Thanksgiving in Macedonia: November 22, 2012

Our Thanksgiving Day Hike

We started the day with a 3-hour hike on Mt. Vodno.  The fog was thick and constant even on the mountain.  After the hike, we visited a friend, Angel, because it was his birthday.  He gave us tickets to a festival of new Macedonian singers so we ended our Macedonian Thanksgiving Day with music from Macedonia.

In between we had dinner.  On Monday, I found a small frozen turkey that was raised in Sarajevo, Bosnia.   It was truly small weighing in at 7.2 lbs (3.3 kg), and it didn't take long to thaw.  Our ex-pat Thanksgiving dinner included the turkey, gravy, sweet potatoes,  mashed potatoes, and California wine.  I even managed to create a cranberry sauce using dried cranberries and jarred sour cherries.  

It was a very good day--a good Thanksgiving.

Earth Day Celebration in Skopje

Earth Day is actually the 22nd, but today in Skopje a small group of people picked up trash on Mount Vodno to help clean up this part of the earth.  It was a small gesture as Skopje and Macedonia as a whole has a huge trash problem.  Trash is everywhere.  When I take photos I must look through the viewfinder very carefully to make sure there is no visible trash.

The pedestrian street is very clean but it is always on show.  The City Park and Mt. Vodno have trash everywhere.  Yes, there are trash cans, but people either don't use them or they do and no one bothers to empty the full containers.  Eventually, the wind blows the overflowing trash into the bushes, trees, and river.  The trash issue is much worse in smaller cities with plastic bottles clogging up the streams.

The effort today was more of a token gesture to get press coverage and plant a seed about not littering.

US Ambassador to Macedonia

The results after just 45 minutes

One of the Skopje mayors made an appearance at the trash pickup.  Four press cameras huddled around him and when there was a piece of white paper next to the trail, all four cameramen focused their lenses on him picking up trash.

There are recycling bins for paper and plastic.  The paper seems to just get wet and eventually is transferred to the trash bins.  The Roma people make daily rounds to pick up the plastic bottles for recycling.  Glass and aluminum is not recycled.  There are battery bins in the larger grocery stores, but no one here recycles used batteries. I've been told that the batteries are trucked to Austria for recycling.  Landfills are almost nonexistent in Macedonia so the garbage is mostly dumped along the roads and rivers.

Our friend Angel who was our guide to Matka Canyon and to Prilep said we don't need signs to get around.  He said to just follow the trash and we'll be on the right path.

Macedonia is too beautiful to trash.  Maybe this small effort will pay off someday.

I'm an Illegal Alien; I'm an American in Macedonia

Dan and I arrived in Macedonia on Jan 12 with the belief that if we left the country every 90 days, we could maintain our legal status in Macedonia.  Last week we learned we were wrong because about three years ago, Macedonia changed their laws to comply with EU requirements.  Now visitors can remain in Macedonia without a visa for only 90 days of 180 days.  Subtracting my time outside of Macedonia, yesterday I became an illegal alien.  Dan becomes an illegal alien next week.

Dan's Macedonian lawyer has advised us that since he is in the process of securing a work visa that we should be okay.  But, that is only his word.  We are worried that when we go to Cairo, Egypt, at the end of the month, we will either be thrown out of Macedonia or not be allowed to re-enter Macedonia as we have over stayed our non-visa status.

We've had varying stories about what happens when you overstay.  Some people have received reprimands at the border but been allowed to enter while others have been refused entry.

At least now we can have a Plan B in place for Kali Cat should we not be allowed to return to Macedonia.

Today, Monday, was a holiday for Easter Sunday.  Dan didn't have to work so he joined the Monday hike.  We hiked about two hours across and up to middle Vodno making a loop to return to the start.  The weather was beautiful while we were hiking.  The slope of the mountain is covered with small gardens, orchards, and vineyards.  Despite the weather, yellow forsythia and wild plum and apple trees covered with white blossoms said it was truly Spring.

We felt the first sprinkles as we returned to our apartment.  The rest of the day was mostly gray with intermittent rain.

Monday Hike: April 2, 2012

This is my second Monday hike with some of the women from IWA.  The hike went up Vodno, along the crest toward Matka, and looped back down through Gorno Nerezi Village to return to the trailhead.  At the crest, the light on the mountains was lovely.  I wish I had more than my little pocket camera on me to capture the view.

We began this hike at the Pantelejmon Monastery located about 8 kilometers southwest of Skopje part way up Mount Vodno. 

The church of St. Pantelejmon is now a museum, but it is closed on Mondays.  

It was a beautiful morning for a hike.  The air was crisp and while we began our hike in the sun, when we entered the forested portion, the ground and vegetation were covered with a dusting of snow and puddles of water were frozen.  

By the end of our 3-hour hike we had all our clothing layers on and were wearing gloves.  

There is an atmospheric Macedonian restaurant (Klet) located within the monastery complex.  I look forward to returning on a weekend day to visit the museum, have lunch, and walk the 5 kilometers to middle Vodno and home with Dan.

Dan will return from DC tomorrow morning.  Kali and I can't wait to have him back.

Monday Hike: March 26, 2012

Last night Azita and I went to the Macedonian Kitchen restaurant to have moussaka before going to the opera.  Their moussaka is the best I've every had.  We also ordered Greek salad (called South Macedonian salad in many restaurants), garlic bread and two glasses of Macedonian wine.  We were chatting and enjoying our Greek salad, garlic bread, and the huge glasses of wine and kind of lost track of the time.  The moussaka was served late, and we realized that we were going to be late to the 8:00 performance.  We rushed through the moussaka and hurried out to see Tosca at the Macedonian Opera.  I'm used to getting to this theater early to see the ballet and watching people arrive to take their seats after the performances have begun.  Arriving at the theater at 8:15 we were refused entry.  We weren't even allowed to sit inside the lobby.  We had to sit outside with the other latecomers until the intermission.

While we were sitting on the steps outside, an older woman (older than me) came up the stairs from the parking lot.  She asked us something in Macedonian, and as I don't understand but a few words of Macedonian, I told her I speak English.  She switched to English and asked why I'm in Macedonia if we can't speak Macedonian.  I was speechless.

Finally, at 9:00 pm, Azita and I were allowed in for the second act of Tosca.  It was warm inside and we were tired from the wine and not enough sleep the night before.  The opera is in Italian and the subtitles Macedonian.  The soprano, Opera Diva Vesna Gjinovska-Ilkova as Tosca, had a beautiful, clear voice, but the men's voices sounded muddy.  In this second act, there was an awkward attempted rape and a subsequent murder.  When the second intermission arrived, we couldn't think of any reason to stay for the third act so we went home.

This morning we joined the walking/hiking group of women who belong to the International Women's Association (IWA).  We drove to the village of Gorno Sonya (Горно Соње) located on the south side of Mount Vodno.  There are several villages represented in the photo below, but the near village with the white bell tower is Gorno Sonya.

From Gorno Sonya, we walked up the the Millennium Cross on the top of Mount Vodno.  On the way back down, we ran into an intrepid hiker who agreed to show us where a spring was located.  He took us to the north slope of Vodno and down the mountain a bit, but indeed there was a spring.

Our impromptu guide, now retired, was an engineer in the Serbian Air Force.  He said he came to Macedonia and married a local woman.  He didn't say married, he said he was enslaved by her.  He walks Vodno everyday and knows every trail possibility.  It takes him about 3 months to walk every trail and the total kilometers for all the trails on Vodno total the same height as Mount Everest.  He said now that it takes him 40 minutes to walk from middle Vodno (the half-way point); when he was younger it took him 40 minutes to get to the top of the mountain from city center.  Truly amazing!

Then he told us which way to go to return to Gorno Sonya on the other side of Vodno and he headed down the north slope toward Skopje's city center.

The weather was warm, and it was a great day for a walk on the mountain.

Kate, Lyubov, Azita, and me

Spring, Where Have you Gone?: March 10, 2012

The city of Skopje expands far beyond the sides of this photo.  Last weekend we were able to get a bird's eye view of the city to see how far it spreads beyond the small path that we normally travel.  Dan and I, limited by weather, have been traversing the same paths over and over.  We had no idea that there was so much of Skopje beyond the City Center where we live.

Last weekend it was in the 50s; we climbed up (walked) Mount Vodno behind our apartment.  We walked all the way up--about a 2700 foot change in elevation.  There is a gondola at the 1/2 way point to the top, but we kept walking.  It was pretty hard slogging as there is still quite a bit of snow above the cable car.  After all that work, we took the gondola down and took a taxi home.   The entire outing took us about 4-1/2 hours.

View of the Sar Mountains (the highest in the Balkans)

Before we got to the half-way point on our hike up, a dog attached himself to us.  He led us along the trail.  We kept trying to figure out how to lose our hiking dog, but once we got to the cable car point, that was his guiding limit.  He found someone else and returned down the mountain.

Hiking Dog

The Millennium Cross is at the top of Mount Vodno.  It was a great day to be at the top.  The view was spectacular.

Wild Crocus

In the lower half of the hike we found tiny little wild crocus emerging between the patches of snow.  It made me feel that Spring was truly on its way.






On Tuesday evening we went to a Chocolate Auction to benefit a charity for visually impaired children.  The entire event was in Macedonian so we were mostly lost, but it did give me a chance to practice my numbers.  We bid on and won a huge chocolate creation and a weekend for two at a hotel in Kruchevo.

Kruchevo is located in southwestern Macedonia.  It is highest village in the Balkans so we need to wait for warmer weather before we visit.  In the meantime, we have a lot of chocolate to consume.  The whole structure is chocolate.  The wine bottle is there for scale.

Views from our Apartment

As the week progressed it became grayer and grayer and Spring disappeared.  Wednesday we woke to snow turning to fog.

 Thursday it snowed all day.







The continued forecast for Skopje is gray, gray, gray overlaid with rain, snow, sleet....