Sheep Guarding Llama

We got up just in time to run up to the top floor of our hotel, the Hotel Super 8, here in Skopje, Macedonia and get breakfast.  We were the only ones up getting breakfast at the time that we were there.

After breakfast we set out to go for a walk and see a little bit of Skopje’s old town, Stari Grad.  In 1963 80% of Skopje was levelled by a massive earthquake.  Nearly all of the city has been built since that time and now there is a new project to rebuild much of the city in an older style since the work done since 1963 was mostly done in a drab, modern, grey block style that was en vogue at the time.  But today it looks boring and ugly and the original project was never completed so a new project to build a bright and beautiful city in a classic style is under way.

The old town is small and leaves a lot to be desired.  It was full of panhandlers and was not very pleasant.  It is loaded with jewellery shops, if you are looking for that kind of thing.  There were a few restaurants and cafes but nothing that we saw that was very interesting.  Nearly every shop was a kabob place.

So we just walked around for a little bit, saw most of the stari grad and returned to the hotel where we ate in the restaurant downstairs for lunch.  I decided to not order any food for myself and just see if I could eat enough from getting the leftovers from what the girls did not eat and, without any surprise, that worked really well.  It is very easy to do that as they are always leaving way too much food that they do not touch.  They both order ridiculous amounts of food and eat almost nothing.

After our late lunch we hung out in the hotel.  I had a lot of catching up that I wanted to do so I put in a long day of writing and posting from the hotel since the Internet access was pretty good.  Everyone was glad to have down time and the girls just played in the room all day.  It is a very large room so this worked out really well.  They could even run around in it.

This evening, while on a call, we suddenly heard a commotion out in the street.  So Dominica and Liesl ran to the window to see what it was.  It turned out to be six thousand protesters in a huge march coming across the river past the Department of Foreign Affairs and turning right by our hotel and going down the main street and under the bridge all within full site of our hotel windows.  This was amazing, we had never seen anything like this.

It turns out that this is day fifteen of marches against the government here in Skopje.  There has been a major issue with corruption and scandal and things are getting pretty serious.  The military was deployed to keep things under control, but nothing got out of control or felt dangerous.  We were watching the news and Twitter to see what was happening.  It was so interesting.

The mob painted over murals of the president, paint bombed the Department of Foreign Affairs, marched on to parliament and buried a tombstone to human rights in front of it.  This is one major political learning experience for the girls, Liesl at least.  She and Dominica got to watch a lot of it.  I can’t believe that we managed to be right in the centre of things!  This explains so much of what we saw last night.

Given the events of the evening, we opted to  just stay in and go to bed early.  No one was all that hungry and we have to be on the road early tomorrow, anyway.

We only had one night in Prishtina, Kosovo before we needed to move on to Skopje, Macedonia.  We had breakfast down at the hotel’s restaurant today.  Breakfast is almost always included with your room in Europe.  I almost cannot remember when it was not.  Even hostels normally include it.

Our Internet in the hotel did come back last night so we have been connected.  It was only out for a few hours and much of that we were out at our friends’ house across town.

This morning we decided to check out and load up the car after breakfast but to leave it at the hotel so that we could see the city on foot before leaving.  Our hotel is right next to the old city centre, just a three minute walk.  So very ideal for exploring. They did not have people checking in soon so leaving our car in one of the three parking spaces was not an issue.

We crossed the big street and were right into the city centre.  Even the side street leading into it that we took was lined with bustling cafes.  Kosovo, I have read and now seen first hand, has an extremely busy cafe culture.  From what I understand, culturally it is a “go and and be seen” culture but current economic conditions have left a huge portion of the population without the funds to go out to eat and such.  Because of that, the trend has moved to going out for coffee, buying one cup and sitting with it all day out in the public spaces.  So the coffee shops are very busy places, but not making tons of money.

We walked the main square for a while.  It is a beautiful downtown square and the national government offices are right there on it.  It is always interesting to see how a country of under two million people hands their national government since, in some ways, their national government handles only one third the number of people in the population as does the Houston or Dallas mayor’s offices!

The girls wanted to play tag.  So Dominica sat at a fountain with them while they ran around in a mostly empty part of the square.  I was sent out to scout lunch options.

I walked all the way down the square to the Grand Hotel.  I got to see a small group of protesters marching through the square.  First time that I have seen that in person.  It was very small, very much lunch time and very low key.  But they had a banner and a dozen people are so bringing some complaint to the government.

For a Tuesday middle of the day, the square was incredibly busy.  We were very surprised at just how  many people were out enjoying the nice weather.

From my scouting we found a restaurant that looked like it would be good and had some space on the side where the girls could run around and not be in the way of people on the square. So we found a good table and sat out.  The girls played for a good long while.  Dominica and I had coffee and everyone ordered sandwiches for lunch.

Luciana had been requesting cake, so after lunch, on the way back to the hotel we knew that there was a little cafe and bakery that specialized in cakes.  So we had planned to stop there.  More coffee and everyone got themselves a slice of wonderful cake.

From there it was back to the hotel and the car.  Time to get on the road again.

Getting out of Prishtina was not too bad now that we know the city a little.  This time we are heading south bound towards Macedonia.  Our last new country on this road trip.

The drive south was easy.  The mountains that separate Kosovo from Macedonia are huge.  We had no idea.  It was so tall that half of the mountain was covered in snow.  Half of it!  It was a warm and sunny today, too.  No hint at the snow that we had seen last night.  It almost felt like summer.

The Macedonia border was not hard, but the insurance fee was fifty Euros.  More than all of the other combined.  A bit ridiculous.  This is not a country working hard on encouraging tourists, I see.  But it is our last one and there is no good route home without going through it.  We do not want to miss it while we are here.

Sadly I have college friends from my time at MCC who were from Macedonia but I lost contact with them a very long time ago and no one that I know knows how to look them up so there is no way to make contact with them now.

Macedonia was an immediately different landscape than Kosovo. Kosovo was very verdant, Macedonia clearly drier and rockier.  Northern Macedonia sits in the rain shadow of that enormous mountain that we saw causing all of the rain in the area to go north into Kosovo and to avoid Macedonia.  So even though they are just next door, one gets four times the rain of the other.

The total drive from Pishtina to Skopje was very short, under two hours.  If we had insurance green cards for both places we could have probably done it in ninety minutes.  An hour if I drove like the locals 😉

Skopje is the largest city and the capital of Macedonia with about half of the country’s population living in it.  We had a little challenging navigating our way to the hotel.  Google GPS was useless of course, but even Google Maps was useless here.  Their data was totally wrong. Roads in the wrong places, bridges that don’t really exist.  What a mess.  I had to eyeball maps while driving and do some complicated things.

The Hotel Super 8 was great.  It is located right downtown in a great location and our room was amazing.  It was huge and very nice and with great views right down onto the new waterfront area that is being built by the city.  We were very happy when we checked in.

Having not had a lot of Internet access yesterday we decided to spend some time in the hotel catching up with things and enjoying the nice room.  The girls took out their toys and had a good time.  It is so nice here that we just went down and extended for an extra day so that we could avail ourselves of it a bit longer.  This will let me do things that I need without extra complication and give us a little bit of time to relax before we tackle the very long drive back up to Baita which is very, very far away from where we are now.

We have loved this road trip, though, and are planning to tackle a similar one in the north sometime “soon”, in the next year or two.  We want to do a massive northeastern European trip that will hit all of the countries that we have not yet been to.  We figure that a seriously long road trip, much like this but on a bigger scale, would let us hit everything that we have thus far missed in a single go.

Once it got late we went out for dinner.  Dominica had done some searching and found an Irish Pub across the river on the river walk that had extensive vegetarian cuisine.  So we went that way out for a walk.

On our walk across the river we quickly encountered riot police heading out to do something.  We practically walked with them across the river.  We also noticed the Ministry of Foreign Affairs building that we walked past was covered in paint, but we did not think very much of it at the time.

Once we hit the bridge, Skopje was truly magical.  The river is spanned by many brightly lit and beautiful bridges.  The north side of the rive is lined with majestic buildings.  The trees and light poles around the area have speakers on them playing classical music.  Everything is lined with statues and is so well done.  It feels very much like walking around the World Showcase in Walt Disney World.  It’s really magical.

We found the restaurant easily enough.  A football game was on so the place was packed.  We sat inside, though, as it was just a little too chilly outside.  There was a table, though, so no problem there.  Dinner turned out to be excellent, everyone really liked their food.

After dinner we walked around the river walk just a little bit.  The girls were not in the mood to walk very much.  We got back to the hotel and I immediately realized that I had left my hat behind.  So I went back to the restaurant on my own where they had set it aside for me.  On the way back I walked around the area a bit more and explored the Art Bridge, the Bridge of Civilizations, found the Archaeological Museum, the monument to Skopje’s most famous daughter Mother Teresa, the Opera House and more.  The downtown area is still under major renovations and construction.  They have been doing this for years and have years to go.

The city was destroyed in the 1960s and when it was rebuild it was rather drab by European standards.  Now the city is working hard to reinvent itself as an amazing, classic European capital, which it has not been for a very long time.  So the project is very important and the scale is very large.  It seems like they are doing an incredible job, though.

I stayed up late working last night, probably until two or three in the morning.  I was the first to post a happy birthday to my baby who turned five this morning.  Officially she will have turned five in Albania and celebrated her birthday later in the day in Kosovo.

We got up and went down for our last giant breakfast in Albania.  We are kind of looking forward to being without so much food soon.  We need a chance to recover from all of the over eating.  It is hard when you wake up still full and are full all of the time from just all of the portions being so ridiculously large.  It is exhausting.

After breakfast we got the car packed up and around noon we managed to get on to the road.  The drive to Kosovo is not a long one but we wanted to get up there nice and early.

There was a bit of back tracking as we drove north in Albania, but soon we turned east into the mountains for what was really an amazing drive.  We climbed up into the lush green, misty hills and took the massive, brand new A1 super highway towards Kosovo.  The drive was just gorgeous and the road empty and impressive.

This is some of the most beautiful country that we have seen yet.  As we approached the border we found the most enchanting high mountain lake anda  little cafe overlooking it.  We stopped as we were near the border and wanted a chance to get coffee and to use the restroom before going to the border in case there were any border complications.

While we were having coffee, Dominica learned that a high school friend that had been in a horrible plane crash a few days ago, had passed away from his extensive burns.  So this was a very sombre afternoon.

The border crossing into Kosovo was pretty easy.  Pretty much everyone needs to get special insurance there so they were totally prepared for us.  It was fifteen Euros and very quick.  We were into the border and everyone was extremely friendly.  This is a model for how border crossings should be.

Once into Kosovo we were onto a major highway that was completed as far as the road was concerned but had no exits, gas stations, all of the signs were for things sometime in the future, etc.  That was odd and confusing but once we figured out that they were all fake and didn’t apply (toll warnings but not toll booths, exit signs without exists, etc.) we were just fine.

We fueled up just outside of Prishtina, the capital, and then headed in.  Navigating the capital was a bit tough and the traffic was terrible.  We moved so slowly through the city.  Our hotel was downtown in the middle of everything right next to the Swiss Embassy, which was a great location.  But getting to it was a challenge.

The hotel was nice.  We liked our room.  We got checked in and dealt with parking the car, which was not too bad.  But we found out that the Internet was down at the hotel.  We have no cell service in Kosovo, sadly, as they do not have the same deals with T-Mobile as the rest of the countries.  So we were in a bit of  a bind.

We figured out that a pizzeria right up the street had WiFi that would reach the edge of our hotel room, so we went there and got dinner.  I got a local style tuna sandwich which was amazing.  They split the bread down the top and pour in the ingredients and then bake it.  So good.  We got their Wifi access and checked in from there.  I like my friend Fatlinda, that I attended RIT with, know that I was in town and where we were staying.  Then it was back to the hotel for a bit.

We spent a little while just relaxing in the hotel.  It was late afternoon and we had some Internet access now so we were letting people know where we were and the girls were happy to have space to play as they had been in the car all morning.

Fatlinda and I had arranged for us to all get together and her and her husband’s apartment which was not too far away.  We struggled to get an address and to map it, however, even the front desk of the hotel could not figure out where I was supposed to go.  So since we were planning to meet around eight or eight thirty I set out on foot at seven to see if I could figure out where we were to go.

While I was out walking for about an hour it started to snow!  Snow, in late April!  I was very surprised and very cold.  I never managed to find their place, even after a very long, cold walk. So I returned to the apartment.

After at least half an hour, maybe an hour, at the apartment we finally figured out where to go and got everyone to agree as to what we were doing and got us all bundled into the car and set out to find their place all together.

Our drive to their condo, which is just 1.1km turned out to be rather an adventure of tight, old city streets where we had no visibility and the car could barely fit through.  And somehow there was supposed to be bidirectional traffic on streets where my mirrors almost had to be pushed it just to get through at a crawl!  This was crazy.

It took us far longer than it should have to get there, but the roads were just insane.  We had to take some longer ways because we could not fit through the shortest path to the condo.

It was probably nine thirty when we arrived.  This is the first time that I have met Fatlinda in person but we did many projects together at university.  She has just had a baby a few weeks ago and her oldest daughter is just three.  Her daughter was still awake specifically so that she could play with the girls.  The three of them immediately set out for a nursery full of toys and had a great time all evening.

Fatlinda had baked a cake for Luciana’s birthday, as well.  So we celebrated Luciana’s birthday with a homemade cake in Prishtina, Kosovo!  This is something for her to remember.  So many birthdays are not very memorable.  This one certainly will be.

We had a really nice time visiting and were there until well after midnight!

Another day and another big breakfast.  We don’t know what to do with the amount of food that we are being served.  We feel terrible not eating the majority of it, it is made just for us.  But there is just so much of it.  Even if we were starving when we arrive for breakfast, which we never are, there is no way that we could eat this much.  It does not help that each of the girls gets a full adult portion of food.  It is crazy.  Tomato, cucumber, eggs, crepes, donuts, cheese, butter, bread, crackers, cakes, a bowl of fruit, yoghurt, juice…  it’s crazy.

Today is a lazy day for us.  Well for most of us.  I spent the day working from the hotel getting caught up, a little bit, on writing and posting.  We have been so busy on this trip that I have had barely any time to be doing anything.  In some ways that is good, I have needed a break, but it also means that there is just that much more for me to do whenever I get the chance.

We never really left the hotel all day.  We did coffee downstairs at one point but the weather was not great for the girls to be out on the beach for very long so we did not put in very much time there.

For dinner tonight we could not decide where to go until quite late and finally the only good option was really just to eat in the hotel.  Luciana really wanted to go get the pasta that they had gotten the other night but we did not want to deal with going down there and we knew that the girls were going to want to play on the playground but that it was too cold and it would just make everyone unhappy.  So eating in our hotel is what we decided to do.

A quiet evening for us.  A simple dinner and getting everyone off to sleep.  Tomorrow we drive to Prishtina, Kosovo and Luciana turns five!  Dominica was off to sleep first, tonight, then I got the girls off to sleep later.  Luciana was the last one to go to sleep and I tucked her in as a four year old for the last time.

Both girls have, at around these ages, expressed their dislike for getting older.  They love being kids and wish that it could last longer.  They don’t want to grow up.  I remember Liesl when I tucked her in the night before she turned four; she just cried and cried because she loved being three and didn’t want to be older.  Luciana is not so dramatic, but the sentiments are there.  These ages are so much fun.  At least they appreciate that and sense the need to hold on to it.

The final verdict is that we like Albania a lot, it is a wonderful country with wonderful people.  A truly fantastic coastline and epic opportunities.  But it doesn’t feel like the right fit for us.  Financially it is totally viable and could be very nice, but we just are not “feeling” it.  It is a perfect place for the week long summer beach holiday crowd.  But for a family looking for an authentic, local living experience there was very little that we found that really seemed like it would make sense to us.

We got up and did breakfast in our hotel.  The included breakfast here at the Hotel Espana is just enormous.  We work hard to eat a sizeable amount of it.  We always feel bad that they make so much and we really cannot eat it all.  There is just more than we can reasonably eat!

After breakfast our project for the day was to drive down to southern Albania and get a feel for the area.  We have only just barely gotten to see the coast and much of the available or accessible coastal areas are south of here.  So we wanted to be sure that we got to see that stuff.

Going south for a ways, the Albanian highway is pretty good.  They are working hard to get highways put in and built around the country as fast as they can.  A decade ago, I have heard, there were barely any paved roads in the country.  Now there are fast roads going all over.  It’s not extensive, but it is surprisingly good for the region and worlds beyond where we had been led to believe that they currently were.

The first place that we attempted to go to was Spille.  It did not take us long to get to where the road turns off to head to Spille on the coast.  We missed it as there was no exit but just a tiny, no warning turn off for it.  You really had to know to be looking for it and exactly where it was going to be.

I managed to find a sort of drive way not long after the Spille turn off and just took that and drove a little dirt path that went along some fields and got us back to the road.  A little bit adventurous there.

The road to Spille was a lot longer than we had anticipated.  It wound up around some hills and went through some really lovely areas but it was also collapsing in places and in several spots the road had fallen away and in one the whole road was so damaged that we had to inch forward.

It was an interesting drive and the condition of the road made us wonder how Spille could have any tourists visiting it.  This was not a place for the faint of heart to drive.  Very accessible, but not exactly casual.

Once we arrived in Spille we were even more confused.  We drove up to the beach, or as close as we could get, and there was no tourist infrastructure at all.  Once up to the frontage road there was an obviously protected stretch of pine forest against the water and behind it a line of small hotels mostly in poor repair.  Some were being worked on while we were there, some looked like they were no longer in use.  It was a bizarre place with these weird hotels all in a row, away from the village and separated from the beach.

At the end of the row we came to a dirt road, a disaster of a flea market, a well advertised and clearly collapsing hotel, the Blu Mare, a Roma woman living in a tent, loads of trash in the street and a little spot where we could access the beach. It was all very strange.

We circled back and went through town on another road.  This one was a little better.  There were a few, nicer, bigger houses in town and some shops and such.  But it was all still quite strange.

We tried to get to the beach by another way.  Of course, we used Google Maps, foolish us.  Google turned us onto a “road” that was listed like any other.  It was dirt and started off okay.  Well not okay, but passable.  And not passable by two cars, really just a dirt path through fields witch ditches on either side and no way to get through without driving all over the road to keep the car from bottoming out.

The road got worse and worse and we couldn’t figure out if we should go back or turn around.  Nothing was a good option but we decided that we could not go on.  The road was just getting to be so bad.

We got out onto a larger road, still dirt (and I mean DIRT, not gravel or rocks) and found a spot where the car could do the manoeuvre to make the turn around and in doing so we bottomed out lightly and after that I heard some odd sounds while we were driving.  We were only creeping along, even five kilometres per hour would be generous.  I got out and there it was, part of the front bumper torn off.  Just what we needed.

We were not in a place to deal with it at all but we could not move the car without doing damage.  I crept along and got the car off of the “road” so that the farm equipment could get by.  Here Dominica and I got out and really took a good hard look at it and figured out that with enough strength we thought that we could get things back into place.  We worked and worked and we managed to snap things back together, more or less.  It was enough pressure to cut my hand a little, but not too badly.  We were really impressed with ourselves for getting things “fixed.”  It is definitely not actually fixed, but it is not hanging low and going to tear the car apart ten feet up the road now, which is exactly what was going to happen if we had not been able to fix it.  It would have been a total disaster had I not stopped the moment that I heard the noise.  Imagine if I had just not had my window down!

We did what we could to get back to a gravel or paved road.   Even with the car back together it was really hard going.  We got very lucky that we managed to drive out.  That took a long time and was exhausting.

Back on the collapsing road we just drove back out of the Spille area the way that we had come in and went back to the highway and headed down towards the south.  The next place to check out was Vlore, much farther south.  Vlore is a small port with its own bay.

Getting down to Vlore the highway that we were on stopped and we had to take normal roads through a few towns, which was slow going, before we got to an autobahn which was amazing.  Suddenly, out of nowhere, a super high speed, very different type of highway zipped us right down to Vlore and… dropped us onto pot hole filled roads so bad we almost could drive down them!  So weird.

Vlore turned out to be a really nice city.  Much more like we are used to in the rest of Europe.  Clearly it is developing quickly and they have not figured out their internal roads and water front yet, but they seem to be making some good progress and have some stuff in place already. Vlore is actually a nice city on its own and has water front a well.  Not just water front with nothing behind it.

We parked the car and walked around Vlore a little bit.  We tried to find food but place after place was serving coffee only.  Very frustrating.  We got directed to the Hotel Bologna so we word our way over there and inquired at the front desk.

The front desk was not sure if they were serving food today as they had a wedding this evening so they had to check.  The chef came out and said that they would make space for us.  A huge hotel restaurant and we were the only people in it.  So weird.

Dominica was nearly passing out from all of her motion sickness medication which made ordering food a little hard.  I went for the red mullet which turned out to be half a dozen small fish in the European style of being full fish, not fillets.  I know that I am adapting to being a European when I don’t have a problem taking six fix and eating them without a problem even with the head, tail and bones all intact.  I both can “handle” the situation and I know how to do the actual eating which itself is confusing and challenging if you have never had to do it before.

The food was all quite good and the hotel was actually an excellent spot with lots of its own waterfront.  It had a very classic Adriatic waterfront and a little playground.  So after we ate we went out and let the girls play for ten minutes or so and checked out the patio area.

From the hotel we went back to one of the cafes along the main pedestrian way, one that Liesl liked because everything was decorated in flowers and Luciana liked because it had a playground.  We ordered some coffee and sat outside while the girls played.  It was a little chilly as it was windy and stormy and the sun was blocked but it was not too bad.

After the coffee and some gelato, which we had finally located, we walked back to the car and reversed our journey back up north to Golem.  The drive back took far less time than the drive down.  Without the Spille stop it really was not bad at all.  More than an hour, but nothing dramatic.  It was a good trip and we got to see a lot of stuff.  We have a much better feel for Albania, now.

We got back and the girls just wanted to relax and play in the hotel room as they had been couped up in the car for so long.  We just had an early dinner at our hotel.  It is impossible to find any places to eat of interest on the strip.  They all look exactly the same from the outside.  And most are closed.  Just makes the most sense to eat at our own place.

Tonight a storm rolled in.  Rain and thunder over the Adriatic.