Journal / Balkans / 2014-05-06

Exploring Skopje

After a breakfast in the hotel (not as good as the buffet in Sofia, but still pretty good), we drove into the city center for a two hour walking tour. I’m not going to go into details of the tour — partly because I don’t remember anything — but I did take a bunch of pictures throughout the tour that you can check out when I get back.

Skopje is in the middle of a 2014 cultural/historical/architectural renovation period that is funded by the Macedonian government from what I understand. The process involves restoring historical buildings, installing new statues and overall — instilling a greater sense of cultural pride. I think one of the main reasons for embarking on this project is to bring in more tourists to a country/city in which tourism is not as prevalent as other areas in Europe.

After the tour, some people went back to the hotel or to a shopping mall. I decided to stay around the city center with some people to grab lunch and walk around some more. It started raining a bit towards the end of our tour, but luckily it cleared up to be a really nice day with only a few scattered showers during the rest of our time there.

Believe it or not, we ended up going to a French restaurant for lunch and had some delicious crepes. We even made friends with the waiter — who spoke pretty good English. We invited him to the concert later that evening, and he said he was going to try and make it.

As a sidenote, meals in Eastern Europe are generally pretty long. Not that they take long to make them (although sometimes they do), but nobody ever seems to be in a rush and you definitely have to explicitly ask for a check. So after our long lunch, we walked through the city center some more. Luckily, the sun finally came out! The walk back to the hotel was relatively quick as well once we figured out which direction to go.

After getting back to the hotel, we had a little bit of free time before a brief rehearsal before the concert. As expected, the concert was incredible, and we even heard a few songs from a local women’s choir. Really good stuff.

We had a late night dinner at an Italian restaurant we happened to stumble upon down the street from the hotel. I had a great spicy shrimp dish. (Sidenote: the translation for “shrimp” in every restaurant I have been in so far is always plural — so I had “spicy shrimps” pasta).