Mramor Skopje

... laid flowers at the foot of it. You know I am all about digging up the obscure and unknown and I learned something today about my journey into Kosovo. Use this at your Tuesday night trivia contest...

The guy's name is Adem Pajaziti and was a leader of what I think was the Kosovar terrorist group leading the opposition to Serbian forces in the 1990s. I say terrorist because I got the info from someone partial to Serbs since he is ...

... between them, so total mastery may never be complete, but still it's nice to be able to read a menu, regardless of whether I can actually speak the language. People talk about the difficulties of Croatian, exclaiming, "At least they use Roman letters!" when in fact that's the easiest part. I wish I could absorb a language acoustically as fast as I can its graphic symbols. That may be the one part of language that you actually ...

Monday: Just a typical Monday.. oh wait, except the part where I didn't have to go to work. Ha ha! Serious though, even though I am having a very good time.. well I kinda miss my work- shhhh... don't tell my boss!!! Okay, so at noon Marija and I headed downstairs to her uncle's house. Bazhe's grandmother invited us to come and eat Mekica. I was told that she makes the best Mekicas and well, they were very delicous! This time I had them with white ...

... by but they seemed friendly. We stopped at this one cafe and I had gotten a banana milk shake and a pepsi. The milk shakes are nothing like the ones we have in the states. They tasted like an instant, watered down, thing with one ice cube to make it cold..... it was gross, but I drank as much of it as I could, so not to offend anyone. We headed back to the house to meet up with Sashe and Zoran. Back at the house we found the guys working ...

... has the food factory Agroplod. Agroplod makes serval sweet candies and cookies among other things. They are the only factory to make peanut butter here in Macedonia, the rest is imported. We were not able to go in and explore, cause we would have had to make an appointment. Next stop was an ancient city called Heraclea. There in Heraclea we seen workers excavating relics and bazilikas. We went into the museum there to see what they had dug up in the site. I was allowed to take ...

... I would recommend Skopje for a visit (1 or 2 days is enough).At a first sight is not attractive city,because of all this '60 &'70 style buildings,but it has this Balkan charm, which is quite obvious after few days. Restaurants are great and cheap,also like coffee bars and discotheques. For a sightseeing I would recommend Old Bazaar, Mustapha Pasa Mosque,Stone bridge-built in 6th century and now connecting new part of the town with the old one and Kala ...

... I've talked to have either already been or are planning to go, so it seems like an interesting and stable destination nowadays. I'll most likely be just long enough to take in Prishtina, Peja and Prizren and then move on again. After that it's onwards to Serbia . . . back via Macedonia though. Which means I'll have one more day here in Skopje, though I'll most likely spend the day out someplace, like Tetovo or something. So Macedonia, I'm giving you one last chance. Better make the most of it!

We left a day after the wedding of my best man Zvanko who, normally, has a full name and a title at that: civ.ing. Ljubomir G. Drnkovski a great guy with whom we were in the same class since the first grade of elementary school. We are still the best of friends. He married ing.tech. Snezana Bekar who took his surname and is now Snezana Drnkovska. I was summoned to serve, from the coming September. the obligatory army service which was "paltry" 11 months long period for ...

Well, we got in last night and things got interesting right off the bat. We want to ultimately get to Croatia so in order to do so, we need to go through either Albania or Macedonia. We asked around and everytime Albania came up, we would hear comments like, "Well do you have a gun or a knife," or "Are you in the army or something," or "Good luck, I hope you don't get robbed." So, after hearing all that, we decided to ...

... of some of the regular's staff.Fear meant that the Macedonians pref**red to deploy Albanians near to this rebel t**ritory,but it led to inevitable security compromises.So,as M would say,"the oldest trick in the book" worked,with no little help from a less than ruthless checkpoint,and we w**e home and dry. Ljuboten was a mixed village,but with an Albanian majority.Ev**ybody we met appeared to be in the resistance.It appeared to be the sort of place wh**e ...