scattered thoughts from Skopje
God i am already fucking done and i only managed 20 minutes of the welcome drinks tonight. Departmental meetup is bad enough, but several hundred people all standing around drinking wine, talking small and eating decidely not-vegan finger food is really not my idea of a good time. And i feel so, so out of place. Like, you take a plate, eat a slice of watermelon, now you're left with a rind, now what? I walked around the whole place looking for a trash, but there is no trash. Because i guess it's a thing at events like this, there are wait staff milling around just... taking your plates and cups away, even though they could be reused? There's not even anywhere for me to return them myself!? This is so fucking snooty, i hate it. The absolute worst.
I ended up outside sitting on the stoop by the side of the road and smoking a cigarette because i just feel so out of place with this high class nonsense.
So let's talk about Skopje.
I have never been especially interested in eastern Europe, and every place i visited there - Czech, Croatia, Poland, Slovenia - quite happy to never visit again. East Germany is about as much eastern Europe as i can take. Although East Germany is marginally better because at least it has good bread and techno music. Macedonia does not.
Which isn't to say it's abysmal. It's okay.
Sunday morning i left my hotel and wandered the streets like a hobo looking for something to eat. Because Macedonia, like way too much of Europe, is pretty much useless to try to achieve anything on the weekend. Like, i appreciate work/life balance and everything, but as a visitor - and especially as a visiting worker who is on the clock Monday to Friday - it really sucks that you can't just go out and buy whatever you need at any time of the day or night, 7 days a week.
Suffice to say i was pretty grumpy that first morning. I did eventually find a bakery where i bought a simit, also known as a Turkish bagel in the US, and in Macedonia known as a ѓеврек (gevrek). I would eat a lot more simits in the next few days. I also found a coffee shop that was barely open, but there was one guy out the front nursing an espresso. I ordered a Turkish coffee.
The guy with the espresso was surprisingly chatty. Turns out i was in the Albanian quarter, and within just a few minutes he was regaling me with the full history of the Albanian people, from pre-history right through till today. He was clearly Albanian first, and slipped a couple times talking about "our land", before catching himself. "Well, no, i don't mean it like the land belongs to us and nobody else, it's just that historically..."
It was actually a great introduction to one of the big political issues in Macedonia. Well aside from the other big issues like the thing with Greece around whether the country should be called Macedonia or North Macedonia, and with Bulgaria around if Macedonian is even a real ethnicity at all. At the time of the conversation, i thought that it was just a proud Albanian guy sharing his culture - and perhaps it was - but then a bit later in the week one of my foreign colleagues was on the panel in a job interview where he shared that one of our Macedonian colleagues gave an immediate no after the interview specifically because the candidate was Albanian. A bit later i was talking to another colleague over coffee who volunteered without prompting "there's some ethnic tensions but personally i don't really care, i get along with everyone". That might be easier to say with the privilege of being in the majority ethnic group, of course.
So maybe there is something there, but having only spent a week in the country, and with most of that time working, i didn't really learn enough to have a strong sense of the situation. I can say one thing, though. South of the river is Christian and north of the river is Muslim. Sure, there are a few churches in the north and there are a few mosques in the south, but the split is hard to miss. To an outsider it does feel a little bit segregation-y.
And yet... did that make it uncomfortable to walk around? Not at all. It's not like they're pointing AK47s at each other. As my Albanian friend told me, Skopje is a safe and peaceful city, and that's why he loves it there. Of course he also told me that he worked in Afghanistan, so perhaps it's relative. But dude wasn't wrong. Skopje has around a half million people but it feels like an even smaller town than that.
It stinks, though. Dear lord, the first thing i noticed when i walked outside was the car fumes. I remember being shocked by it in Switzerland last year but Macedonia is even worse. It might be because more cars use diesel in Europe, but for fuck's sake, i live on a 6 lane road in a city of 7 plus million people with motorcycles and buses out the wazoo and it does not smell as bad as the parade of smoke-belching hot hatches screaming up and down the roads of Skopje.
Skopje is a car culture. It tricks you. If you visit the old town, it is the typical European old town with cobbled roads and walking streets and souvenir shops and icecream stands and all the usual tourist tat. Then you cross the bridge to the new center which has that typical Communist style faux-grand architecture and a big fountain and high rise apartments with parks in the middle and bakeries at the bottom like you would expect from a European city. But then if you venture a few more streets further out, it starts to get weirdly American. Shopping malls! And - as i discovered Saturday - full ass sprawling residential suburbs with single family homes and "sidewalks" that are entirely blocked by parked cars.
It's like a fake European city, as if the city planners put up some Disneyland version of Europe in the downtown area for the tourists, when in reality it's a sprawl behind the scenes. And that point got driven home when going out with local colleagues, and they got lost, because either they only visited the center of town occasionally, or they always drove there when they did. Very odd.
But there is a pretty castle overlooking the town, which i explored with a Taiwanese colleague that first Sunday. It was my favorite kind of castle - one which is free to get in and fairly run-down, so it actually feels legitimately old. You can imagine the history better when these places are crumbling and overgrown. Also, it reminded me of the ruins we used to hang out in as teenagers - great places to sneak up to at night for beers, joints and canoodling.
There is also a tall mountain on the south side of the river which has an absolutely massive fuck-off gigantic cross on top of it, one which lights up all night long. It's almost as if the Christians just wanted to rub it in the face of the Muslims on the north side of the river. No matter how tall the minarets, the cross will always be towering above everything else in the city. It is truly obnoxiously huge. Of course i had to go see it.
Saturday we were booked to do a team-building outing, but i was completely wiped out just from socializing. So instead i got up early and hiked through town to the base of the mountain, then started climbing. The first half of the mountain is a fairly popular trail that leads up to a cable car station. It takes about an hour to climb that half, and the trail was unpleasantly busy, although i'm still glad i took it over getting a bus. Then the second half you can pick from several different difficulty trails, and i correctly surmised that "Chinese grandpa difficulty" was going to be quieter than the others. By which i mean steep as a motherfucker. It was a hard slog, but it was relatively quiet and it felt absolutely fantastic to get to the top.
The cross is stupidly big. There are a couple cafés up there, and an even bigger swooshy modern lookout tower they are building next to it. The cafés were very overpriced, so instead i munched on a simit and sipped my water, sitting on a cliff looking south to the next damn mountain, and the villages in between.
One of the best things about Europe is that when you climb a mountain, there are trails going back down the other side that all lead to different villages. It's still a dream of mine to just take a pack and hike across Europe because i reckon you could cheerfully make it across the whole continent, wandering scenic countryside trails during the day and still finding a civilized hotel every night. But since my bag was back at the business hotel, i decided not to head down to the villages further south, and instead head west a bit and then back to Skopje proper through some other settlements.
Normally i prefer climbing up mountains to coming back down, but in this case the path down was great because it was deserted. I didn't see a soul until i was getting pretty close to what my map said was a monastery. I heard bells in the distance, getting louder and louder. I think i have lived in Asia too long because i immediately assumed it was some kind of praying thing. You know, there's bells, there's yelling, must be a temple nearby. Ding ding ding. Ding ding ding. Clink clank clonk. Ding ding. Here come the monks.
I turned around and there is a whole fucking herd of big horn cattle behind me. I nearly shat my pants. Then i nearly stod on a cow shit. What kind of Sound of Music fantasy am i living in where all the cows have actual cowbells around their necks?
I am terrified of any animal that can move faster than i can. And cows are fast as hell. They are also much heavier than me. So even without the giant horns that could pierce my flesh like a wet tissue, they could stomp me dead without a care in the world. Last time i got stuck behind water buffalo in Laos i climbed up beside the main path and tried to sneak through behind some brush so they wouldn't see me. This time the idiots were following me into a clearing, like i was Queen Moo of Moosville.
Thank God there was a cowboy coming up behind, holding a very long whip. He was not a monk. He yipped and yelled and the cows went the other direction. He didn't even acknowledge me, just bounded on down the path to the village like a goat himself.
And that was the sum total of my experience meeting a Macedonian cowboy. I am sure there is some kind of stereotype about these guys, because when i told my colleagues i really wanted to try тавче-гравче (tavče gravče) - a local bean dish - they joked that i must be a cowboy. Like, eating beans is far too yokel for my tech company-working, suburb-dwelling, car-driving colleagues, even if it is their national dish. (I did have the opportunity to eat it, by the way, and it was fantastic.)
Anywho, after my cow experience i continued on down the hill, and through a little mountainside village, and along some cobbledy roads, and then followed Open Street Maps to a meandering farm road that cut through what seemed like an overgrown wilderness until here and there the odd delapidated house or shabby field peaked through the brush. And then... out i popped in a thoroughly middle class suburb, surrounded by cars, and not a single pedestrian to be seen. Sigh.
I'm writing this from Thessaloniki, but this morning i had a last big Skopje adventure. I had read there was an old aqueduct in a rural-ish area to the north, and one which bizarrely nobody knows how long it has been there for. Is it Ottoman? Byzantine? Is it Roman? Nobody knows! How can you not know who built a fucking aqueduct hundreds of meters long? Can't you tell from the construction technique or materials? Apparently not. It's bananas. You get the sense that civilization just kinda came and went from Macedonia. Nobody bothered to write down a history. One conqueror rolled through, then another one, and whatever tribes hung out on the mountain didn't give much of a shit, and now there is a mysterious aqueduct perched in no man's land.
Of course i had to see it.
And it is in a weird part of town. You walk through a bunch of light industrial, then past what appears to be a military base, or maybe a former military base, and then some rural homes, and suddenly you're in the middle of a field and there is an aqueduct. Plonk. No signage. No tourists. It's amazing.
I was originally planning to get breakfast in the old town, since i knew that bakery and coffee shop i found on my first day, but as i wandered back into the town proper, i found myself in the most comfortable district i'd visited yet. North of the old town there are a bunch of highrises with parks in the middle and bakeries at the bottom, typical European design, and more lively than the same looking districts on the south side of the river.
It's obviously poorer. Playground equipment falling apart. But at least there's kids running around playing. Old men chatting over tea. Bakeries with lines out the door. And me in my tank top and tattoos hanging out like the antithesis of every modestly-dressed woman of the neighborhood... but i got service with a smile, sitting down at one of the coffee shops where a kid was smoking cigarettes and watching Premier League highlights between pulling espressos for this dopey-ass foreigner who walked halfway round the city before 9.
And i sat there, and i thought how much nicer my experiences had been north of the river. The kid at the little Syrian falafel place. My Albanian buddy who gave me his take on local politics on day one. That first hotel - featuring negative reviews like "they don't serve alcohol" and "it's in the ghetto" - where they treated me like a princess and gave me refreshing ice tea in a wine glass. The Turkish place where i tried a neat vege köfte i'd never had before. I mentioned the uncanny niceness to one of my expat/migrant colleagues during the week, and wondered if the Muslims in Skopje are just culturally friendly, or if that's a sort of face they have to put on precisely because they're an ethnic minority, so they need to be model citizens, same way we sometimes feel like we have to be in Taiwan.
It might also be that the Muslims just don't have hangovers to contend with. Dear lord, don't even get me started on the boozing that has been happening on this company trip. I know boozing is standard for business trips, but i feel like this has been worse than most. I mean, even when i was in my heavier drinking phases i still didn't go hard on weeknights during business trips, because you still need to fucking work next day. This time... man i almost wanted to punch one of my colleages in the face when he interrupted a conversation i was having and asked me to take it outside because my voice was too loud. Like... bro. You are the one who got so hammered last night you can't handle being around a work-related conversation. Go back to your hotel room like the other half of the gang who are either "working from bed" or still passed out. Fucking hell. I was furious, but also so bamboozled that someone could be so utterly self-centered and oblivious i stopped mid-sentence. I think i'm also especially self-conscious about my masculine voice, being trans, so that incident subsequently pissed me off for the rest of the morning and probably contributed to my decision not to go kayaking with this bunch of useless fucking amateurs who can't grimly suffer in silence like proper alcoholics.
Needless to say, i have had one beer and one Aperol spritz all week, and that already feels like too much. Take me back to the Albanian quarter, man. Fuckin, coffee and cigarettes with a smile each morning, nice cup of tea with dinner, kids playing and laughing. I cannot with this fake-ass alcohol-fueled socializing and subsequent next-day misery.
Ugh, anyway, i probably have a lot more to write about this new adventure in traveling mostly sober, not to mention the usual bitching about the blandness of European food, but i will leave that for later. It's almost midnight and i got a presentation to do tomorrow morning at 9am. And i am going to do it loudly, hell with the overhung. I just hope this hotel actually has coffee worth a damn. Oh, i just realized i didn't even get into my coffee woes. To be continued.
I ended up outside sitting on the stoop by the side of the road and smoking a cigarette because i just feel so out of place with this high class nonsense.
So let's talk about Skopje.
I have never been especially interested in eastern Europe, and every place i visited there - Czech, Croatia, Poland, Slovenia - quite happy to never visit again. East Germany is about as much eastern Europe as i can take. Although East Germany is marginally better because at least it has good bread and techno music. Macedonia does not.
Which isn't to say it's abysmal. It's okay.
Sunday morning i left my hotel and wandered the streets like a hobo looking for something to eat. Because Macedonia, like way too much of Europe, is pretty much useless to try to achieve anything on the weekend. Like, i appreciate work/life balance and everything, but as a visitor - and especially as a visiting worker who is on the clock Monday to Friday - it really sucks that you can't just go out and buy whatever you need at any time of the day or night, 7 days a week.
Suffice to say i was pretty grumpy that first morning. I did eventually find a bakery where i bought a simit, also known as a Turkish bagel in the US, and in Macedonia known as a ѓеврек (gevrek). I would eat a lot more simits in the next few days. I also found a coffee shop that was barely open, but there was one guy out the front nursing an espresso. I ordered a Turkish coffee.
The guy with the espresso was surprisingly chatty. Turns out i was in the Albanian quarter, and within just a few minutes he was regaling me with the full history of the Albanian people, from pre-history right through till today. He was clearly Albanian first, and slipped a couple times talking about "our land", before catching himself. "Well, no, i don't mean it like the land belongs to us and nobody else, it's just that historically..."
It was actually a great introduction to one of the big political issues in Macedonia. Well aside from the other big issues like the thing with Greece around whether the country should be called Macedonia or North Macedonia, and with Bulgaria around if Macedonian is even a real ethnicity at all. At the time of the conversation, i thought that it was just a proud Albanian guy sharing his culture - and perhaps it was - but then a bit later in the week one of my foreign colleagues was on the panel in a job interview where he shared that one of our Macedonian colleagues gave an immediate no after the interview specifically because the candidate was Albanian. A bit later i was talking to another colleague over coffee who volunteered without prompting "there's some ethnic tensions but personally i don't really care, i get along with everyone". That might be easier to say with the privilege of being in the majority ethnic group, of course.
So maybe there is something there, but having only spent a week in the country, and with most of that time working, i didn't really learn enough to have a strong sense of the situation. I can say one thing, though. South of the river is Christian and north of the river is Muslim. Sure, there are a few churches in the north and there are a few mosques in the south, but the split is hard to miss. To an outsider it does feel a little bit segregation-y.
And yet... did that make it uncomfortable to walk around? Not at all. It's not like they're pointing AK47s at each other. As my Albanian friend told me, Skopje is a safe and peaceful city, and that's why he loves it there. Of course he also told me that he worked in Afghanistan, so perhaps it's relative. But dude wasn't wrong. Skopje has around a half million people but it feels like an even smaller town than that.
It stinks, though. Dear lord, the first thing i noticed when i walked outside was the car fumes. I remember being shocked by it in Switzerland last year but Macedonia is even worse. It might be because more cars use diesel in Europe, but for fuck's sake, i live on a 6 lane road in a city of 7 plus million people with motorcycles and buses out the wazoo and it does not smell as bad as the parade of smoke-belching hot hatches screaming up and down the roads of Skopje.
Skopje is a car culture. It tricks you. If you visit the old town, it is the typical European old town with cobbled roads and walking streets and souvenir shops and icecream stands and all the usual tourist tat. Then you cross the bridge to the new center which has that typical Communist style faux-grand architecture and a big fountain and high rise apartments with parks in the middle and bakeries at the bottom like you would expect from a European city. But then if you venture a few more streets further out, it starts to get weirdly American. Shopping malls! And - as i discovered Saturday - full ass sprawling residential suburbs with single family homes and "sidewalks" that are entirely blocked by parked cars.
It's like a fake European city, as if the city planners put up some Disneyland version of Europe in the downtown area for the tourists, when in reality it's a sprawl behind the scenes. And that point got driven home when going out with local colleagues, and they got lost, because either they only visited the center of town occasionally, or they always drove there when they did. Very odd.
But there is a pretty castle overlooking the town, which i explored with a Taiwanese colleague that first Sunday. It was my favorite kind of castle - one which is free to get in and fairly run-down, so it actually feels legitimately old. You can imagine the history better when these places are crumbling and overgrown. Also, it reminded me of the ruins we used to hang out in as teenagers - great places to sneak up to at night for beers, joints and canoodling.
There is also a tall mountain on the south side of the river which has an absolutely massive fuck-off gigantic cross on top of it, one which lights up all night long. It's almost as if the Christians just wanted to rub it in the face of the Muslims on the north side of the river. No matter how tall the minarets, the cross will always be towering above everything else in the city. It is truly obnoxiously huge. Of course i had to go see it.
Saturday we were booked to do a team-building outing, but i was completely wiped out just from socializing. So instead i got up early and hiked through town to the base of the mountain, then started climbing. The first half of the mountain is a fairly popular trail that leads up to a cable car station. It takes about an hour to climb that half, and the trail was unpleasantly busy, although i'm still glad i took it over getting a bus. Then the second half you can pick from several different difficulty trails, and i correctly surmised that "Chinese grandpa difficulty" was going to be quieter than the others. By which i mean steep as a motherfucker. It was a hard slog, but it was relatively quiet and it felt absolutely fantastic to get to the top.
The cross is stupidly big. There are a couple cafés up there, and an even bigger swooshy modern lookout tower they are building next to it. The cafés were very overpriced, so instead i munched on a simit and sipped my water, sitting on a cliff looking south to the next damn mountain, and the villages in between.
One of the best things about Europe is that when you climb a mountain, there are trails going back down the other side that all lead to different villages. It's still a dream of mine to just take a pack and hike across Europe because i reckon you could cheerfully make it across the whole continent, wandering scenic countryside trails during the day and still finding a civilized hotel every night. But since my bag was back at the business hotel, i decided not to head down to the villages further south, and instead head west a bit and then back to Skopje proper through some other settlements.
Normally i prefer climbing up mountains to coming back down, but in this case the path down was great because it was deserted. I didn't see a soul until i was getting pretty close to what my map said was a monastery. I heard bells in the distance, getting louder and louder. I think i have lived in Asia too long because i immediately assumed it was some kind of praying thing. You know, there's bells, there's yelling, must be a temple nearby. Ding ding ding. Ding ding ding. Clink clank clonk. Ding ding. Here come the monks.
I turned around and there is a whole fucking herd of big horn cattle behind me. I nearly shat my pants. Then i nearly stod on a cow shit. What kind of Sound of Music fantasy am i living in where all the cows have actual cowbells around their necks?
I am terrified of any animal that can move faster than i can. And cows are fast as hell. They are also much heavier than me. So even without the giant horns that could pierce my flesh like a wet tissue, they could stomp me dead without a care in the world. Last time i got stuck behind water buffalo in Laos i climbed up beside the main path and tried to sneak through behind some brush so they wouldn't see me. This time the idiots were following me into a clearing, like i was Queen Moo of Moosville.
Thank God there was a cowboy coming up behind, holding a very long whip. He was not a monk. He yipped and yelled and the cows went the other direction. He didn't even acknowledge me, just bounded on down the path to the village like a goat himself.
And that was the sum total of my experience meeting a Macedonian cowboy. I am sure there is some kind of stereotype about these guys, because when i told my colleagues i really wanted to try тавче-гравче (tavče gravče) - a local bean dish - they joked that i must be a cowboy. Like, eating beans is far too yokel for my tech company-working, suburb-dwelling, car-driving colleagues, even if it is their national dish. (I did have the opportunity to eat it, by the way, and it was fantastic.)
Anywho, after my cow experience i continued on down the hill, and through a little mountainside village, and along some cobbledy roads, and then followed Open Street Maps to a meandering farm road that cut through what seemed like an overgrown wilderness until here and there the odd delapidated house or shabby field peaked through the brush. And then... out i popped in a thoroughly middle class suburb, surrounded by cars, and not a single pedestrian to be seen. Sigh.
I'm writing this from Thessaloniki, but this morning i had a last big Skopje adventure. I had read there was an old aqueduct in a rural-ish area to the north, and one which bizarrely nobody knows how long it has been there for. Is it Ottoman? Byzantine? Is it Roman? Nobody knows! How can you not know who built a fucking aqueduct hundreds of meters long? Can't you tell from the construction technique or materials? Apparently not. It's bananas. You get the sense that civilization just kinda came and went from Macedonia. Nobody bothered to write down a history. One conqueror rolled through, then another one, and whatever tribes hung out on the mountain didn't give much of a shit, and now there is a mysterious aqueduct perched in no man's land.
Of course i had to see it.
And it is in a weird part of town. You walk through a bunch of light industrial, then past what appears to be a military base, or maybe a former military base, and then some rural homes, and suddenly you're in the middle of a field and there is an aqueduct. Plonk. No signage. No tourists. It's amazing.
I was originally planning to get breakfast in the old town, since i knew that bakery and coffee shop i found on my first day, but as i wandered back into the town proper, i found myself in the most comfortable district i'd visited yet. North of the old town there are a bunch of highrises with parks in the middle and bakeries at the bottom, typical European design, and more lively than the same looking districts on the south side of the river.
It's obviously poorer. Playground equipment falling apart. But at least there's kids running around playing. Old men chatting over tea. Bakeries with lines out the door. And me in my tank top and tattoos hanging out like the antithesis of every modestly-dressed woman of the neighborhood... but i got service with a smile, sitting down at one of the coffee shops where a kid was smoking cigarettes and watching Premier League highlights between pulling espressos for this dopey-ass foreigner who walked halfway round the city before 9.
And i sat there, and i thought how much nicer my experiences had been north of the river. The kid at the little Syrian falafel place. My Albanian buddy who gave me his take on local politics on day one. That first hotel - featuring negative reviews like "they don't serve alcohol" and "it's in the ghetto" - where they treated me like a princess and gave me refreshing ice tea in a wine glass. The Turkish place where i tried a neat vege köfte i'd never had before. I mentioned the uncanny niceness to one of my expat/migrant colleagues during the week, and wondered if the Muslims in Skopje are just culturally friendly, or if that's a sort of face they have to put on precisely because they're an ethnic minority, so they need to be model citizens, same way we sometimes feel like we have to be in Taiwan.
It might also be that the Muslims just don't have hangovers to contend with. Dear lord, don't even get me started on the boozing that has been happening on this company trip. I know boozing is standard for business trips, but i feel like this has been worse than most. I mean, even when i was in my heavier drinking phases i still didn't go hard on weeknights during business trips, because you still need to fucking work next day. This time... man i almost wanted to punch one of my colleages in the face when he interrupted a conversation i was having and asked me to take it outside because my voice was too loud. Like... bro. You are the one who got so hammered last night you can't handle being around a work-related conversation. Go back to your hotel room like the other half of the gang who are either "working from bed" or still passed out. Fucking hell. I was furious, but also so bamboozled that someone could be so utterly self-centered and oblivious i stopped mid-sentence. I think i'm also especially self-conscious about my masculine voice, being trans, so that incident subsequently pissed me off for the rest of the morning and probably contributed to my decision not to go kayaking with this bunch of useless fucking amateurs who can't grimly suffer in silence like proper alcoholics.
Needless to say, i have had one beer and one Aperol spritz all week, and that already feels like too much. Take me back to the Albanian quarter, man. Fuckin, coffee and cigarettes with a smile each morning, nice cup of tea with dinner, kids playing and laughing. I cannot with this fake-ass alcohol-fueled socializing and subsequent next-day misery.
Ugh, anyway, i probably have a lot more to write about this new adventure in traveling mostly sober, not to mention the usual bitching about the blandness of European food, but i will leave that for later. It's almost midnight and i got a presentation to do tomorrow morning at 9am. And i am going to do it loudly, hell with the overhung. I just hope this hotel actually has coffee worth a damn. Oh, i just realized i didn't even get into my coffee woes. To be continued.