretty flexible, although she may have made hostel reservations in Split, Croatia, that cannot be moved. We'll see.

My bus ride to Sarajevo is 14 hours (doh!) but it is through the night tonight so I am hoping I will be able to sleep most of the time. I will arrive in Sarajevo and check into our hostel. A nap may be in order. Dao doesn't arrive until the evening so I will have the day to explore the city by myself. I am a bit nervous because my Macedonian is poor, which means it will be hard for me to understand the Bosnians, but I'll manage. Until my next update from the road...fare thee well.