Day 10 – Skopje

I had planned to visit the natural site of Matka today but I awoke in pouring rain again, so I used the morning for some work and tax issues I had to do anyway. When the rain eased a little at midday, I decided to go there anyway and went to the bus stop. There I waited for bus number 60 for about 45 minutes. It didn’t come, nor did the rain stop so I changed my plans and went to visit the “Museum of the Macedonian Struggle” instead.

My previous Skopje experiences had created pretty high expectations in me and, again, I was not disappointed. The exhibition lives inside of one of the neoclassical Skopje-2014-buildings and consists of 13 rooms on 3 levels representing 109 important figures of the Macedonian struggle in life-sized wax figures!! This country seems to have some kind of fetish with figures and statues but the installations were beautiful and strange and different and made me learn a lot about the Macedonian fight for independence since the Ottoman empire began to crumble towards the end of the 15th century until the foundation of the Republic of Macedonia in 1991.

I also used the opportunity to take a closer look at the building and saw that there is an about 3 cm gap between the columns and their foundation and that the walls are simply tiled with white stones rather than built out of marble. As my host put it – it’s all just cardboard.

After lunch I went out with my Quebecois-Malageño roommate Vladimir to explore more weird places of Skopje. We walked through the Turkish-albanian neighborhood towards the fortress and climbed all the way up. The place was as weird as all the others. An old fortress with strange, grave-like excavations and half-finished buildings inside it’s walls. Everything seems like someone expected a huge boom a few years ago, inverted lots of money which was empty half way and then the boom never came. On the top of the fortress’s hill we saw another building and were curious if it was still inhabited or not. It turned out to be the Contemporanean Art Museum and actually didn’t look bad. But it’s another example of the “unstructuredness” of the city. Lots of interesting places but no infrastructure to connect them or to let people know they exist. We followed the spectacle of some crazy street dogs for a while and then finished the day with a Turkish tee before going back to the hostel.

I am kind of sad to leave this place tomorrow although I’m also looking forward to my next stop. One of the purposes of this journey is to learn how encounters with different people are not worth less because they end. Traveling is a weird state of existence. You have the most interesting conversations with people, you have beautiful 5-hour-friendships, you save someone’s ass although you just met them and they do the same thing for you. You share an hour, a day, a walk, a coffee, a secret, a thought… and then you never see them again.