Turns out we had been pronouncing Skopje wrong the whole time. At first, we were literally saying "Skop-gee" which in hindsight was a bit dumb as most of these countries have a 'y' sound for their 'j's. After that, we started calling it "Skop-ee-ay". This too wasn't quite right - what we needed was more of a "Shkop-ee-ah".
I had researched and found a walking tour that started at 10am in the main part of the city. We got up nice and early to make ourselves some scrambled eggs and encountered our first problem. We couldn't figure out at all how to make the hot plate work. It was electric, and when we pressed the buttons it would only make an irritating beeping sound, not get hot, and not do anything. While Dan made it beep some more, I took to google to see if it was possible to scramble eggs in the microwave.
My dear friends, the answer is yes, you can scramble eggs in the microwave (you can actually do anything in the microwave) and it surprisingly turns out quite well! This is a new skill I have added to my list of achievements. While there, I wondered if you could cook mushrooms in the microwave, and google provided again.
So I threw the mushrooms into the microwave for a few minutes, and voila, out they popped, soggy but somewhat cook. Success. Next, the beaten eggs into a mug. Into the microwave, 45 seconds, stir, and repeat until cooked. Well, after the second lot of this, I opened the microwave to find a giant mushroom cloud of egg trying to escape out of the top of the mug. I couldn't stop giggling. Turns out the air underneath had pushed the egg mass right up, so after I poked it with a fork it started to deflate. I was able to break it up a bit in the mug and serve. And so we had a tasty hot breakfast, a la the microwave!
But here came our second problem of the morning - the sink. All the night before, the sink would make "glugging" noises when a neighbour would turn on their taps. It was annoying. Anyway, this morning, at one point while Dan was kindly washing the dishes, he opened up the cupboard for the bin and noticed it was flooded. That would explain the glug glug noise.
Obviously this stressed Dan out a bit while he went into damage control, trying to mop up the mess. We got it to an acceptable level (and I tried to un-war-zone the apartment) and messaged the manager to let him know. He said he would fix it while we were out, so that was easy - but meant we had to rush to get to the walking tour.
It took us about 15 minutes to get to the Memorial House of Mother Teresa where the walking tour began, and it was interesting to see how the housing and buildings changed as you got closer to the centre. Less rural, that's for sure!
We found the memorial house pretty easily enough - there was a big statue of Mother Teresa in front of it, and in front of that was a man wearing a lanyard. This must be our guide. We were blown away by his greeting and his energy - Miha (pronounced Mika) was simply bounding with it.
He began the tour. "Wars have been started in 3 minutes. We should be able to have a friendship in 3 hours!" He assured us that being late in the Balkans is fine - if you are in a rush then something has to be wrong! He also apologised for the driving. "Something is wrong with our drivers," he said.
The tour lasted about 3 hours and we covered the breadth and width of Skopje - ancient, middle and current history. He told us that the main street had changed names 6 times in the last 90 years, and of a disabled woman who had lived her entire life never leaving her apartment - but had had to change address 4 times in her life due.
I can't go into the complex history of it all, but essentially Macedonia is currently in battles to have the name Macedonia. It's official name is Former Yugoslavian Republic of Macedonia (FYROM for short), although internally of course they call it just Macedonia or Republic of Macedonia. Having to drag around "Yugoslavia" all the time must be quite awful! The reason for this has some thing to do with Greece - many Greeks call themselves "Macedonian" referring to the area, not the country, and so Greece want them to change the name to at least North Macedonia. The battle continues.
Skopje is known for one major thing - and unfortunately (for the locals, at least) it overshadows almost any other achievement or fact of importance. Skopje is full of statues. Now, I had known this before I went there, that there were a lot of statues but until you actually experience how many statues there are, you can't quite fathom just how...many...statues...a...city...can...have. Imagine that person who collects cow figurines, for instance, and starts to run out of places to put them... It's pretty incredible. As our guide said, we became addicted to making statues!
Project Skopje 2014 has a lot to do with this, and not very many locals are happy about it. I wouldn't have been either. So many millions of euros have been poured into this project, with little to show for it. As different parties come into power, Skopje 2014 continues, with further construction and deconstruction of previous construction.
'Skopje is copy/paste,' our guide said. 'Our former mayor would visit a city, and next thing we knew, we had it's major landmark!" There's the famous bull that lives outside of every major stock exchange in the world - except in Skopje, it's outside a shoe shop. Here's the beginning of construction of the Skopje Eye, reminiscent of the London Eye. Oh, and here's our Arch, like the Arc to Triumph, except we haven't won any battles so we'll just put some important pictures on it... and finally,
"Please, please pray for me," Miha said, at which point I thought he was going to go into the spiel about receiving tips as this was a free tour, "please pray. Please pray that our mayor doesn't go to Venice! We'll get rid of the roads and have gondolas everywhere!"
He said that soon, there will be no need to go anywhere else in Europe - all the major landmarks will be right here in Skopje.
At the beginning of the tour, he said that some stray dogs may join us, but they are harmless to humans but will chase cars and bikes. At the beginning of the tour, a groovy little terrier bitser joined us, and would wait just a little way off until we started walking again, trotting to keep up. By the middle of the tour, we had a convoy of 6 dogs ranging in sizes. And the really did attack cars and bikes.
At first this made us laugh a lot - the moment a bike went past, all the dogs would race after it and try to bite the wheels (much to the disgust of the bike owner). A car would go past and they would all race after it and try to grab the wheels, barking furiously. It was all quite funny until one got injured (I think his paw was run over), which put an end to our laughing.
By now, we had seen a multitude of statues, many of which had no real rhyme or reason. "This here, is Chelsea Girl. No one knows why she is here." W arrived in the main square and in front of us stood possibly the most magnificent fountain I have ever seen. It was enormous, and had water cascading from the top of a large bowl, which sat underneath a man on a horse. Underneath the plinth stood another ring of statues, at their base the water was like a de-mister, making a lovely white glow. Around the outside stood lions with jets coming out of their mouths, and more jets were spewing towards the centre. It was magnificent.
It also cost 8.2 million euros. €8.2 million. How many mouths could that feed? How many houses could that build? Obviously our guide was less than impressed by this, and we were rather agape ourselves. The statue is officially called Warrior on a Horse, and it depicts Alexander the Great. It's the tallest Alexander the Great monument in the world. Which cost €8.2 million euros.
Our guide pointed out more and more statues - it became absurd. He pointed to a ring of statues at the top of each building in a row and said that seeing as they are so far away and it's impossible to tell who they are, they are probably the statue maker's hairdresser, maybe the butcher... They really got addicted to making statues.
At one point on the tour, I may have put our photo karma into jeopardy. I'm usually pretty happy to take photos of people, but when I'm trying to take a photo and a phone is shoved in my face with a, "Take photo" and her walking into my way, I get a bit annoyed. I took some shitty photos of her, told her she messed up my photo, hoping she wouldn't talk to me again. I was wrong. At the next stop, she did the same - shoved her photo towards me. I kept telling her she was too close I couldn't fit everything in. In the end I just took some photos and avoided her - she literally worked her way through the whole tour group and by the end there was no one to ask anymore as I think she'd pissed everyone off!
I can't go through everything we saw on the tour, but we also spent some time learning about Mother Teresa who was born into an ethnically Albanian family in Skopje. She is probably Macedonia's biggest...celebrity?...well known person, and so they revere her (which is also understandable, she was remarkable).
At the slightly-after-midway-point, we stopped in a local cafe/restaurant as is quite usual. Next thing we know, Miha was asking us if we drink alcohol, and plops a full shot of rakia down in front of us. Ok! Well, this is apparently happening! Dan and I were sitting with a guy from Bulgaria as well as two who came from England, and we said Nostravia! and tried to down the shot.
Now I've been sick for a while, my voice is all husky, and they say that this stuff cures all ills! I had my shot, shuddered for a while (actually, it wasn't as bad as I expected), while the Brits tried to drink theirs but ultimately had a hard time of it. Miha came around again and asked if anyone wanted a second, I just said ok sure, one for us each! With Dan looking at me like I was nuts. Down the hatch went the second shot, and it was time to make our move up to the fortress.
At the conclusion of the tour, Miha helped take us back to the restaurant where we had the shots saying it was very good and they won't try to overcharge you because you're a tourist. Some other people in the group had said it was good too, and when we arrived about 6 people from the tour were already there! Dan and I took a seat, and one of the dogs sat underneath my legs. He thought Miha was the Alpha Dog and would follow him everywhere!
At the restaurant, called Kaj Seradot, we ordered a feast of local food. The baked beans, the sharska burger, shopska salad and some bread with cheese. We didn't end up getting the bread with cheese (as we found out later) but the rest was presented on a large platter and it was truly divine. Especially the burger! (it's not an actual burger with bread, it's the patty). We had some beers and the total sum of our meal came to about €10 with tip.
From here, we wandered around the Old Bazaar area for a while. The restaurant is officially in the Old Bazaar, but there are also winding maze-line streets as well, lined with shops, that converge on a giant square. The square was full of stalls, and beyond that was a fruit and veg market. It got really overwhelming, so we were glad to pop back into the maze-like streets over the stalls. We grabbed an icecream (literally 30c per scoop!) and continued wandering, taking photos.
As my cold was getting the better of me, and I'd had a shitty night's sleep due to coughing fits, we went back to the accomm to regroup a bit. I had a nap, and we spent some time working on repacking our luggage - we were already going to be leaving the next day. Now we had a full bag of clean clothes though, it warranted a repack to be more sensible and we could work out what we haven't really been using to put into the more difficult to reach compartments and what we needed easily into the easier to reach compartments.
We ate the other pastry that we had bought the night before and made another salad, topped off with the rest of the wine that we had left over. I had seen pictures of the fountain at night, so we thought it might be nice to see the city at night time so once we were finished eating, we grabbed our camera gear and headed out, back to the city centre along the water front.
The night had cooled off but it was still really lovely and not cold. We stopped periodically to take pictures - I had my tripod with me too, and eventually we reached the square with Warrior on a Horse. As soon as both Dan and I had completed setting up - - - the water and the lighting show stopped. It was 10.30pm. What a waste. We stood there, not sure what to do, looking around for a few minutes, and shooting in the other direction when suddenly, BLUE and WATER - it started again! It must have just come to the end of a cycle.
We spent some time here - there weren't too many people around this late, and got some nice photos before calling it a night. No fly tennis tonight back at the apartment thankfully, so it was easy to settle in to bed.
Til next time,
xx
I had researched and found a walking tour that started at 10am in the main part of the city. We got up nice and early to make ourselves some scrambled eggs and encountered our first problem. We couldn't figure out at all how to make the hot plate work. It was electric, and when we pressed the buttons it would only make an irritating beeping sound, not get hot, and not do anything. While Dan made it beep some more, I took to google to see if it was possible to scramble eggs in the microwave.
My dear friends, the answer is yes, you can scramble eggs in the microwave (you can actually do anything in the microwave) and it surprisingly turns out quite well! This is a new skill I have added to my list of achievements. While there, I wondered if you could cook mushrooms in the microwave, and google provided again.
So I threw the mushrooms into the microwave for a few minutes, and voila, out they popped, soggy but somewhat cook. Success. Next, the beaten eggs into a mug. Into the microwave, 45 seconds, stir, and repeat until cooked. Well, after the second lot of this, I opened the microwave to find a giant mushroom cloud of egg trying to escape out of the top of the mug. I couldn't stop giggling. Turns out the air underneath had pushed the egg mass right up, so after I poked it with a fork it started to deflate. I was able to break it up a bit in the mug and serve. And so we had a tasty hot breakfast, a la the microwave!
But here came our second problem of the morning - the sink. All the night before, the sink would make "glugging" noises when a neighbour would turn on their taps. It was annoying. Anyway, this morning, at one point while Dan was kindly washing the dishes, he opened up the cupboard for the bin and noticed it was flooded. That would explain the glug glug noise.
Obviously this stressed Dan out a bit while he went into damage control, trying to mop up the mess. We got it to an acceptable level (and I tried to un-war-zone the apartment) and messaged the manager to let him know. He said he would fix it while we were out, so that was easy - but meant we had to rush to get to the walking tour.
It took us about 15 minutes to get to the Memorial House of Mother Teresa where the walking tour began, and it was interesting to see how the housing and buildings changed as you got closer to the centre. Less rural, that's for sure!
We found the memorial house pretty easily enough - there was a big statue of Mother Teresa in front of it, and in front of that was a man wearing a lanyard. This must be our guide. We were blown away by his greeting and his energy - Miha (pronounced Mika) was simply bounding with it.
He began the tour. "Wars have been started in 3 minutes. We should be able to have a friendship in 3 hours!" He assured us that being late in the Balkans is fine - if you are in a rush then something has to be wrong! He also apologised for the driving. "Something is wrong with our drivers," he said.
The tour lasted about 3 hours and we covered the breadth and width of Skopje - ancient, middle and current history. He told us that the main street had changed names 6 times in the last 90 years, and of a disabled woman who had lived her entire life never leaving her apartment - but had had to change address 4 times in her life due.
I can't go into the complex history of it all, but essentially Macedonia is currently in battles to have the name Macedonia. It's official name is Former Yugoslavian Republic of Macedonia (FYROM for short), although internally of course they call it just Macedonia or Republic of Macedonia. Having to drag around "Yugoslavia" all the time must be quite awful! The reason for this has some thing to do with Greece - many Greeks call themselves "Macedonian" referring to the area, not the country, and so Greece want them to change the name to at least North Macedonia. The battle continues.
Skopje is known for one major thing - and unfortunately (for the locals, at least) it overshadows almost any other achievement or fact of importance. Skopje is full of statues. Now, I had known this before I went there, that there were a lot of statues but until you actually experience how many statues there are, you can't quite fathom just how...many...statues...a...city...can...have. Imagine that person who collects cow figurines, for instance, and starts to run out of places to put them... It's pretty incredible. As our guide said, we became addicted to making statues!
Project Skopje 2014 has a lot to do with this, and not very many locals are happy about it. I wouldn't have been either. So many millions of euros have been poured into this project, with little to show for it. As different parties come into power, Skopje 2014 continues, with further construction and deconstruction of previous construction.
'Skopje is copy/paste,' our guide said. 'Our former mayor would visit a city, and next thing we knew, we had it's major landmark!" There's the famous bull that lives outside of every major stock exchange in the world - except in Skopje, it's outside a shoe shop. Here's the beginning of construction of the Skopje Eye, reminiscent of the London Eye. Oh, and here's our Arch, like the Arc to Triumph, except we haven't won any battles so we'll just put some important pictures on it... and finally,
"Please, please pray for me," Miha said, at which point I thought he was going to go into the spiel about receiving tips as this was a free tour, "please pray. Please pray that our mayor doesn't go to Venice! We'll get rid of the roads and have gondolas everywhere!"
He said that soon, there will be no need to go anywhere else in Europe - all the major landmarks will be right here in Skopje.
At the beginning of the tour, he said that some stray dogs may join us, but they are harmless to humans but will chase cars and bikes. At the beginning of the tour, a groovy little terrier bitser joined us, and would wait just a little way off until we started walking again, trotting to keep up. By the middle of the tour, we had a convoy of 6 dogs ranging in sizes. And the really did attack cars and bikes.
 |
| Some of our doggy contingent. |
At first this made us laugh a lot - the moment a bike went past, all the dogs would race after it and try to bite the wheels (much to the disgust of the bike owner). A car would go past and they would all race after it and try to grab the wheels, barking furiously. It was all quite funny until one got injured (I think his paw was run over), which put an end to our laughing.
By now, we had seen a multitude of statues, many of which had no real rhyme or reason. "This here, is Chelsea Girl. No one knows why she is here." W arrived in the main square and in front of us stood possibly the most magnificent fountain I have ever seen. It was enormous, and had water cascading from the top of a large bowl, which sat underneath a man on a horse. Underneath the plinth stood another ring of statues, at their base the water was like a de-mister, making a lovely white glow. Around the outside stood lions with jets coming out of their mouths, and more jets were spewing towards the centre. It was magnificent.
It also cost 8.2 million euros. €8.2 million. How many mouths could that feed? How many houses could that build? Obviously our guide was less than impressed by this, and we were rather agape ourselves. The statue is officially called Warrior on a Horse, and it depicts Alexander the Great. It's the tallest Alexander the Great monument in the world. Which cost €8.2 million euros.
Our guide pointed out more and more statues - it became absurd. He pointed to a ring of statues at the top of each building in a row and said that seeing as they are so far away and it's impossible to tell who they are, they are probably the statue maker's hairdresser, maybe the butcher... They really got addicted to making statues.
At one point on the tour, I may have put our photo karma into jeopardy. I'm usually pretty happy to take photos of people, but when I'm trying to take a photo and a phone is shoved in my face with a, "Take photo" and her walking into my way, I get a bit annoyed. I took some shitty photos of her, told her she messed up my photo, hoping she wouldn't talk to me again. I was wrong. At the next stop, she did the same - shoved her photo towards me. I kept telling her she was too close I couldn't fit everything in. In the end I just took some photos and avoided her - she literally worked her way through the whole tour group and by the end there was no one to ask anymore as I think she'd pissed everyone off!
I can't go through everything we saw on the tour, but we also spent some time learning about Mother Teresa who was born into an ethnically Albanian family in Skopje. She is probably Macedonia's biggest...celebrity?...well known person, and so they revere her (which is also understandable, she was remarkable).
At the slightly-after-midway-point, we stopped in a local cafe/restaurant as is quite usual. Next thing we know, Miha was asking us if we drink alcohol, and plops a full shot of rakia down in front of us. Ok! Well, this is apparently happening! Dan and I were sitting with a guy from Bulgaria as well as two who came from England, and we said Nostravia! and tried to down the shot.
Now I've been sick for a while, my voice is all husky, and they say that this stuff cures all ills! I had my shot, shuddered for a while (actually, it wasn't as bad as I expected), while the Brits tried to drink theirs but ultimately had a hard time of it. Miha came around again and asked if anyone wanted a second, I just said ok sure, one for us each! With Dan looking at me like I was nuts. Down the hatch went the second shot, and it was time to make our move up to the fortress.
At the conclusion of the tour, Miha helped take us back to the restaurant where we had the shots saying it was very good and they won't try to overcharge you because you're a tourist. Some other people in the group had said it was good too, and when we arrived about 6 people from the tour were already there! Dan and I took a seat, and one of the dogs sat underneath my legs. He thought Miha was the Alpha Dog and would follow him everywhere!
At the restaurant, called Kaj Seradot, we ordered a feast of local food. The baked beans, the sharska burger, shopska salad and some bread with cheese. We didn't end up getting the bread with cheese (as we found out later) but the rest was presented on a large platter and it was truly divine. Especially the burger! (it's not an actual burger with bread, it's the patty). We had some beers and the total sum of our meal came to about €10 with tip.
From here, we wandered around the Old Bazaar area for a while. The restaurant is officially in the Old Bazaar, but there are also winding maze-line streets as well, lined with shops, that converge on a giant square. The square was full of stalls, and beyond that was a fruit and veg market. It got really overwhelming, so we were glad to pop back into the maze-like streets over the stalls. We grabbed an icecream (literally 30c per scoop!) and continued wandering, taking photos.
As my cold was getting the better of me, and I'd had a shitty night's sleep due to coughing fits, we went back to the accomm to regroup a bit. I had a nap, and we spent some time working on repacking our luggage - we were already going to be leaving the next day. Now we had a full bag of clean clothes though, it warranted a repack to be more sensible and we could work out what we haven't really been using to put into the more difficult to reach compartments and what we needed easily into the easier to reach compartments.
We ate the other pastry that we had bought the night before and made another salad, topped off with the rest of the wine that we had left over. I had seen pictures of the fountain at night, so we thought it might be nice to see the city at night time so once we were finished eating, we grabbed our camera gear and headed out, back to the city centre along the water front.
The night had cooled off but it was still really lovely and not cold. We stopped periodically to take pictures - I had my tripod with me too, and eventually we reached the square with Warrior on a Horse. As soon as both Dan and I had completed setting up - - - the water and the lighting show stopped. It was 10.30pm. What a waste. We stood there, not sure what to do, looking around for a few minutes, and shooting in the other direction when suddenly, BLUE and WATER - it started again! It must have just come to the end of a cycle.
We spent some time here - there weren't too many people around this late, and got some nice photos before calling it a night. No fly tennis tonight back at the apartment thankfully, so it was easy to settle in to bed.
Til next time,
xx
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