Arrival in Skopje
Trip Start
Jan 06, 2006
1
59
120
Trip End
Sep 02, 2008
Skopje,
Macedonia
Friday, October 20, 2006
As it was, the only thing that beat us was the Bulgarian bus system. I had purchased our return tickets in advance in Skopje. Finding our bus back wasn't quite as chaotic as getting our bus there (see my entry on Sofia). However, we did had to find a ticket window where we could redeem our prepaid tickets for a spot on the bus. A reservation was required. After visting eight windows (starting at information where I showed them my prepaid ticket) we found the right one. I spent our last two lev to pay the bus station fee, as was required before we could get on the bus.
The ride wasn't as fast as the way in (six hours in total) but we did meet a fascinating character from Michigan who is studying international relations in Ankara, Turkey. His university classes broke for the end of Ramadan and he had eleven days to kill. He chose to spend his time in Macedonia. It wasn't his first visit to a South Slavic country (he spent two months in Bosnia/Croatia/Serbia), and he was working on his Macedonian/Bulgarian (the two languages are quite similar). After we chatted for a while (a six hour converstation is a bit hard to maintain at times, even between the best of conversationalists) he tried his tongue at Macedonian with a woman next to us and continued on for the rest of the ride!
The scenery along the road to Skopje is really fantastic. The lombardy poplar grows abundantly, and although most of them had lost all but the leaves at their very tips, Fall had not quite set in on the region and the fields were still green. It was sunny and the air was clear for the most part, until twenty kilometers from Skopje. The first smog we saw was very obvious. A fourty story smokestack let something black off into the atmosphere. Nearer still it looked like a fog had descended on the city. Only as the bus was enveloped in it (visibility went from perfect to less than a kilometer) could we see the the fog was thicker atop chimneys and open fires.
From the bus station to the hotel S- with our reservation we quickly moved, trying to get there before sunset. As we walked, we noticed that everyone with trash dropped it as they walked along, wherever they happened to be (after two days, we have the impression that littering Macedonia's national pasttime). Trash lies everywhere, and we can't imagine why. Apart from the smog in Skopje, this is a beautiful country. We did learn that under the Jugoslav government, litering was not permitted. Some have said that litering now is a reaction to that, but it seems careless.
We waited and waited at the hotel S- and it started to get aggrivating. No one was at the reception desk. Half an hour later a dopey little fellow showed up and informed us, that at 6 pm, our reservation had been cancelled. I told him what I thought about that. We began a toil to find another accomodation.
We asked around in the district (the Albanian quarter) and found nothing suitable. The one available option was a wickedly overpriced room with two cots. We went to a internet cafe to look online in order to find somewhere cheap, open and available. I found a Hotel K- with beds for 20 Euros each. Not great, but it was the best we could find at seven thirty pm. We caught a taxi because the place was a ways off of our map (and we never could have found it otherwise): even the taxi driver had to ask three other taxi drivers before he found the street.
Twenty minutes after looking online to find that they had a place that would cost 40 Euros for the two of us, the manager at Hotel K- claimed that actually that sort of room wasn't available and we had to take another type of room that costs 55 Euros. It seemed like we were getting a bit of a hussle. That was more than we wanted to spend, so I asked if he had a discount for multiple nights. The manager would cut our bill by five euros a night.
We told the fellow that we needed some time to talk outside. The advertising / reality price descrepancy was getting me down. We took our bags to the sidewalk and chatted for a moment. Then the manager shouted out the window to us that we could have the room for 40 Euros, but only for one night, and we'd have to see in the morning. After all, he said, it was eight pm and probably no one else would come to take the room. For that, we said "alright" and we had accepted a place to stay. It had European tv so we spent our night catching up on our vedging.
