Two weeks ago Paul, a friend from France, and I decided to spend a long weekend in Bulgaria’s western neighbor Macedonia and also Kosovo. The first stage started friday morning in the city center of Sofia after a night with a lot of partying and definately not enough sleep. This, combined with the fact that we are 2 guys let us already doubt a little about the hitch hiking plans… and we were to be right. So we took a tram to the end of the city and waited like an hour until the first car stopped for us. Suprisingly a girl of our age who barely spoke english. But we gave our best to make some communication happen with our crappy bulgarian. At least we were forced to practice now. Unfortunately for us she was enjoying having us so much, that the dropped us 30km away from the main connection to Skopje, which made it really hard for us to find a comfortable “direct connection”. So it took us another 6 h and 3 more cars + 2 hours walking and the same time of waiting to get to the Macedonian border. Among these was a bulgarian lawyer, two gysies with a backseat full of potatoes on which we hat to sit while they were listening to aweful loud chalga music and a nice young lady with her dog who savad us another 1,5h of walking towards the border. still abt 6 or 7 km afar from the border, already becoming dark, noone else wanted to take us. So we had to walk on the side of the street to make it there. It slightly started raining and we didnt know were we might end up this night. Which was really strange, because everyone else we talked to made good experiences with hitch hiking in Bulgaria. We were just unlucky. Finally we could convince a young macedonian guy in an empty van, who has been waiting for the border control, to take us with him to Skopje. He was really communicative and told us a lot about what we could do in Macedonia, about the country and so on. So finally our first hitch hiking experience had a good ending. Even though we decided to continiou by bus, cause 12h for 200km seemed like a pretty bad performance to us.
Skopje itself is a pretty interesting place. Some people say a that Macedonians are just Bulgarians in a different country. But many decades of communism in Yugoslavia and a government that tried everything to build an own nation did a good job. I don’t want to evaluate if its only that or macedonian people have always been different, but life on the street and the mood of the people definately gives the feeling of beeing in a different country. Nevertheless it was easy to get along, cause the languages are very similar and many people speak english. Another interesting fact is, that nearly 40% of its population are ethnical Albanians, who are mainly moslem and speak Albanian and Macedonian. About 40 years ago the capital Skopje has been destroyed by an huge erthquake, which only spared the old ottoman part with a lot of mosques and the bazar which are situated on the north side of the river. After the earthquake the government took the chance to rebuild it exactly how they imagined an idealistic communist city. This couldnt be completed, but is still very dominant and of course interesting to see. (Maybe a bit comparable to Dresden, which has been bombed during WW II in many parts and therefore been rebuild also in a socialistic style under the GDR administration.)
In fact this supported the moslem Albanians to mainly live in the northern parts of the city and the slavic Macedonians to live in the new south part. Walking 300m from one side to the other over the river not only made me feel like in a different city but on a different continent. In my impression this is the most interesting fact about Skopje. But it also shows the actual separateness of the 2 main ethnical groups in Macedonia. Talking to people of both origins sadly supported this impression.
In the hostel Paul, by chance, met a collegue from his uni in France who actually does an internship in Pristina, were we also wanted to go. They were two guys with a car. The plan was to visit a neolithic archeological site in the north of Macedonia. After that we went on to Pristina with a shortcut through Serbia including a rather intensive border control.
Pristina is an ugly, but interesting city. As the capital of the young country Kosovo (if this sounds weird to the reader, your country maybe hasnt aknowledged Kosovos independence) it still hostes a lot of international governmental and non governmental organisations, which help to build the new state. Also we were lucky to arrive at the albanian national day of the flag. So the whole city was crowded with partying people who celebrated with a lot of albanian flags and albanian music. I’ve only seen so much national pride in my own country during football wordcups, but never on national day.
On Monday, the last day of our trip, we took a bus from Pristina – Prizren, then 3 hours sightseeing in Prizren, Prizren – Pristina, Pristina – Skopje, Skopje – Sofia.
Prizren is situated in an amazingly beautiful valley in the south of Kosovo sorrounded by mountains, which reach more than 2500m and were already snow capped. The city itself used to be the actual important administrational and economical center of the region and therefore shows a lot of old ottoman buldings and mosques, but also orthodox churches from older, serbian times. Unfortunately these are in a bad chape, bacause albaniens are only moslem and in a minority catholic, but orthodox church is a part of serbian culture.
Finally we arrived back in Sofia 5:30am tuesday morning. Exhausted but with a lot of impressions and the plan to come back in summer.
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Paul trying his best
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bazar in Skopje
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Skopje, cross on hill
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Skopje
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bazar, minarett, Skopje
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new city center Skopje
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somewhere in Macedonia
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neolithic site
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Pristina
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Prizren
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orthodox church, Prizren
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Prizren
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UCK Memorial
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Prizren
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no pork
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Kretsche's Blog 