Day 9 – Skopje

Today I stood up at 6 (again) to take the bus to Macedonia. This time I permitted myself the “luxury” of going to the train station by taxi instead of crossing the whole city with my backpack again. My intuition to leave Thessaloniki had been exactly right because I awoke in pouring rain and couldn’t really have done anything nice there. Instead, I watched the rain clattering against the windows of the bus that took me straight north – destination: Skopje, the capital of Macedonia. I crossed not only a country border leaving the Schengen area, a language border, an alphabet border, a cultural border, a currency border but also a timezone. I wasn’t aware of that at all and it doesn’t make too much sense but my 4-hour ride was converted into 3 hours. Passports were controlled twice at the border and we spent almost 1 hour waiting for the controls to be over. I could barely keep myself awake, but I observed that behind the border Casinos and Dental clinics dominated the landscape for a while until it changed to an environment that reminded me a lot of Germany. Endless green hills and agricultural fields; just that what grew there wasn’t wheat or corn but wine.

Skopje, right to the contrary of what had happened in Thessaloniki, immediately felt sympathetic. Streets were wide, there was air to breathe and my first impression was one of a poor but relatively modern and somehow very strange European capital. I walked towards the city center and towards a hostel I had looked up online. The way took me along the river Vardar which is lined by huge and obviously very new buildings of neoclassical style. When I arrived to the city square, my backpack had gotten so heavy that I decided I wouldn’t make it to the planned hostel and checked in to the closest hostel there was instead. The “Unity Hostel” is a typical hippie hostel; the kind of place that has yoga mats, drums, guitars and phrases about happiness all over it.

After lunch, I headed out to discover this city that had made such a weird first impression on me. I can say as a summary, that this is the most absurd place I have ever been to. The whole center is packed with these baroque and neoclassical enormous buildings and with ridiculously large and unproportionate bronce statues. There is statues literally everywhere. Men on horses, horses without men, men without horses, all of them at least 5 meters high and with weirdly large heads and strange expressions. It all doesn’t seem serious, it seems ironic and sympathetically absurd.

I haven’t been to the “Museum of the Macedonian Struggle” yet and as you know I am not exactly a history expert. But for what I understood from what my host told us, all this neoclassical transformation of Skopje started only a couple of years ago with the project “Skopje 2014” which is not entirely finished yet. The prime minister seemed to have a certain “short guy complex” and needed to do something “epic”. So he inverted millions in new, neoclassical, absurd buildings and bronce statues. All the buildings seem to be “made of cardboard”, fabricated with the cheapest materials, the new state theater had already been leaking before its opening. Spending money on fancy (although “fake”) buildings was much more convenient than spending it for example on hospital material (or anything useful) because they could easily declare having spent 10 mio. on a building, build it for 2 and keep the rest without anyone able to control it. According to Swasi, people were pretty impressed at first because it had been the first time that any government had done anything, until they started noticing on what it had spent all the money. Nevertheless, it’s too late now and Skopje is full of weird statues and buildings.

Apart from the reformed center, I went to discover the “Turkish neighborhood” up hill. While the rest of Skopje is home to many Orthodox churches, there are several minarets rising over this neighborhood and the streets are like a Turkish bazar. It immediately caught my attention that I almost exclusively saw men on the streets.

In my planless wandering (Skopje does not have a Tourist information and it was impossible to get a city map anywhere), I stumbled upon a beautiful patio that radiated an “artsy” vibe, so I stepped in. I found out that I had discovered the subdepartment for print of the university’s arts faculty. I talked to some very nice students for a while, who weren’t currently attending the nude drawing class on the upper floor nor the silkscreen printing course on the ground floor.

Following their recommendation, I went directly to the “Museum of illusions” afterwards. In line with the rest of the city, this museum was just another extremely absurd and funny place. It basically accommodates a weird collection of double images and pictures of optical illusions on the first floor. On the second floor, it provided its guests with a variety of spaces for optical illusion photo-shootings: Oneself in the endless mirror-tunnel, oneself as a giant or a gnome in the Ames room, oneself hanging from the ceiling of a room like Spiderman in the upside-down-room, oneself getting eaten by a dinosaur, oneself on a giant plate, oneself merged with a friend by the cut mirror, oneself getting overrun by a train … etc. etc. It wasn’t exactly something to visit on your own but I enjoyed it anyway, thinking about all my strange friends who would have enjoyed being there with me.

After another round of neoclassical buildings and bronce statues and grocery shopping I was extremely tired and not feeling too well so I went back to the hostel. I spent the rest of the evening talking to my very nice roommates and host; about languages, countries, about how this city became so weird, and about the Macedonian revolutions from only two years ago.

Summary: Skopje is weird and absurd and chilled and I will stay an extra day.

P.S.: After an extremely confusing moment this morning it turns out that the time zone didn’t change yesterday coming to Skopje but had changed coming from Madrid to Greece which I didn’t notice. Now I’m back to Madrid time. Thank God my phone did it all by itself coming to Greece, otherwise I would have missed all my busses. 😀