Monday we woke up very early in the morning, in order to catch the 6:30 bus to Ohrid, a six hour ride from Kocani. The bus ride was pretty average. There was your standard Macedonian guy who was afraid of “the draft” coming from the window, and took each departing passenger as a sign that he had another window to close, until ours was the only window still pumping fresh air into the bus. It was a real showdown, as we were the only passengers left. He made it clear he was dissatisfied with the situation by giving us the occasional evil eye, and turning up his collar to protect the back of his neck from certain windy doom. This behavior is in sharp contrast to earlier in the trip, when he would ask the surrounding passengers if they could aim their little air blowers at him, because (I assume) he was hot.
While we were at one of the stops along the trip, Shayne ran into a Peace Corps volunteer. She is serving currently, and is in the group that Shayne helped train just before leaving to return to the states. They had a good amount of catching up to do, and did so. Shayne was also nice enough to share some of the goodies that she had brought as gifts for the Peace Corps Volunteers. It’s funny to see someone get so excited about peanut butter cups.
Ohrid is a very beautiful place to visit. The old part of the city was where we stayed, in a small hotel reminiscent of a converted house or mansion. From there, we had a very good view of Lake Ohrid, and most of the city. Our location was perfect, and we were very near to several of the sights we would later see. The first night we were there, we settled into the hotel, and then headed down the winding cobbled streets to the commercial area of Old Ohrid, near the lake. We needed to do some work at the Internet Café, and we kind of checked things out. Later we had dinner at a restaurant called Belvedere. It was nice, they served traditional Macedonian. The atmosphere was cozy, and in the right circumstances romantic. There were few people dining, something that can probably be attributed to the fact that we arrived a solid week or so ahead of the bum rush of vacationers for the summer. After work and dinner, we rounded off the evening at Gino’s where we got some seriously good ice cream. Throughout the day, we encountered bouts of rain. We walked the old town a while, and as we were headed to one of the churches that we wanted to visit, it started to seriously downpour. We used our rudimentary sense of where the hell we were, and decided (thank you Shayne) to stick to the route that we had come by, and got back to the hotel not too worse for the wear. The thing about Ohrid is that, if you were to look at a map, the streets look like someone spilled some pasta on the ground next to a puddle, so I would estimate that our dryness was directly affected by the lack of a standard grid pattern of streets. For a bit of night life, we planned a rendezvous with a friend of Shayne’s at a café. Shayne met Ivan when she first got back from Macedonia, and got a job at Olive Garden. Ivan has since come home to Macedonia, and we were lucky enough to catch him when we were in Ohrid. I had only gotten very surface impressions of the dude the once or twice that I met him in the states, but having spent a few hours with him buying us drinks (a feat most unnecessary, especially considering he was jobless – bad economy and all), I can say that he’s a really nice guy and fun to hang out with. It seems to be a trend with these Macedonians. It’s tough to find one you don’t like. A funny aside to meeting up with Ivan: Shayne arranged over the phone with him to meet at the “Old Tree” near the center in Ohrid. Having waited a while, she eventually got a call from Ivan asking where we were. When we told him we were by the tree, a funny thing happened. Apparently there are several old trees in Ohrid, and we had chosen different ones. Luckily as we walked to meet each other, Ivan spotted my foreign clothes from far away, and we proceeded to get our fun on.
Tuesday we arose with the intention of hitting certain sights in a certain order. Weather, time, and other factors soon realigned our priorities, and we chose a different path than originally intended. Some things, it became clear, would be best experienced on another trip for the future. That decided, we hiked up to the Fortress, and thanks to the placement of our little hotel, we were nearly halfway there when we started. The fortress was a pretty cool experience. I’ve never been in any kind of stronghold, so this was a good place to start. It was built in the 11th century, and has a good history to it. In addition to the history and fortressness of it, it provided a stunning view of Ohrid and the lake. For lunch, we went to Gino’s for some pizza. Shayne’s claim that it was the Ohrid authority on pizza was well founded, and I had a really good lunch.
Nothing magical happened on the bus ride to Skopje. We got to Skopje in one piece (well, two of us… one piece each.) We hopped the bus to Shayne’s friend Rachel’s place, where we would be crashing during our stay in Skopje. Rachel was a Peace Corps member that served at the same time as Shayne, and stayed in the country to work as a teacher after her service was through. We settled in a little, and then headed out with Rachel to grab some dinner. We ate at the Mexican restaurant in Macedonia, and it was predictably substandard by American standards. But as Shayne pointed out, for someone who has been in a Mexican food drought for nearly three years, it’s damn authentic. From that perspective, it does well to act as an oasis for any traveler with a yen for some serious burrito action. On a cute note, as with chips and salsa in most Mexican restaurants, this place served us some croutons seasoned with taco seasoning combined with some salsa. It was a noble effort, but again fell short when considering that there were maybe a dozen croutons total.
