Scoping Out Skopje

So I'm writing about our time in Skopje, Macedonia's capital, way after the fact.  This may lead to a shortish entry and slightly hazy memories. In short, our time there was weird but good. 

Perhaps more than any other former communist capital city we'd visited, Skopje has managed to erase almost all traces of it's former government.

This took the form of reviving historic quarters, sprucing up residential areas and, most obviously, a huge investment in monumental buildings and statuary around the city's centre.  So pronounced was this that it looked almost crazy. Giant bronzes of Alexander the Great and Phillip of Macedon staring at one another across the river. A huge choreographed water fountain.   Lots and lots of white marble. And dozens of more only slightly less grandiose sculptures. If actually reminded me of Ashgabat, the capital of Turkmenistan. Or an extra large Vegas casino.

However there were lots of positives to Skopke as well.  We are at the same lively local restaurant every night, where we are the best food we'd had in the Balkans.  Admittedly, this was probably due to the individual restaurant more than anything, but it was fun and memorable.  At the restaurant we drank plenty of Skopsko beer, whose cleanness and qaulity was a welcome relief after the uni spiring Albanian macro brews.  And on the way home we regularly saw an incredibly floofy chow how that seemed to have a regular crew of admirers and patters.

We went for a stroll in the pretty old Turkish quarter, which reminded me a lot of Sarajevo's old town.  And where we escaped a ferocious rainstorm by popping into a quirky little brewpub and watching the end of the cricket world cup final on my phone.

We climbed up to the old castle (with pre-Roman origins) and strolled to the fabulous Skopje modern art museum.  It had a really cool exhibition of installation type pieces from a Macedonian artist (whose name I've already forgotten, sadly) and a fascinating show of 20th century political posters from Switzerland, from which I learned the astonishing fact that Swiss women were only granted the vote in 1979!

And we had a lovely outing to the Matka gorge.  It was very pretty, and, at least in theory, very accessible from the city.  It was let down a bit by the inscrutable ticketing system on Skopje's city buses and the non-appearance of a scheduled bus on the way back, meaning that we spent as much time waiting for the bus as we did actually enjoying the impressive scenery of the gorge.

On departing we took a bus to the airport (only private buses were available, which was a mixed blessing as they were somewhat more expensive than the municipal ones but very much easier to navigate).  Once again, a budget airline (Wizz Air this time) managed to run everything smoothly and pleasantly. We said a fond farewell to the Balkans and had a fairly pleasant flight to the first of several quick hops to Belgium.

Before concluding my discussions of the Balkans, I will make one more observation that I'd forgotten to up til now: we met an absolutely crazy number of Kiwis travelling in the Balkans.  To the point that on more than one occasion, Kiwis were about half of the people on an eleven-seater minibus. Whether it was hearing an accent or noticing someone's ponamu you couldn't escape them!  I'm still a little unclear on why this was. Possibly because the NZ dollar isn't a particularly strong currency and the Balkans are the cheapest region of Europe to travel to? Whatever the reason, we had plenty of reminders of home as we journeyed from Beograd to Skopje.