Thursday 7 July. Day 21: Skopje

July 7, 2016

Our final day in Skopje was spent being the tourists we had failed to be when we arrived. Remember the 38-40 degree C days only a few weeks ago at the beginning of this journal?

We caught the double-decker bus into the city centre and headed past all the new buildings and monuments and across the bridge to the old part of town.

Upstairs in prime position for the bus to town.

There we found some old streets to wander and away from the tourist area, some awesome and very cheap cheese burek and drinking yogurt/buttermilk.

Burek and Yogurt - I think we paid about 70c each or something crazy.

We struggled to find some of the old buildings (bath houses, caravanserai and the like) either because they had been subsumed into shopping centres or renovated and were now shut off except for private events.

It took us a while to find the entrance to the National Museum of Macedonia. It is not well marked, and hiding out the back looking like a car park only. The museum has seen better days. It was very run down, the shop and café basically closed (and empty of stock) and there was barely a light bulb in the place that didn’t need replacing. We spend almost all of our time in the Icon Gallery with its 14-19th century icons.

An advertisement for Wagyu beef from Australia (Австралија)!!

We continued walking the streets enjoying the sights of the slightly crumbling bits of the city and the signs of recent anti-Government protest action – paint bombs on government buildings and any new edifice built by the President to try and make Skopje more triumphalist and ‘important’, like the copy of the Arch de Triomphe.

Heading 'home' on the bus to the hotel at the base of Mt. Vodno.

Sports store with the photo of the Macedonian football team wearing shirts to commemorate Todor "Toše" Proeski (Тодор "Тоше" Проески) Remember him? I tried to convert you to his music a few pages back.... The photo was taken after a match they played in the week he died, dedicated to his memory. Played in fact on the national day of mourning, the match was free for the 18,000 strong crowd and preceded by a minute's silence. The national team had not won a game in THREE YEARS. But they won this one (3:0 against Andorra!).

Dinner that night was at Gradska Kafeana Furna – also close to the hotel.

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