11th August - Sooo exited to be in Macedonia !

My first proper day in Macedonia :-) :-) :-) How many years have I been waiting for that moment? I had a great greeting yesterday by my friend Bojana, who picked me up with 3 good-looking men, and we went to an Irish pub, haha ! I still stayed faithful to my Macedonian mission and drank Rakja and ate Shopska Salad.

Skopje on a first scroll is lovely lovely! The Vardar River goes right through the city, unfortunately I couldn’t talk Bojana into singing with me ‘Jovano Jovanke’ whilst sitting on the riverbank…

They are doing a lot of major renovation and new buildings in the centre

- the major of Skopje definitely has a love for massive statues with gentle smiles and big curves and muscles…

The old town is a huge mix of cultures. I used all of my scraps of Turkish and Serbian, and was asked why I don’t speak any Albanian (I only had a song on offer o that front, which bought me a free peach in the old bazar) but actually most people speak English and German.

I could have bought two suitcases full of stuff, but luckily I had misread the zeros when getting money out, and so had only the equivalent of £10 which was spent in coffee, burek, tomatoes, raspberries, of course coffee and yes, fabrics !!! They’ve got amazing stores there…

Back to the main square of Skopje. All those 'Sissi'-type' buildings are newly renovated or completely newly built (some building sites are still waiting to be polished away). 

In the evening all is prettily lit up, and the water fountains play amazing looking visual effects together with a colourful light-show. When suddenly loud Vienna-waltzing music started accompanying those water plays, the whole place transformed into a magic fairytale - unfortunately making it into a little imitation of Vienna rather than of Macedonia, still, it was beautiful. 

The Balkan-bellied gentlemen which  started politely talking to me, proofed to be the secretary to the foreign Minister of Macedonia (or so he said, but his polished speech and manners implied he could a be politician. He was out for touristic feedback on their amazing creation for the visitors - unfortunately he had to listen to my regret for not having Macedonian music played on the square, and I further shocked him by my planned visit to the Roma quarters called 'Shutka' on the next day, rather than visiting all the meant-to-be tourist attractions…

7th – 10th August: Fun and fire in Koprivshtica

The 5-yearly festival was the reason, why I came back to Bulgaria this year, and inspired by the tasty reports from last time, 5 years ago, others came…Last time wild camping, this time in luxury fasion I shared a room with Olga and Karen:

Koprivstica is on a normal day already a pretty and historical town in the centre of Bulgaria, surrounded by mountains and hills.

One of our highlights we had on the first evening, before the festival, in THE first restaurant, when Orchestra Zornitsa, my favourite Bulgarian band played the whole eve and we enjoyed plenty of amazing food and knotted our feet with Bulgarian folk dances.

The next days we spent mostly up in the hills, strolling between the 8 festival stages and lots of folk dance performances. 

  

Some of the costumes were even for my taste extraordinary.

Good developments of the festival since last time is the fact that amongst the performers there were Roma people – the children’s dance groups was one of the best I have seen at the festival, and the Brass band one of the rare musical highlights.

This leads to the bad development: last time I saw many stunning performances, whilst this time they were alright. Also, I think the festival has tipped over from being a stunning folk extravaganza into becoming commercially explored, which is sad :-(

Unfortunately I had caught a really nasty cold there – whilst we had 35 degrees and bright sun all the time ! This here is not a Rakija drinking feast, but a ‘health ritual’ gurgling some local herbal medicine I had bought at the Witches’ stall with Bernard, who had to be fit for his solo in the eve.

Always on the Saturday evening, the stage in town is reserved for foreign Bulgarian Choirs – London Bulgarian Choir was and is the best !!! 

At night time they will perform the old ritual of fire dancing for the tourists, which by tradition should happen in June, and involves dancing on glowing coals. Unfortunately I never managed to see it due to the overwhelming crowds.

Sad it was to travel back to Sofia, where would on the next day distribute to various places, me Macedonia and the other girls back to London. 

3rd -6th August: Plovdiv on Wings

   

Plovdiv is one of the most amazing places on earth – the old town it is. It’s soooo pretty and atmospheric. 

Though sturdy sandals are advisable to manage those cobble stones – or wings J

For three days we had crazy music making on the menu – being taught in the day and off to jams, performances and parties in the eve…

Unfortunately our violin tutor favoured the electric violin and sheet music, and his own and his friend’s compositions rather than old traditional stuff. Still, we learned about 50 finger-breaking embellishments, my repertoire of time signatures was expanded to 13/8 and 15/16, and some of the tunes were even good J

The evening entertainment gave more satisfying results. The municipality Plovdiv put on free folk/world music and dance performances in the Amphitheatre.

Mild artistic to crazy acrobatic…