Journal / Balkans / 2014-05-07

Matka Canyon

Today was the best day by far. Partly because of the club on Sunday night which I forgot to mention in the last post. But since that experience didn’t technically begin until Monday morning (apparently people don’t start partying until late here), I suppose we can group that in with today’s events.

At any rate, after a few hours of sleep and breakfast at the hotel, we were on our way to the Matka Canyon, one of the seven natural wonders of the world. The experience was awesome, and unfortunately we only had under an hour to explore. I definitely could have stayed there for an entire day — on a trail that was at least a couple hours long from what I understand. But either way, it was still awesome, and I’m hoping that I got some good pictures (I certainly took a lot).

After our hike, we had lunch at the only restaurant in the Canyon. It was really good. I had chicken with grilled vegetables. As a sidenote, things are really inexpensive in Macedonia. For example, the Italian dinner we had last night with eight or ten people was under $100 USD.

Anyways back to today. After lunch at the canyon, we had a couple hour bus ride to Ohrid. Not surprisingly, I slept most of the ride, so it went pretty fast. Ohrid is encompassed by a huge lake and our hotel is relatively close overlooking it. As usual, the hotel is really nice. Each room has a small balcony that overlooks the lake side of the building.

We had a little bit of time to kill at the hotel before heading to dinner at a restaurant not too far down the street. We were told that we would be entertained with a folk show during our dinner, but nothing could have prepared us for what lay ahead.

First of all, the dinner was fantastic. After a cold appetizer of shredded beets, lettuce, carrots and olives, we had some sort of fried cheese thing before a main meal of fish. They served the entire fish again — head and all. Really good stuff.

Now the dinner was good, but the music and dance were really something else. The evening started off with an older group of about six musicians — an upright bass player, guitarist, percussionist, accordion player and saxophonist believe it or not! Clearly not your historically traditional folk ensemble but apparently a popular modern instrumentation. And if course I was particularly excited about the alto sax player.

After the group played a few traditional Macedonian songs (most of which demonstrated some seriously impressive musical technique — for example the saxophone player was really good at double tonguing), a second group of eight young dancers came out accompanied by an ensemble of similar instrumentation. The dancers performed a set of what I’m guessing were traditional Macedonian dances, most of which had to do with a commentary on playful flirting between the guys and girls. The dance itself is kind of hard to explain, but I imagine somebody took a video of it — or at the very least, you could look up a similar video on YouTube and get a pretty good idea.

Even at this point, the night was good stuff. Great music, great entertainment and great food. But little did we know that as we were finishing our dessert, the first group of instrumentalists brought out there American repertoire. Pretty soon we were all up dancing to everything from The Beatles to good ol’ American folk songs. Certainly something to remember.