Another Glorious Weekend

My friend Happie called me Friday afternoon and invited me to come down to Makedonski Brod to visit and go to the Zrze monastery since it was going to be a beautiful weekend. So after work I packed up and caught the 5:30 combi and I am so glad I did. It was a spectacular weekend. Saturday morning we got up and caught a cab with a random cabbie waiting by the Mak Brod Center. It was the first of several 'blessings' for the day. He agreed to take us to Zrze, but warned us we would have to walk the last kilometer or so up the mountain to the monastery. That was fine. We went from an okay road, to a not so good road, to a pretty bad road, and reached Zrze. Zrze, like many small remote villages in Macedonia, is dying. I had thought maybe we could pick up something to eat and drink there before our steep hike, but there were no stores that I saw. Many houses were abandoned and falling apart. We saw no one under 45 living there, and indeed, no young people do live there. A quick side note, someone told me that the reason that villages like these died in Spain was because of universal education. While small villages can support primary schools, once children start high school they are sent away to board at the high school in the nearest city. Often times parents follow them there, but even if they don't, the children never return to live the hard-scrabble farm life. They move to the cities to seek better opportunities and more stimulation. The same is true in Macedonia. So slowly, as the older people die, the villages die. Villages that once had hundreds of residents are now down to a handful and soon will disappear forever, along with that way of life. But back to my tale....

Smiler (pronounced smeelar) stopped and asked a resident about the road up to the monastery. The man shrugged, and said he could make it with his car, so Smiler started up. The road was truly terrible, but Smiler was determined. It turned out that he had grown up in Zrze, and the last time he had been to the monastery was 30 years ago, and he wanted to see it as well! So up we went, saved a strenuous (and hungry and thirsty) hike, to one of the most beautiful places in the world.

The monastery is currently inhabited by 8 monks who are busy restoring the archaeological features. It was first settled in caves in the rock cliff under an ancient fort in the 9th century. If you look at the picture, you can see the monks cells and a cave church in the rock. There was also an old basilica that was built up on the ledge in the 5th century that they are busy excavating - if you look on my facebook page you can see more pictures. One of the monks came out and gave us a tour - he spoke very good English. Most monks in Macedonia are young, because while the church wasn't shut down under Tito, neither was it encouraged. Only during the past 20 years or so have the monasteries been repopulated with young monks. Anyway, in the 14th century the current church was built with its beautiful icons and paintings. There are two paintings of Jesus and Mary by the altar which have a miracle attributed to them. Mary's painting showed her playing with Jesus - a fairly unusual depiction. For 3 days after the paintings were placed in their proper place by the altar, the monks would enter to find that the paintings had switched places. Mary finally spoke to one of the monks and told him that she needed to be on the right side of the altar instead of her customary left spot so her back wouldn't be turned to the picture of Jesus, and so it is today. The monk gave us another blessing - a small book on the monastery, and they gave us some mountain tea to enjoy under a tree in the courtyard. It was magical.

When we headed back we were starving, so we had Smiler take us to a new restaurant built by a friend of Happies by the Peshar Peshka cave - our third blessing. They are building some guest cabins there, but after the workers ate, we had the place to ourselves. We sat on the balcony in the sunshine until the sun went down, then our host came out and ushered us in by the wood stove. We had mixed salad - in Macedonia that's shredded cabbage, tomatoes, cucumbers, beets, carrots, and soft white cheese - to start off, then asked the owner/chef to choose our main course. He brought out уваци, a traditional Macedonian dish that is a rolled chicken breast stuffed with cheese and wrapped in bacon, and a homemade kolbasa - both were the best I've had yet in Macedonia. Biljana and Goce sat and talked to us as we ate, and partway through the meal Biljana's mother came out with a благо that she had made for us - a sweet coconut cake soaked in the sugar water that they use for most desserts - think baklava for an idea of what the syrup is like. We were stuffed, but it too was delicious not to eat. She had brought out about 8 pieces for us, and when we could each only eat one, they wrapped up the rest for us to take. That meal, plus a big glass of rakija each, cost about 8 dollars each - I shall miss the prices of good meals when I return home. It was such a pleasurable meal - like many Macedonian meals it stretched out over a couple of hours - made more special by the hospitality of our hosts and the intimate feeling of our surroundings. On so many days here I blink my eyes to remind myself it is all real - bouncing on combis squeezed between Macedonians or Albanians, their patience and delight in having conversations with me, seeing such beauty, and feeling such warmth from everyone. I wish I could send each and every one of you the sensations I experience here - they are truly indescribable.

Oct. and Nov.

Hi, everyone,
I know it's been forever since I've written, but it's been a busy month. Tomorrow is Kurban Bajram, or little Bajram. The two Bajrams will always resonate with me, because I moved in with my Albanian host family right before the big Bajram, and moved out the day after little Bajram. Thanksgiving marks half of my service time - it will be a year since we were sworn in as Peace Corps volunteers. The Mak-13's (and the Mak 12's who extended a year) are going home, and it's like losing family. They were our guides and introduced us to Macedonia, and I will forever be grateful for their welcoming us into the PC family. Mbarre rrugen, everyone.

One reason I was so busy was that I went back to the States for two weeks and visited sisters, parents and kids. What a great time! It feels like teleporting from one world into another (but not as quick - the trip home took 24 hours). Every part of it was wonderful. It was especially nice to see my parents. They have had significant health problems since I've been gone - not unexpected, given their age - and it has been difficult to be so far away. But they both looked good and we had a rewarding visit.

Talk about fabulous - San Fran and NYC were both great fun. Chris was able to arrange for Pixar to have a luxury box at the Oakland Raiders/Seahawks game, and Dave, Karen and Kellen came down to see the game with us. We feasted and watched the Seahawks lose badly, but it was great fun. He then gave us a tour of Pixar. The picture above is him in Alcatraz - I'd never gone and wanted to. Next was 3 days in NYC, where Kacy took me for a mani, pedi and massage. That night we went to a play and saw Laura Linney. It was excellent and thought provoking. It was great to see the kids' new apartments and offices - a lot has changed since I left.

Two seminars - one on sustainable tourism and one on sustainable forestry - buttressed my trip home. Above is a picture of my Kosovar friends. One day I will go visit them, but I fear it will have to wait until I'm done with Peace Corps. Kosovo is off limits to us. Everyone I have met from Kosovo has been so nice, though, and I can't wait until I can get up to visit.

Finally, last weekend I went down to Demir Kapija for a lamb roast that my friend Tracy had arranged. We all brought some a variety of things to eat or to make, and did we feast. Friday night we took ingredients we had brought to a place that makes pizza with a brick oven. We gave them the ingredients and instructed them on which ingredient we wanted on what pizza. They made the crust, added the ingredients as instructed, and then baked them in their oven. Talk about gourmet pizzas! We had a pepper pizza with fresh onions, peppers, ajvar, and the regular fixings, a garlic pizza, a gorgonzola, bacon and carmelized onion pizza, a cheese pizza, and one other yummy one whose ingredients I now can't remember. They were amazing. The next day we got up and got the combi out to Demir Kapija and dropped off the food for the lamb roast. We then went out for a short hike and condor watching. It was a pristine fall day - warm, blue sky, the kind of a day where you are so happy to be alive and outside. We then returned for the roast. The owner of the restaurant had been getting the brick oven heated and ready, and we roasted the lamb and a variety of root veggies. It was the best lamb I'd ever eaten, succulent, flavorful, with juices oozing everywhere, and done perfectly. It was possibly the best meal I have ever eaten.

Now that I've made you all hungry, I think I"ll go eat lunch. Have a great day!

Simplicity

You begin to realize shortly after getting here how much you consume and how unnecessary some of it is. One of the things that amuses me is how to invent uses for common things. For example, plastic water bottles. They are just starting to recycle plastic here, but it isn't widespread and you do have a work some to find plastic recycling bins in big cities - forget about villages. But you find plastic everywhere - Coke and other soda producers have definitely had a huge impact on Macedonian beverage selection. When I walk along the Vardar, there are places where the tree roots have reached out and caught islands of plastic bottles. Interestingly, the Roma are the big recyclers here - they do go around and gather bottles to make money. But anyway, I like to find a variety of ways to reuse plastic bottles. So far I use them to store water (we distill water here - Gostivar's water supply was breached last spring), for a hot water bottle (indispensable in the winter), a sprinkling bottle for ironing (who needs a spray bottle - just poke some holes in a bottle cap), an exercise ball (I developed plantar fasciitis and use the bottle with water in it instead of a tennis ball to exercise my foot), and, of course, a plant watering can. I never realized they were so golden!! Mail me your uses - I'm sure there are more I'm not thinking about.

It's pepper season here. Peppers are a huge staple for people in Macedonia. They roast them and can different recipes of slow cooked peppers. The main dish is called ajvar - the peppers are cooked over an outdoor bbq for hours. There are more kinds of peppers here than you can imagine - the bazaar is a red, green, yellow, pink rainbow of pepper colors and shapes. The main one, though is the red pepper above, which is also often dried for winter use. People use all kinds of nooks and crannies to hang their peppers, and it adds extra color to the city.

I also love the brooms they use here. The one above was being used by a street cleaner. Ah, twig technology - when you need a new one, just go out and collect twigs.

Finally I included a picture of the big hero of Albania - Shkenderbej - not sure of the correct spelling. Does he look like a big Viking or what?

Went to a week of seminars on tourism. It's interesting to hear about all the new trends - ecotourism, adventure tourism, rural tourism, agrotourism, and my favorite, integrated relational tourism. The last refers to tourism where you stay in a small venue, like a b&b or a family, and get to know the area, people and culture. Our lecturer was a professor from Malta, and now I'm dying to go to Malta and Sicily!

Harvest Festival in Gostivar

Hello, everyone, I still am alive!!! September flew by in a flash, filled with planning for the Harvest Festival, new volunteers arriving and another two weeks of sustainable agriculture seminars. In fact, so much happened in September we were cadging time in order to get the planning for the Festival done. I'm hoping to get some pictures up on my Facebook site soon. We are lucky enough to have a professional photographer in PC Macedonia - my friend Phil. He took hundreds of pictures while I was running around with my head cut off. But more about that later.

First more about the month. When September came it was as if someone told mother nature it was fall. In a day the weather turned from hot and summery to cool, rainy, and autumnal. My PC heater is turned on, blankets piled on my bed, and I'm layering my clothes. What happened to gentle transitions? Not this year, not in Macedonia.

The really fun part of the month was welcoming the new volunteers. As the facilitator of the Volunteer Support Network, I got to welcome them when they first arrived in the hotel. I'd already been in contact with all the over 60's, it was fun watching the bus roll in and all my new friends climb off the bus. Part of the fun was reliving that experience. I remember it very well, the anxiety and excitement blended in with trying to remember 30+ new names and faces. I remember the surprise at seeing Macedonia for the first time - I had pictured it looking like New Hampshire, but the topography and the natural background were very different, not to mention the houses and villages. And settling in with the host family - what a wonderful challenge that is. Knowing what they had facing them was part of the fun, and we worked hard to alleviate as much anxiety as possible.

Welcoming the newbies came right in the middle of another 2 weeks of sustainable agriculture seminars. We had wonderful lecturers from Belgium and the Azores, but their lectures often just highlighted the difference between the highly industrialized Western Europe and Macedonia. There were several hours of lecture on animal welfare legislation in Europe. Halfway through the first one I asked Luli if any of the lecture made sense to him. Unsurprisingly, it didn't. Thinking from the point of view of an animal is a luxury for poor countries. And I must admit, some of the laws didn't make sense to me, either. Things we used to do pretty routinely on the farm are now against the law in Europe.

And finally, the 5K fun run and Harvest Festival. Yikes! We were racing around up until it started putting things in place. Two days before the race we talked to the schools, and if the schools hadn't participated, we would have had about 15 runners. As it was, we had 130 who finished - a big success. The day before the festival, the people who were going to put up the booths threatened to pull out, so we had to run into Skopje to placate them. Plans changed, people were in and out, how we did things was adjusted, and then it happened. And amazingly all went well. We had t-shirts for the runners and those were popular items - a free t-shirt in Macedonia is like gold. But they looked great. The pictures above are Luli and my friend Kerry in race headquarters ready to sign up the runners, me and my wonderful bakery woman who came to the festival because I invited her, and me with the Cegrani folk group who entertained. I'm still recovering. But off to more things. I have another two weeks of sustainable agriculture, this time about rural tourism. When I can, I help Kerry teach English to the employees of the local emergency management center. And who knows what else will pop up.

You never know what's going to happen in Macedonia. Yesterday I was returning from Ohrid. I'd caught the bus that drops me off by the side of the highway outside of Gostivar, forlorn and smattered by dust as the bus pulls away. Because it was a highway drop bus, I'd carried my backpack and swimming bag aboard the bus with me, hoping that I could have a row all for myself and my stuff. We pulled out of the Ohrid bus stop - so far so good, the bus wasn't full and no one challenged me for the space by me. We picked up a couple of passengers along the way as we left Ohrid, but, phew, still had my spot. I put on my Ipod headphones and shut out the world - it's a 2.5 hour, hot trip. When we pulled into Kichevo some people got off the bus and some on. I felt safe - the only person who didn't have a seat was a man, and they usually sit with other men. But before I knew it, he was standing by me saying "Moshe?" I looked up in some distress and he saw all my stuff and started to turn away, but then turned back and I made room for him. Dang......

We rode up to the rest stop on top of the mountain in silence. After we reboarded I noticed him talking to the other American on the bus, so when he returned I decided to be at least a little more friendly. And what a treat it was! He was a charming young man who spoke English. He was an Albanian from Kichevo who had studied bioengineering for the past 6 or 7 years in Austria, and is going this fall for his masters in Switzerland. There he will do research on the role of a couple of enzymes in attaching prions in the brain for such things as mad cow disease and other brain diseases. His hope for the future is to go for his PhD in the US where he would really like to work on autism research. He was thinking he'd like to go to Boston or LA, but I tried to talk him into Berkeley and the Bay area. Like many Macedonians,however, he is a mad basketball fan, and would die to see a Lakers game in person. We had the best conversation. Ipods are the curse of the modern world......

I was returning from Ohrid after attending another of the many festivals. Last week the Sheepbreeders Association had helped put on the annual wine and cheese festival, and this week was the choral festival. The both festivals were great! For the choral festival, groups from all over Europe - Lithuania, Russia, Romania,etc., come to Ohrid for a competition, and afterwards wander through the tourist areas, find a spot, set up, and sing. Many wear their national costumes and carry their flags. The group above is a youth group from Spain. We just walked around going from one group to another listening to fantastic music. As Benson said, whoever thought that we'd be in Macedonia listening to a Czech group sing salsa music? We missed the group from the Congo, but heard groups from Switzerland, Croatia, Romania, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Spain, and some others we weren't sure of. It's an amazing world!

The End of Summer

Last night, I actually felt cold - the first time in a long time. It's still warm and sunny, but the hints of the end of summer are here. Most of the big cars with EU license plates are gone, the traffic is not crazy, families have been putting their loved ones on buses to return to the EU. Last weekend I was in Ohrid again for the wine and cheese festival, and I shall return on Thursday for the final choral production of the summer. Tomatoes, peppers, egg plants and melons crowd the fruit and vegetable stands, and the apples are big and heavy on the trees. Next week school starts again.

With the end of summer, a new group of Peace Corps volunteers prepare to change their lives. Thirty-nine new volunteers will meet on Sept. 9th in Philadelphia and on the 11th start the long journey to their new home. It hardly seems possible that I have been here for almost a year. I remember so clearly the stress of trying to get everything done, the nervousness of facing the unknown, and the sadness of saying goodbye to my friends and family. I also remember how accomplished the volunteers who came before us seemed to be - something I definitely do not feel. But it will be exciting to get to know the new volunteers - Macedonia is a very small country the other volunteers are our family here.

It's also Ramadan. Every year it moves up 10 days, so this year it started on the 11th of August. Last year we arrived at our host families right at the end of Ramadan, and experienced just a bit of it before the big Bajram celebration. During the holy month of Ramadan, observant Muslims don't eat or drink during the day. They generally get up at around 3am to have a bite, and then as soon as the Hoxha calls the last evening prayer, they eat dinner. It's hard for me to imagine living for a month that way, but especially in the heat. Many rest for most the day, and then come to life at night after eating. But it still is a big challenge. It is a month of knowing what it's like to have little and be always hungry, and to think of others, something all of us should do.

The sad thing about this time is the group before us is preparing to leave. They will be here until November and December, but they just had their close of service conference and the wheels are in motion for them to depart. Next year it will be me - the days move both so slowly and so quickly. I still feel so much like a newcomer.

Just got back from buying some chicken breasts at my butcher (where I have to order in Macedonian) and my baker (where I have to order in Albanian). For months in the winter I baked my own bread, missing the multigrain chewy breads of home. But now I shall return all roly-poly (or perhaps, more roly-poly). Once I started buying bread at this bakery, all thoughts of making my own have vanished. Sure, it's white bread, but warm, freshly baked, with a chewy crust - well, I've talked about this before, so I won't go on. But it is always a treat to bring it home and snarf down on it. There will be many things I miss about Macedonia.

Hot Time, Summer in the City

Hot Time, Summer in the City....Macedonia has hot, humid summers. The weather has been coming from the southwest and zaps my energy. When I go outside during the day, there are a few people on the streets, but not many, and when I return home, I'm soaking.
But at Night It's a Different Tale...Macedonians handle the weather by staying in most of the day. The minute it starts to cool off at night, though, everyone comes out. The streets are flooded with families and young people. A doughnut maker has a stand selling a basket of fresh donuts for about 75 cents, and another vendor sells hot roasted corn. In August, the Macedonian diaspora returns home. Suddenly there are large cars with EU license plates crowding the streets, and I start noticing tourists. 'Humph, they're not from here." It's not my country, but I do get possessive with this sudden onslaught of strangers.
"Go out, go out and find a girl".....It's wedding time. Although it probably means they'll live apart, now is the time when those working elsewhere get married. Everyday you hear drums, honking and gunfire or fireworks, and you know there's been another wedding. Weddings are 3 day events, and end with a large party in a special restaurant. But first, there are rituals the women go through, the men go through, the couple goes through - none of it in a mosque. Part of the nightly parade, too, are people looking for partners. Everyone walks the streets in groups, talking, meeting friends, and meeting each other. Today begins Ramadan, so I expect things will slow down, but I'll have to wait and see.
Spent the weekend in Ohrid again, and went to a concert where the cousin of a friend headlined. He's a jazz funk guitarist and vocalist, and lives now in NYC, just a block or so from Kacy. The concert was in the old Roman amphitheater in Ohrid, and we sat on ancient stone seats that have been there for centuries. Sitting close by was the President of Macedonia and his entourage - very little security, though dogs did sniff for bombs before he arrived. Back now in Gostivar, heading over to Luli's to plan the Harvest Festival....