Tuesday, 30 March 2010

 

Start: Skopje (MK) 09:00

Arrival: Bitola (MK) 19:00

Total: 312 km

 

 

 

 

The next morning, my hand still hurt and I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to drive like this. On our travels, I’m usually the driver and my sister the co-pilot. That way, we each do what we love and what we’re best at. An ideal symbiosis. Sonia offered to drive and I resigned myself to wrestling with the maps. But first, we had an excellent breakfast and a chat with our concierge. We had read that the roads in rural Macedonia could be very bumpy and that in some high-up places, there was snow even in early spring. Therefore, we had given up on our plan to visit Kruševo. I didn’t feel like being stuck in snow on a mountainous mud track. But the concierge assured us that the road to Kruševo was asphalted and that it didn’t take long at all to drive the 30 kilometers from Prilep to the little mountain town. He wasn’t overly worried about snow, either. No wonder, with Skopje basking in the spring sun, it was hard to imagine that a few dozen kilometers to the south, the weather could be radically different. I decided to trust the man who had guided me so perfectly into the underground garage two days before, and so we set out on an adventurous day in mountainous Macedonia.

 

But first, we had to find our way out of Skopje. Experience told me that getting out of a city is always easier than getting in, so we simply followed the signs for the highway and sped along Skopje’s broad avenues. We were in an excellent mood, pointing out landmarks that we had visited the day before, already feeling at home in this beautiful city. I spotted the sign for Kumanovo and expertly changed lanes, in my mind already preparing to take a right at the next major crossing. Traffic was indeed very light in this capital. I enter an intersection and all of a sudden, a car comes at me from the left. I jump on the brakes, he swerves just millimeters to the left and manages to pass me, no harm done. More cars are following on his heels, but they slow down and so I accelerate and get the hell out of this crossroad. When we’re safely on the other side, I deeply exhale and drive on, but this time a tad less fast. “You burnt a red light,” Sonia pointed out. “Don’t do that again.” But actually, I had not burnt a red light. The lights weren’t working, and as there had not been any red light, my subconscious had interpreted this as a go-ahead. The traffic warden didn’t seem to have realized what had happened, so we drove on, unhindered. I thought back about the supposedly crazy Balkan drivers in the travel blogs I’ve read. “That guy had good reflexes,” I mused. Sonia agreed. “And he didn’t even honk.” She looked at me quizzically. “By the way, how’s your hand?” I had completely forgotten about my hand! We had taken our usual places in the car, and, as I’m never happier than behind a steering wheel, I had forgotten all about my plight. “Better, I think.” I tried to bend it at odd angles. Well, that still hurt, but then, no-one was asking me to do any magician’s tricks just yet.

 

 

 

From the ringroad, we took the highway to the south. We debated our plans for the day. Originally, we had wanted to visit the Roman excavations at Stobi, then the fortress of count Marko in Prilep, and finally head towards Pelister national park where we had booked a hotel for the night. But after our chat with the receptionist, Kruševo, the mountain town of revolutionary fame, looked tantalisingly feasible as well. “Let’s forget about Stobi,” we finally agreed. What’s yet another Roman bath, virtually identical to the many we had already seen in Portugal, Spain, France and Italy, compared to Kruševo. That was settled, then.

 

Thirty kilometers south of Veles, the beautiful and blissfully uncrowded new highway ended. As it so happened, it ended in the vicinity of Stobi. We had to turn west towards Prilep, and the sign for Stobi pointed vaguely in the same direction. We decided to let fate decide: should the Roman excavations lie straight on our route, we would make a quick stop there, nevertheless. If not, then not. Off the highway, the overland route meandered beautifully through fields and orchards. The asphalting was ok, though we did encounter the odd pothole along the way. For the most part, the road was comparable to what you might expect in rural areas in Western Europe as well. Traffic was blissfully light and the locals drove rather slowly.

 

We didn’t see another road sign for Stobi, so we barred that destination from our minds and concentrated on getting to Prilep. After a while, nature called, and as we had to refuel our car anyway, we stopped at a gas-station along the way. A boy came out to fill the tank up for us, and upon my enquiry, he pointed me to a room behind the gas-station. I followed his directions and located a tiny tiled cubicle with a washbasin and a roll of toilet paper. A battered old door led to an even tinier cubicle with the kind of toilet that you still find, unfortunately, all over southern Europe: a ceramic platform with a hole in the ground. The place looked reasonably clean, even though there were a few suspicious puddles on the floor. But no spiders or arthropods of the more worrisome kind seemed to call the place home, so I grudgingly resolved myself to my fate. I pulled the door close and realised that it didn’t have any key. Nor a latch, for that matter. Actually, the door didn’t even close properly. As soon as I pulled it shut, it slowly creaked open again, as if pushed by a ghost. I sighed. This felt like a scene straight out of my own novel. Realising that peeing under these conditions wouldn’t work anyway, I did what any woman in my situation would have done: I went to fetch my sister to stand guard.

 

Meanwhile, Sonia had a curious encounter of her own. When I got back to the car, she just came out of the service station. “Guess what,” she said, “I just had the strangest experience.” Me too, I thought, and squeezed my sphincter shut. “I went in to pay for the fuel,” she babbled on, happily oblivious to my urethral torment. “I paid with my credit card, but then the guy refuses to give me the receipt. Instead he points at my wallet and says: Paper – 10 euro.” Uhu. I nodded sympathetically and pulled her towards the toilet. This story can wait, I have to urinate. Back at the cubicle, I made her promise to stand guard outside and keep the door shut. Then I turned my attention to problem number two. Because fact is, I cannot squat. I never understood how women manage to urinate in a more or less standing position without ruining their jeans. So I unlaced one of my sneakers and wriggled out of my trousers. That however was easier said than done, because all around me, everything was sort of wet. The floor, the tiles and of course the ominous hole in the ground. I gingerly placed my foot on a not-too-icky looking spot and tried to somehow simultaneously keep my balance, my trouser legs off the floor and my shoe laces out of the puddles. Not surprisingly, I did not manage to pee in these conditions.

 

“Can I go on with my story?” Sonia asked through the door. I grunted a yes, and she resumed: “So, he says: Paper – 10 euro. I don’t know what he wants, I mean, he cannot want 10 euros just for the receipt, can he? After all, I had already paid for the petrol! But he keeps insisting. I have a mind of just leaving, when he takes a heap of one-euro coins out of the cashier and points again at my wallet: Paper. And then I get it: he wants to exchange his coins for a ten-euro bill. I suppose he can’t exchange the coins at a bank here in Macedonia. So we swap our money and he grins happily and I’m happy too. And I’m thinking: why do we always fear that people want to rip us off? We keep running into really friendly people, and still we keep being suspicious. Why is that?” Why indeed? I grimaced, desperately willing my bladder to relax. “Are you okay?” Sonia asked sympathetically. “No,” I moaned, close to tears. I tried to get into a less uncomfortable position and, pluff, my shoelaces landed squat in the deepest puddle. Shit! Pee, more like it, I thought, and started giggling. “You’re not losing your mind in there, are you?” my sister asked worriedly. Quite possible, quite possible. By then I didn’t care about my shoes anymore, they were soaked through anyhow.

 

 

 

After what seemed like an eternity, I finally emerged from the cubicle, utterly relieved in more than one sense. In the car, I quickly put on new shoes and we resumed our journey. Prilep is a small town in central Macedonia. Its main attraction are Markovi Kuli, the Towers of Marko, a Medieval fortress on top of a high hill overlooking the town. But first, we wanted to grab a bite. We parked the car close to a hospital, and walked the few paces to the town centre.

 

In the town square, we found the incarnation of all things Macedonian: Alexander the Great. I posed for a quick pic with my namesake and we ambled on through the shopping zone. Prilep, although located in the centre of Macedonia and thus really far from any major body of water, nevertheless had the feeling of a seaside resort. Fast food stalls, little shops with tourist knick-knacks and postcards (yes, postcards! what Skopje didn’t have, Prilep had it aplenty) and, oddly enough, street vendors selling all sorts of beach utensils and toys. We let ourselves be swept away by this holiday vibe and indulged in a huge ice cream. But the good weather had lured a lot of people into the streets, and from the roadside cafés, loud music blared into the street. We soon had our fill of beach atmosphere and got back into the car.

 

We had seen parts of the fortress lying on an impressively high hill when we approached Prilep. Rather than traipsing all the way up there, we were looking for a street to get as close to the ruins as possible. After all, we didn’t want to spend the whole day up there. Markovi Kuli proved very elusive however. The higher up we drove, the narrower the streets became. Soon, we were crawling up steep, cobblestoned alleys that looked like somebody’s back yard. Convinced that we were on the wrong track, I rolled down my window and made eye contact with a little old lady. She smiled encouragingly, so I fired my whole inventory of Macedonian at her: “Dobar den, izvinete, Markovi Kuli?” She seemed to understand me, in any case she nodded vigorously and pointed up a narrow path. I squinted doubtingly in that direction. The path seemed to deteriorate into a grass-and-gravel lane further up. “Asphalt?” I resumed my attempt at communication. She nodded, pointed again at the dirt track and let loose a flood of Macedonian. Aha. I thought to understand that, unlikely as it seemed, this was indeed the correct route to the Towers of Marko. So we thanked her and drove on. After a few meters, the street turned into a gravel track and shortly after into a bumpy grass path. After less than a minute, we bumped over a rocky meadow, to our right a perilously close steep hillside. “Turn around,” my sister commanded in a dangerously calm voice. “But the little old lady said…” I began, but Sonia just threw me her usual no-nonsense look. Of course she was right. I proceeded to turn around. Easier said than done. Two years ago in Portugal, we had learnt a very important lesson: Don’t trust your GPS. Use your head instead. When we finally bumped back into civilisation, we had learnt another, equally important lesson: Don’t blindly trust little old ladies, either.

 

We tried another lane and, surprisingly, that street led onto an unexpectedly large mountain road. Soon we found ourselves at the foot of a monastery. Our map informed us that this was the Monastery of the Archangel Michael. Neither the dragon-fighter nor the monks seemed to be home, though. Somewhere, someone was cleaning with a hoover, but we didn’t see anyone. Strange. We wandered around the beautifully kept precinct for a while.

 

As we were already very high up, we decided to find the fortress ruins on foot. A large cobblestoned path led away from the monastery. Unfortunately, this soon turned into a grassy lane and then even that disappeared into the meadows. But we weren’t the only people out walking. We met two women, a man and his dog, several children playing among the rocks and two middle-aged men taking a stroll. I approached them with my by-now routine question: “Markovi Kuli?” They nodded. Obviously, they didn’t understand my question. I tried again: “Markovi Kuli, where? and pointed in several directions. They nodded again and waved around. “Markovi Kuli.” Uhuh. So this WAS the fortress, was that what they were trying to tell me? Indeed we saw what looked like the foundations of houses in several places. Count Marko had been a medieval Macedonian leader during the time of the Ottoman conquest. His life is wreathed in legends about his extraordinary courage and strength. He’s said to be so strong that he could lift a fully-grown horse over his head. In the end, the Turks invaded his little mountain town after all, and Marko finished his days as a vassal of the Turkish Empire. His fortress and the town over which he had ruled were right underneath our feet on this hillside.

 

We remembered the ruins that we had seen from afar and so we resolved to walk on in the hope of finding some more tangible evidence of the legendary hero. We passed a horse grazing peacefully in the meadows. Higher and higher up we climbed. The path had long since disappeared and we clambered over rocks and patches of wet grass. When we looked down, the horse was just a tiny speck, a forlorn, solitary figure in the vast landscape.

 

We felt like kids, playing in the wild, scrambling over meadow creeks and scrabbling for a foothill on huge boulders. It was a lot of fun, even though we didn’t find the fortress ruins. The view from up there was simply breathtaking. If the Towers of Marko stand for Freedom and Independence, then truly that day on that rocky hill we found them.

 

 

 

Back in our car which we had parked at the foot of the monastery, we were in excellent spirits and more than ready to tackle the journey to Kruševo. The road there turned out a lot less adventurous than we had feared. It was in good condition, curvy but not dangerous to drive on, similar to roads in the rural mountain regions of Austria or southern France. It took us a bit more than half an hour to complete the 30 kilometer drive from Prilep. The first view of Kruševo was imposing: there it lay, a small town of about 5000 people, nestled on a woody hilltop.

 

Kruševo is the highest town in Macedonia. In 1903, the Macedonians staged a concerted uprising against the Ottoman occupants, known as the Ilinden Uprising. All over the region, towns rebelled against the Turkish authorities. But the only town that succeeded in throwing them out was Kruševo. The rebels established a democratic rule and declared that all people of Kruševo, regardless of ethnicity, language or religion, should live together peacefully. This became known as the Kruševo Manifesto. The little town declared itself the Republic of Kruševo with the teacher Nikola Karev as their first president. But their freedom was short-lived. After only ten days of independence, the Ottoman troups attacked the town and took terrible revenge on the rebels. Kruševo remained under Turkish rule for another ten years. In 1913, in the First Balkan War, Bulgaria, Serbia and Greece wrested the region from the Ottomans, but Macedonian independence was not on their agenda: the land was divided under the three winning nations, and Macedonia had to wait for another 80 years until it finally gained its independence.

 

The events of the Ilinden Uprising are documented in a memorial called the Makedonium. To reach it, we drove through the picturesque little streets of Kruševo, all the way up to the top of the town. A large parking lot indicates the memorial’s touristic importance. This early in the year however, there were very few visitors. We encountered a Dutch tourist group and ambled along behind them. First, one reaches a round area with dozens of plaques listing the different places of upheaval during the early 20th century Macedonian fight for independence. The next structure had a similar theme. We didn’t really figure out what it was supposed to tell us, and the guide’s explanations in Dutch didn’t enlighten us either. Suddenly, we noticed a cute lizard, basking in the sun. The little animal put the memorial to good use. We followed its example and enjoyed the wonderful weather.

 

Then we walked up the steps to the memorial’s main building. It looks distinctly futuristic, a bit like a UFO. Weird, somehow.

 

The interior is high-ceilinged, sparsely decorated and somehow really cold. To me, it didn’t convey the passion and enthousiasm of the freedom fighters which it is supposed to commemorate. I wondered what they would have thought of it. The Makedonium holds the tomb of the first and only president of the Republic of Kruševo, Nikola Karev. I read the date of his birth and death. He was only 26 when he became president. And he died two years after the Ilinden Uprising. I wondered how he had managed to survive the Ottoman’s wrath, when so many other rebels had died.

 

With that heretic little thought in mind, I turned to a picture of “my” hero of the Ilinden Uprising: Pitu Guli. When the Turks lay siege to the town, Pitu Guli and his band valiantly defended the road to Kruševo. They had sworn to defend the town’s freedom with their lives, their motto being “Sloboda ili smrt”, which means “Freedom or Death”. In the end, the rebels were no match to the Turkish army. After hours of desperate fighting, Pitu Guli finally shot himself with his last bullet. But he is not forgotten: Pitu Guli, along with Goce Delčev and other revolutionaries, is mentioned in Macedonia’s national anthem. A truly uplifting song about freedom, check it out on YouTube!

 

Every year on the second of August, Macedonia is celebrating Ilinden. The state authorities have their official celebrations at the tomb of Nikola Karev in the Makedonium, while the people have a huge festival at the site of Pitu Guli’s last stand against the Turks. And that was where we were headed next. The site is called Mečkin Kamen or Bear Rock in English. It lies a few kilometers outside of Kruševo on the road to Bitola. The winding road led us through picturesque woodland. We even found a small patch of snow up here. But the sun was shining and it was a beautiful spring day.

 

The last fifty meters, a grassy lane runs through a wooded meadow up to a monument. Here at last we found the fiery spirit and noble grandeur that I had looked for in vain at the Makedonium. A statue of a strong young man, holding a huge boulder high over his head. A representation of the legendary power of Count Marko? No, a symbol of human courage and strength. Once upon a time, a huge bear threatened the people of Kruševo. Three brave brothers refused to be intimidated and fought the bear. The animal rolled a huge boulder towards them, but the brothers managed to kill the bear. Thereupon, the boulder turned into a hill, and that is how Mečkin Kamen got its name.

 

Beneath the statue is written in large letters the motto of Pitu Guli’s freedom fighters: Sloboda ili smrt. Freedom or death. Lord Byron would have been proud.

 

 

 

From Mečkin Kamen, we drove on in the direction of Bitola. Our hotel for the night was situated a few kilometers west of that town, at the foot of the Pelister national park. It was a long but scenic drive and after the wealth of heroic feelings from Kruševo, our stomachs started to grumble. We reached Bitola much faster than we had thought. Outside the town, we found a restaurant next to an open-air swimming pool and a football stadium. It was the middle of the afternoon, but the restaurant was nevertheless open. We sat outside in the sun and enjoyed an excellent meal of shashlik, french fries, salad and baguette. Life was good.

 

We discussed what to do next. After all, it was still early in the day. Just south of Bitola lies the Roman excavation site Heraklea Lyncestis. As we had not seen Stobi, we decided to visit this site instead. Heraklea Lyncestis was founded in the fourth century before our time by Philipp II of Macedon, a.k.a. Alexander the Great’s daddy. It was named in honour of the Greek hero Heracles (known as Hercules by the Romans), so the town’s name actually means something like “Town of Heracles in the land of the lynx”. Pretty neat, as names go.

 

Under the Roman occupants, Heraklea Lyncestis had been an important stop on the Via Egnatia which led from Byzantium to Durrës on the Albanian coast. It was located just a few minutes from our restaurant and again we seemed to be the only visitors. For the umpteenth time, we congratulated ourselves for visiting the country at Easter instead of during the peak tourist season in the summer. We paid the small entrance fee and wandered around the ruins. The mosaics were covered in sand to protect them from the weather during the cold season. All in all, the site looked pretty much the same as Roman ruins all over the world. We agreed that we had made the right decision in substituting Kruševo for Stobi.

 

Back at our car, we first consulted our watches. It was just after five o’clock. Then we consulted our map. Bitola is only fifteen kilometers from the Greek border. We had never been to Greece. I looked at my sister. “Just across the border and back,” I pleaded. “Just so that I can say I’ve been to Greece.” Sonia doesn’t share my passion for ticking off countries, but she relented. “Why not, let’s visit Greece for an hour.” I happily hopped behind the steering wheel, and off we were to the south.

 

 

 

The Macedonian-Greek border was the busiest checkpoint on our holiday. The Italian car in front of us caused a minor commotion. We watched in astonishment as the driver, an energetic young man, jumped out of his vehicle and started arguing with the official. He seemed to have a very elaborate tale to tell, endlessly talking and gesticulating wildly. The customs officer met his verbal waterfall with stoic indifference and asked the occupants of the car to get out. First a man emerged from the passenger seat. Then we watched in disbelief as the backseat of the vehicle gradually emptied: a corpulent woman and man climbed out, then a young woman with a young child on her arm emerged, next a rather bored-looking teenager and finally one more man. There had been eight people in this very small old car! The driver was still discussing with the official, it seemed there was a problem with their passports. Unfortunately, we didn’t witness the end of this rather odd episode, as another official opened up a second lane and waved us through to it. She just glanced shortly at our Luxembourgish passports, then she waved us through with a broad smile on her face. Her Greek colleague was equally efficient and in no time at all we were back in the European Union.

 

So now we were in Greece. We decided to drive to Florina, the first larger town in the area. The road wound along fields, orchards and lonely hamlets. After what seemed like an eternity of uneventful driving, the overland road changed into a large boulevard. A very large, highway-like boulevard. I have never before driven on a dual carriageway where each lane was so amazingly wide. And the street stretched on into the distance, straight as a rod, with hardly any traffic on it at all. A racer’s paradise. Had there not been the sneaky road sign telling you that the speed limit on this heavenly road was … 50 km/h. Highly suspicious. We crawled forward at a little over 60 km/h, careful not to exceed the speed limit too much. The Greek cars in front of us were equally weary. The minutes passed by – the road didn’t. The boulevard stretched endlessly toward the horizon, and every kilometer or so, a road sign reminded us that, yes, the speed limit was still 50 km/h. The grotesqueness of the situation started to unnerve me. We still hadn’t reached the city, to the left and right lay fields and there was no reason why this wasn’t declared a highway with a speed-limit of 130 km/h. Or was there? I forced myself to drive more slowly. Now I was making barely more than 50 km/h. The landscape seemed to crawl by in slow motion. And still the road didn’t end. A driver behind us finally lost his nerve and speeded up. He passed us at a more than reasonable speed of maybe 80 km/h. I stared ahead. There, in the distance, the first houses of Florina. It couldn’t be much further. After a couple of more minutes, the nighmarish boulevard finally changed into a normal inner-city avenue. But about half a kilometer earlier, we had passed a traffic control. Of course. They had pulled the driver that had passed us earlier to the side and were fining him. Poor bugger. We shook our heads. What a sleazy way of conning people out of their money.

 

“I want to go back to Macedonia,” I declared angrily. But now we were in Florina, and so we might as well have a look around. At the roundabout, we were introduced to another Greek quirk: in Greece, the cars entering the roundabout appear to have the right of way. The three-sided road sign universally known as “yield” seems to mean “jolt” in the land of the Hellenes. Unsurprisingly, this leads to a minor traffic jam at each roundabout. Being the rebel I am, I insisted on stopping at the yield-sign to let the car in the roundabout pass. He waved at me to get in front of him. As Obelix would have said: These Greeks are crazy.

 

Florina pretty much looked like any southern European city of the same size. Overall, the apartment buildings and streets looked less “poor” than the ones in Macedonia, but then they’ve had European money floating in for the last three decades. In the town centre, we found a fun fair. Parents waiting for their children on rides, teenagers hanging out together. We had a Coke and mingled with the locals. This felt like some tourist place in Southern Italy.

 

But the sun was already low on the horizon and we had still some way before us. On the way out of Florina, we passed another traffic control on the con-boulevard. I had another good rant while we slowly crawled out of the town. Re-reading the Florina episode three years later, I must say that I have radically changed my view of Greece. After visiting it in detail, I found out that it's a wonderful country with truly charming people. And the odd yield-rule seems to be confined to Florina, we never encountered it anywhere else in Greece. This only goes to show that you shouldn't form an opinion of a place that you have barely set a foot into.

 

As we approached the border, we wondered whether the Italians were still discussing with the customs officers. But we didn’t see them anywhere. The Greek side of the border control seemed deserted, but the Macedonians took their time. An elderly official asked me politely to open the boot of the car. Oops. Did he realise that we had only hopped over the border for an hour? Maybe he thought we were smugglers. I put on my most innocent face, got out of the car and dutifully opened the trunk. He pointed at the large white L-sign. “Is that Liechtenstein?” How come people always think of Liechtenstein? After all, it’s a much smaller country than Luxembourg. “No, it’s Luxembourg,” I explained. “Small country,” he said, not even glancing into the boot. “Yep,” I agreed. “Smaller than Macedonia,” I added, just to say something. “Macedonia is also a small country,” he continued the geography lesson. “But it’s really a great country,” I volleyed back. He looked quizzically at me: “So you like Macedonia?” He shouldn’t have said that. Happy to have an audience, I launched into a praise of Kruševo, Prilep, Skopje and the wonderful people we had met these last few days. “We quickly hopped over the border to Greece, just to have been there too, but Macedonia is a lot nicer,” I explained. We chatted on about the rock churches we planned on visiting on Lake Ohrid. Somewhere in between, he motioned for me to close the car boot. That seemed only ever to have been an excuse for this friendly chat. He gave us some more tips about places to visit, and off we were towards Pelister National Park, unspeakably happy to be back in this charming, welcoming country.

 

 

 

It was getting dark and we had a bit of trouble finding the hotel Šumski Feneri. But the guy we asked at a service station was very helpful, and so we finally arrived at our nightquarters. The hotel was very quiet, we seemed to be the only guests for the night. The decor was rustic, with lots of wood, massive walls and indoor plants. Our room was large and looked comfortable enough, a bit like in a chalet. The window overlooked an inner yard in which some men were busy working on a car. Mechanics? We watched them a bit and then got ready for dinner.

 

The restaurant continued the hotel’s “national park” theme, it was almost completely taken over by plants. There weren’t too many customers, just one large party of workers enjoying their evening meal. We had the strong suspicion that these were the self-same hunks that we had spotted earlier from our window.

 

The hotel and restaurant seemed to be a family-run affair. One of them, a grumpy-looking old man, sat underneath a large TV screen and watched a soap-opera. So as not to disturb the diners, he had the sound turned very low. Sonia and I didn’t mind, as we didn’t understand Macedonian anyway. Even so, the storyline was easy enough to guess: there was a wedding party going on. A man and a woman danced, another woman watched them jealously. Suddenly, the bride paled and fainted, her wedding dress stained red. Big commotion, in despair the man cried: Sherazat! Now we already knew one character’s name. Neat. We watched fascinated, guessing at the plot and the characters’ motives. From time to time, the old man threw a glance in our direction and turned the volume up or down. Were we bothering him? Or did he think the show was disturbing us? We munched our yummy pancakes and watched on. When the soap ended, we learnt its name: Binbir Gece, meaning “1001 Nights”, a Turkish series, dubbed, I think, in Macedonian. Back home, we read the plot on Wikipedia, it’s a very dramatic story. No wonder the old man was glued to his telly.

 

This had been a long and eventful day. We had seen so much, explored so many new places. We fell into bed, hoping for a good night’s sleep. It was blissfully quiet, but unfortunately also immensely cold. There was no heater in the room, so we crept into bed with our socks on and huddled deep into the blankets. Soon, we were fast asleep…