Escape from Prizren

Taking the occasional escape to Macedonia is going to be what keeps me sane while I am here. I left Prizren Thursday afternoon to go up to Pristina, the capital of Kosovo, for a meeting and dinner. The only way I could swing dinner was to spend the night in town. To take the greatest advantage of those arrangements, I decided to make a weekend out of being away from Prizren. On Friday morning I went to the bus station and boarded a bus for Skopje.

View out the bus window somewhere in the middle of Kosovo

My plan was to spend Friday and Saturday night down in Ohrid, a town in southwest Macedonia on Lake Ohrid. I missed the 10 o’clock bus out of Skopje by 8 minutes, which meant I had 4 hours to kill before the next bus. My first stop was breakfast. I found a decent little café in the Ramstor shopping center that makes a pretty mean omelet. Well, it was listed on the menu as an omelet. What I got was more along the lines of an egg scramble. It was pretty tasty nonetheless.

My tasty "omelet"

My next destination was the grocery store. Yes, Skopje has museums; and, yes, there are plenty of other shops to shop around in. But I really like grocery stores. In fact, I far prefer grocery shopping to clothes shopping. The Ramstor shopping center has a pretty decent grocery store and it was a worthy trip. I was planning on waiting until Sunday to buy a few things on my back to Prizren, but I couldn’t help myself. I bought a small bag of quinoa, a can opener (impossible to find in Prizren even though there are cans which require their use), muffin tins, and the Bradt guide for Macedonia.

Pics from around Skopje

By the time 2 o’clock rolled around, I was on the bus and ready to get myself to Ohrid, a 3-hour ride. The bus was full. As usual, the seat next to me was one of the last to be filled. I didn’t talk to the woman who sat next to me until a stop about half-way through the trip when I asked her how long the bus was going to be stopped for and if there was a toilet (10 minutes and yes).

She didn’t stop talking for the rest of the ride. As it turned out, she’s a radiologist at a children’s hospital in Skopje and was travelling to Ohrid to visit her ailing parents. She also kept an (empty) apartment in Ohrid and offered it as a place for me to stay. Since she was going to be spending the night with her parents, I would have the place entirely to myself. I thought about it and figured it would be okay. As soon as we debussed in Ohrid, she whisked me to her apartment and offered me figs that had been soaked in honey and sitting in her fridge for who-knows-how-long. The figs were good, the apartment was not.

Although it was very kind of her to offer me a place to stay, I wish I had declined. There was no bed. I slept on a child’s foam couch, the kind that flattens out into a bed-type thing. There weren’t any sheets, so I used a scratchy tablecloth. The heaters didn’t work and I couldn’t get any water to heat up. The curtain rods were devoid of curtains, and the floor was soft in places. I found a store to buy toilet paper. I took a very chilly sponge bath. It was pretty cold and I couldn’t find many blankets, so I slept in my down jacket which I had fortunately thrown in my bag at the last moment.

My Friday Night Digs

Are mailboxes a good indicator of their owners?

The next morning we had agreed to meet at 10:30 am back at the apartment and she was going to take me around town. As I usually do, I woke up early. Not one to waste a morning, I walked down to the water and around the old town. After having a breakfast picnic down by the lake (I couldn’t find any place serving breakfast), I headed back to the apartment to meet her. By 11:15 am she hadn’t shown up. I weighed my options, grabbed my bag, and went back to the bus station. I was pretty tired after a poor night’s sleep and I was desperately wanting a shower. So I returned to Skopje and booked myself into the Holiday Inn.

Pics from around Ohrid

In retrospect, I should have just found a place in Ohrid. But I wasn’t thinking. The reason I went to Ohrid was to tour the sites (it’s a UNESCO World Heritage site) and try to do some hiking. I covered a lot of the churches and ruins during the morning, but I would have liked to see what else the town had to offer. After I was on the bus, I was trying to consider my hotel choices. I knew the Holiday Inn was within easy reach of the bus station, close to the center of town, and would likely have rooms with bath tubs.

As soon as I got off the bus in Skopje, I walked the 10 minute walk to the Holiday Inn, stepped up to the desk and said, “Do you have any rooms for the night?” The desk clerk nodded, said he’d give me the corporate rate of 134 Euros, and I was in my room less than 5 minutes later. I sat on the bed and sighed. The room had a tub, a comfy bed, and an angled view of the River Vardar. Determined not to think about how much cash I had agreed to lay out for the room, I walked back to the Ramstor shopping complex with one thing on my mind: Lush. I wanted to make the best use possible of the bathtub.

The Ramstor Lush isn’t a store but a little kiosk by the escalator. I couldn’t find what I was looking for, a Dreamtime bath melt, so I found something else that I thought would be suitable. When I got up to the register the guy said, “I am so happy today.” “Oh, yeah,” I replied, “Why?” “Because Manchester is playing blah blah blah.” I lost the thread of his conversation here. When he realized that either I was not British or that I really could care less about football (soccer) he said, “You know, this product would be really nice with something from our half-off table. It’s called Dreamtime.” And I squealed, “That’s it! That’s what I want!”

Happy, I took my purchase and went to find some dinner. I settled on a place called Irish Pub for two reasons. One because I wanted a Guinness. Two because I was in the mood for sheppard’s pie. I went in, sat at the bar, looked over the beer menu and decided on a Leffe Blonde. They also had Chimay Blue and Red. White would have been my preference, but they didn’t carry that. They didn’t have any of the Leffe Blond, either, so I went with a Guinness. The menu had an odd mix of items. There weren’t any meat pies or stews on offer, but there was quite an array of Indonesian curries. What caught my eye, though, was the grilled salmon.

I haven’t had salmon since my arrival and it was g-o-o-d. Salmon with potatoes and spinach. I lingered over it as long as I could. As I finished dinner, the bar was starting to fill up. I considered sticking around to strike up a conversation with one of the English-speaking groups that had come in (I don’t get a lot of random conversation with other native-English speakers and I miss that), but my lump of Lush and the bathtub were calling me.

After a great night’s sleep, I was happy to discover that the Holiday Inn offered a free breakfast buffet. For the most part, the buffet was nothing special: overcooked eggs, cheese, olives, white bread, assorted meats, cereal, and bacon. Real bacon. Because Kosovo is predominately Muslim, pork products don’t exist. I ate my fair share of bacon on Sunday morning and it was good.

The view from my room





More random pics from Skopje

Since the bus back to Prizren didn’t leave until 4pm on Sunday, I decided to spend the day walking around Skopje. Most of the shops are closed so I just roamed around. I didn’t find anything particularly interesting, but I was so glad to be walking around on clean sidewalks without stray dogs lurking around piles of garbage. For lunch I happened to stumble into Skopje’s only Mexican restaurant, Amigos, where I ordered and ate a surprisingly decent burrito. I asked them to make it without the nacho cheese and cream (I’m not sure if that meant sour cream or something more insidious although what’s more insidious than nacho cheese?) and to add a side of jalapenos. The rice inside the burrito was more like Spanish rice, but it was better than Mexican food I’ve had in Japan (except for one place down in Kumamoto City which is fantastic). It was a good find.

Amigos



A good find at the grocery store: Organski Japonski Jabolki
aka kaki (Japanese) or persimmon

I can see myself taking the occasional weekend escape. I won’t be staying at the Holiday Inn, but I must say, between the bacon and the bathtub, it was worth every Euro.