Monday, September 11, 2006

quickie: alive and well in makedonia

the bus trip was 17 hrs, but somehow they went by smoothly and quickly! I would have never believed it... Eurolines service gets my kudos. Belgrade is an interesting town, still recovering from the war in places, and it is a mixture of extreme poverty (gypsies mostly), old grandeur, and modern life. We were there only one night, so we saw very little, but we plan to dedicate some days to it again towards the end of our trip.

This morning we rented a car and made our way to Makedonia, aaaall the way to Ohrid. The only warning we had for the trip was to avoid Kosovo at all costs, and to park overnight in garages (a car with serbian plates can get pinpointed by certain locals...). So we first headed to Skopje using a combination of highway and mountain roads that circumvented the area, then we looked for the next highway to keep going south, to Ohrid. We got on this tiny road, figured it was an underdeveloped section of the country... and all of a sudden one of the guys reads a sign: "Kforce border patrol 1.5 Km" (I'll get back to you on the actual spelling of "Kforce", I forget what it actually was...)and asks us "Kforce? What does the Kosovo military have to do with this zone? Aren't we in Makedonia?" We suddenly realized we had taken a *very* wrong turn north and had headed straight for disaster! We did a quick u-turn and high-tailed outta there. No harm, no foul. But a nice scare to wake us up after the long, boring drive we had gone through.

We reached Ohrid late, found our hostel with some difficulty, but were pleased by the contrast of quality with the hotel we had in Belgrade. That one was a filthy, broken-down, almost scary place. Here, instead, things are run by a family, it smells nice, and even though when u look closely the bathroom is a bit yucky, overall the presentation is so much nicer!

Mistakes not to repeat: even though the languages are similar, do not use any serbian words in Makedonia! Ppl seem to get quite irate and dangerously unamicable when they think you are serbian... So we are defaulting to English, but try to make sure they understand we are Italian. That seems safe... Ah, and learning the cyrillic alhabet comes in very handy... I can muddle my way through it now!

We are keeping a communal offline diary with all the coolest adventures and things, so I'll have plenty to write about when I have a longer chance. Toodles until then!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hey.. que dicha ue lo lograste!!!!... :P