Day 11 – Ohrid

After discussions until almost 3 o’clock the previous night, I woke up without pressure this morning and enjoyed one last breakfast with the nice people at Unity Hostel. Today I would be heading south towards the Ohrid lakes at the Albanian border. Vladimir-Xabier had decided to join me and so we headed off to the bus station to take the 12:30 bus (which eventually would be a different bus at 12:00).

One last time I had the chance to observe this weird place before eventually leaving it behind. Something that had caught my attention in the previous days got especially clear again: there is some strange connection between Skopje and Germany. Entire adverts on buses are in German, there is Sparkasse and dm-Markt, and everyone seems to know a few words of German even if they don’t speak any English. Yesterday an old man had accompanied me through the streets for a while, talking quite good German and telling me how he had worked in Switzerland for some time. When I had asked a bus driver for his destination, he had kindly pointed out to me that he was driving a “Kinder-Bus, Schulen-Bus!”. The young waiter in the Turkish coffee-shop yesterday had explained us that almost everyone had some family in Germany that had gone there for work and that almost everybody would like to go to Germany some day and that they had the opportunity to choose German as a second language in school.

As the bus left Skopje, statues and neoclassicism were substituted by large, green valleys between mountains with snowy white tops. After a while, villages began to appear alongside the road. Villages in the middle of nowhere, consisting almost entirely of new, modern, mostly unfinished houses for one or two families. All of them built according to the newest standards and optically much alike any house you would find in newly built middle-upper-class residential areas in German villages. The high minarets of at least one mosque per village overtopped the houses and in many cases there were orthodox churches right next to them. The further we drove, the more I could observe huge Albanian flags marking certain villages, houses, yards and cemeteries, and Macedonian flags marking others; the Albanian villages always being more modern and having more mosques and the Macedonian being poorer and with higher presence of orthodox churches.

We arrived in Ohrid at 3 in the afternoon and while I was attaching my jacked to my backpack I heard a woman asking: “Are you Anna?”. This is how I met my Airbnb-host Nade.

I had decided to book a little (still very cheap) studio in Ohrid instead of looking for a hostel and treat myself with the luxury of sleeping alone in a room, not sharing a bathroom, not climbing into bed in the dark in order not to wake anyone, and leaving all my stuff laying around for a few days. I had doubted the decision as my previous days in hostels had been very awesome and I almost couldn’t imagine being alone in the evenings anymore. However, if I had gone to a hostel I would have never met Nade and Vladimir who turned out to be the most amazing people. As I had come with a different bus, Nade was waiting for me at one busstation while her husband was waiting for me at the other. We immediately liked each other and she organized a local-priced taxi that took me to the apartment where I met her husband. After detailed explanations about the city, Nade cooked “very good original Macedonian coffee” for us and took me to the city afterwards. Through this increasingly windy, cold and wet afternoon, we walked along the shore, through the old-town and on a hill for almost two hours and I learned about her personal history, her marriage, her beloved city Ohrid with its special magic, her cats and many other things.

Ohrid is a little 60.000-inhabitant town next to the Ohrid lake. This lake – the deepest one in the Balkan region and one of the oldest lakes of the world – is located on the Macedonian-Albanian border, surrounded by mountains and does indeed transmit a special magic. The village accommodates 365 orthodox churches – one for every day of the year – and also several mosques. Nade explained how in politics there might be differences but how Albanians, Macedonians, Muslims and Orthodox live together in harmony and respect as neighbors and friends who talk, smile at each other and meet for coffee or dinner. We easily agreed on how flags and religious differences are useless and stupid, shared stories and laughed a lot. After visiting the church of St. John, we descended towards the “bazar” where she took me to a special fish-shop. This place had only one type of fish – trout – and I could choose one, which the lady prepared on the grill for me to pick up 20 minutes later and take away. In the meantime, Nade showed me the other two flats they are currently turning into tourist apartments. After the 20 minutes had passed, with my fish in a plastic-bag and constantly saying hi to neighbors on the way, she took me to her favorite restaurant where she ordered “the usual” (Macedonian Kebab) for herself and a Macedonian salad for me. It consisted of tomatoes, cucumbers and Macedonian sheep cheese which is a little bit like Greek cheese but much softer, less salty and creamier and which they grate over the salad an top off with a dark-purple Olive. We shared the salad and a few more laughs before she indicated me how to get back home and we said goodbye at almost 8.

Although I found the apartment easily and without a map even in the dark, I am not planning to leave this place too soon. Macedonia keeps convincing me of being a beautiful, completely safe country with stunning nature and extremely nice and hospitable people.