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…