9 Macedonian Lives

Grease to Macaronia

The heading of each page in my notebook is the city that we are trying to reach that day, or the place that we’re visiting if we’ve decided to take a break from traveling (e.g. Istanbul, Paris, Venice, etc). On 8 February 2012 I wrote “Bitola, Macedonia” with a question mark. We had spent three days in Thessaloniki, Greece, and with each day the weather conditions in the Balkans were getting progressively worse. Even in Greece, many people (well, at least the ones with jobs) weren’t going to work. Nobody even knew if the roads we needed to bring us North into the mountains were operational.

Originally, we had intended to hitchhike all the way to the capital, Skopje, where we had a CouchSurfing host arranged. The day before leaving, upon realizing that it would be near impossible to make it in light (or dark) of an impending blizzard of doom, I made a frantic full-blown attempt to find a couch for us to crash upon in a more proximal location. I sent a couch request too all but one of the 21 CouchSurfers listed as available in Bitola. The gentleman I skipped had a great reply rate, though indicated that his preferred gender was female (alas, I fear that neither I nor Ben fall under this category), and that his interests were limited only to sports, women, and erotica. His profile picture gave me the impression that he might only know how to take us on a sightseeing tour of the local weightlifting facilities. I’ll sleep in the snow thanks. Someone needs to buy this guy a subscription to Lavalife and get him a mail-order bride.

Thankfully, one person replied. I read first in anticipation and then in mounting despair as I learned that she didn’t actually live in Bitola any longer, and that she had moved back to the United States. Our only hope was the email address of her ex-roommate Lauren, who she indicated might be willing to put us up. As it turns out, Lauren was more than willing to grant our requested asylum, and we left Greece.

Macedonian beer.

We were hitchhiking. For most of the day I wasn’t sure that we were going to make it. You can interpret this in two ways and not be wrong. First, I was quite sure that we weren’t going to make it to Bitola, seeing as I didn’t even really know how far away it was or even how to get there. Second, I wasn’t even sure that we were going to make it anywhere (past the ditch). This became a real concern especially by about three or four in the afternoon. We spent a good part of the day standing in 50 km/hr winds in the middle of nowhere, with what felt like hours (ten or fifteen minutes) between passing cars and only the following landmarks to orient ourselves: snow bank; distant nuclear power plant; snow bank exhibit ‘b’; large empty field; the North Star (just kidding - the snow filled the sky like dove droppings in a lightning storm).

It took nine rides and the same number of hours to make our way from Thessaloniki in Greece to Bitola in Macedonia. Stefanos, our Greko-Canuck CouchSurfing host in Thessaloniki, was kind enough to drive us to the outskirts of the city, where we walked through a toll both and waited with our thumbs in the air and our frowns in our pockets. We waited at least an hour before being picked up by a bald, 35-or-so-year-old-man who was going to Athens but was able to drive us 5 km to the turnoff (leaving us even more stranded than before). Before he gave us a lift, we watched hundreds of cars drive slowly by. Almost every person stared at us with their mouths hanging open, drooling unapologetically all over their dashboards and steering wheels in sheer disbelief.

Over the course of the day, we slowly consolidated our understanding of each of the three main hand signals drivers give us as they decide blow us off and accelerate past: 1) Pointing down at passenger seat means “I’ve got shit in here, like my coat, so there’s clearly no room for you”; 2) Wagging one finger: “No, but please put down your thumbs now and pretend that you don’t need a ride so that I can stop feeling guilty for the 2.7 seconds that it takes me to pass you”; 3) Spreading fingers and waving palms up and down as if pretending to be an illiterate, overenthusiastic koala bear: “What in God’s name is wrong with you absolutely psychotic morons. You don’t actually think I’m going to pick you up? You’re standing alone in a blizzard. There is no chance that there is even one single sliver of sanity in either of your heads, so why would I risk my own life by stopping for you SCHIZOPHRENIC LUNATICS”. Occasionally we get 4) Pointing at crotch, which we have interpreted to mean: “only for oral”, but we’re not 100 percent on this one yet.

Face Book (a.k.a. Perry Niclc).

Our second ride was from a guy our age who insisted that we add him on facebook, but who’s identity I cannot confirm. I think his name is Perry Niclc, or Perry Nick, or maybe his name is actually “Face Book”, because he also wrote that in my book (admittedly, the chances of this are quite low, as I probably would have remembered if he had introduced himself as Mr. Book). I liked him right away because he didn’t look at us as if we were serial killers, so I decided to spare his life and not eat his liver.

Perry was a student, admittedly a little bit shy, who brought us 80 km in the direction of Macaronia. Although he didn’t have much to say, he was a very friendly young man who didn’t seem to show any discomfort when he finally broke the silence: “Maybe you would like to smoke a little joint?” While he was rolling it, I was painting yellow an already wet snowbank that was at least as deep as the bottom of my bum cheeks (any more snow and the operation would have been a logistical nightmare). Of course, none of us did any drugs, because this is a public blog and anybody could be reading it. I stick to beer, coffee, cigarettes, chocolates, heroin, kryptonite, and maple syrup (though there’s a premium on the latter in Europe). Nothing else.

When he dropped us we gave him a sticker of Ganesha (the remover of obstacles) to provide him with good luck in his fourth year atmospheric pollution final that afternoon. We added one point to the “open-minded youth” category of people most likely to pick us up. “Horrified parents” were in a close second.

As it turns out, there aren’t so many horrified parents or open-minded youth driving around the middle of nowhere in the middle of a blizzard on a Wednesday afternoon between Greece and Macedonia (who woulda thunk it?). There are police though, and when they stopped to [try and] speak with us I thought that we were for sure doing something illegal. I was so relieved that we were about to get arrested and obliged into their nice warm car and brought to a cozy indoor prison cell that I almost cried when they left us with nothing more than a few words of wisdom: “Please try not to get hit by a car”. Fortunately we soon received three different rides in quick succession: The first by a couple of guys in a pick-up truck with an elevated back seat that forced us to reorient our neck positioning and tense up at each bump in the road so as to avoid bashing our neck bones into the roof; A really nice, really normal guy about our age traveling home from a day on the ski slopes; 3) A classy old man in a fancy new car with nothing to say - he couldn’t bring himself to interrupt his neo-classical opera-jazz world fusion beats.

An old mosque, built on a church, in Macedonia.

Now the old guy truly dropped us in the middle of nowhere (we thought we were in the middle before, but it must have just been the outskirts of nowhere). It was so cold, windy, and snowy that it didn’t take long for us to start losing spirit. Just as we were about to go apeshit like Jack Nicholson in The Shining, we turned around and saw an angel floating towards us through the snow. The angel was wearing a large backpack and a goofy smile. The angel was a Danish hippy, hitchhiking and CouchSurfing, as we were, in the exact opposite direction (away from winter - how sensible) towards India. It was refreshing to meet him, if only briefly, and we were almost immediately picked up after changing our hitchhiking technique by watching his style from the opposite side of the road. He was the first tourist we met in Greece. What are the chances?

The couple that picked us up wasn’t anything to write home about. They recommended that we go to the bus station in a nearby village and use it to get to the next town, where we would at that point be able to find a bus (probably) to our final destination for the day. They dropped us at the bus station and it took us about two hours and a dozen conversations with the melancholy bus ticket seller to establish that that next bus would maybe leave at 5 o’clock, if it arrived, and that there would certainly not be a bus from Florina to Bitola that night. It was 2 o’clock.

Left-to-Right: Lauren, Ben, West Virginia, NYC.

We were left with a single, desperate option: try and hike back to the highway, regardless of how long it might take, and hitchhike to the border and beyond. So we ordered a cappuccino, and I filled mine with just a touch more sugar than the largest possible amount that it could chemically (or physically?) dissolve. The calories were much needed. We first walked down the wrong road for about half an hour. We then retraced our steps and walked down the correct road for about half an hour. Near the end of the road, we were picked up by a man (with his son) who must have been one of the most generous I’ve ever met. It turns out that this [correct] road was blocked by snow from the highway, and that we were more-or-less completely fucked. He showed us his home (where he was headed) at the end of the road, and proceeded to turn around and drive us 50 km out of his way to get us to the border. I was speechless the entire way, unsure if it was really happening or if I was unconscious in a snowy ditch, dreaming my final dream. When we left the car, he would accept no form of payment apart from stickers of Hindu deities. They left us, and drove the 50 km back to their home.

Our ninth ride of the day was a breeze. We scored another quiet n’ classy old man listening to alternative world music. He left us in downtown Bitola, and we found a café with wireless, which we used to make contact with Lauren. She found us there, despite our trying to trick her by telling her the wrong name of the place, and brought us to her Peace Corps funded apartment, where we unpacked, breathed a sigh of relief, and marveled at how lucky we had been.

West Virginia with a doll she
made out of used underwear.

We only spent one night in the Former Yugoslavic Republic Of Macedonia. It was very beautiful, very snowy, very cheap, and from what I could tell, quite old fashioned (there were lots of beautiful old stone buildings, things built by the Germans during WWI, the water from the tap is brown at first, and you aren’t allowed to put toilet paper in the toilet). One major difference I noticed between Macedonia and other countries was that in FYROM they have not yet discovered swinging doors. We inevitably aggravated a great deal of people as we traipsed obnoxiously around town, leaving doors hanging open, and thus warm rooms exposed to the merciless outdoors.

Lauren, who was off work due to the weather, was a great host and showed us around her little corner of Macedonia. We had Turkish food, hung out with Americans (Connecticut, New York, West Virginia), and ate brownies. Lauren’s Peace Corps friends were interesting and unlike anyone I’d met traveling for a long time. New York was strongly opposed to alternative music and what she called “hipsters”, but made up for it by buying all our drinks at an old-style tavern. West Virginia was my favourite Macedonian. She was full of energy and had her house decorated with little artful decorations that she had created. The American Peace Corps girls were all warm hearted, friendly, and full of things to say, which made it easy for me to work on my listening skills.

I think the only Macedonian cultural experiences I really had were the local raki, which must have been at least 80 % alcohol content, and an Australian tourist with FYROM heritage.

Rundown

Language: Macedonian
People met: Lauren, NYer, West Virginian, Macedo-Australian
New beers tried: Ckoncko
How they say cheers: jivali (to life)/nazdrovia (to health)
$ spent: 17
# of rides: 9
Distance traveled: 215 km
Other useful expressions: eemafreme (there is time); moje peevo (get me beer)