Macedonia

We only had one afternoon in Skopje, but I thought that was long enough. It’s very cute and pretty, but there is a hell of a lot of construction work going on. They seem particularly keen on building things that look like they’ve always been there – lots of classical architecture. To their credit, even the construction is beautifully lit at night.

Also, they’re building random statues like there’s no tomorrow. In some places there are two or three within a few metres of each other. In the main square there’s a great big fountain, which is beautiful, and which we all assumed had been there for ages. But actually it was brand new, it’d only been there a month or so, and it’d only started playing three days before we got there. We were kind of wondering why so many people were so interested in it, when there didn’t appear to be too many tourists. They even had recorded music to go with the fountain, the kind of thing you’d play at concert band. The funniest thing about it was that the music played for about two minutes and then cut out. The first time I heard it I thought something had gone wrong with the speakers. But no, that’s just what happens. Then the fountain plays the rest of its circuit to the sound of silence, and when it gets back to the start the music starts again. You’d want to get yourself committed to the psychiatric ward if you worked anywhere near that fountain. The music played every seven minutes, exactly the same music every time. We sat and had a drink and people watched for half an hour or so, and by then we knew the tune.

There are very few tourist attractions in Skopje. We walked down the main pedestrianized street, past Mother Theresa’s picture (the Macedonians claim she was born in Skopje, the Albanians claim she was born in Tirana), to the museum. The museum has a clock on it that stopped when the museum was bombed. And that was about it for tourist attractions. It did fill in a good fifteen minutes though.

Skopje was the first town with a Turkish area, which had heaps and heaps of Turkish cafes. We went across the river to there and had dinner, then walked back and took lots of night photos of the new fountain and the surrounding square and buildings.

The pretty fountain.

And my favourite, the spewing lions.

Next we had a day and a half at Lake Orhid.  That was fantastic.  We were all worn out from being on the go all the time, and we all really enjoyed having somewhere beautiful to blob out and look at the water and swim.  When we arrived, Marsha was in her togs and in the water before most of us had even put our bags down.  The lake was really big, maybe about the same as Lake Taupo for all my NZ friends, and surrounded by mountains.  I liked that a third of the lake was in Albania.  And it was really calm and we had beautiful hot sunny weather.  A few people got pretty sunburnt, namely Cameron who managed to roast his belly pretty good.  There was also a nice little town but it was really very touristy.  We spent most of our time at the beach, being shown off to by a group of Macedonian guys.

And that was about it in Macedonia.