Before I met Jason in Dubrovnik, I was planning to ride along the coast into Greece so that I could stay closer to the warmer weather. I was out of days on my Schengen visa but I was thinking maybe I’d take the risk and see if I could get in – maybe the border control agent wouldn’t actually count days on my passport?! That was wishful thinking.. When I. bounced the idea off of Jason, he said something like “you don’t want that living on your permanent record.” That scared me into just going eastward.
I had another YouTube friend that was from Macedonia and he and I had been playing tag on Instagram last summer. So I connected with him wondering if he’d be visiting home for the holidays, and he was, so we got our itineraries aligned and planned to meet up in Skopje on Christmas.
It got colder as I headed inland. The roads improved when I entered Macedonia and the drivers became slightly safer, but still fairly honky and didn’t give much space when overtaking me.
My first stop in Macedonia was Ohrid; an ancient town on the northern side of Lake Ohrid. Lake Ohrid reminded me a lot of Lake Tahoe because it’s an oval shaped lake surrounded by mountains that split between Albania and Macedonia.
I spent a day there and enjoyed visiting the castle and the numerous orthodox churches. There are only a few orthodox churches in SF and I can barely notice them – they also look different than the ones in Europe. The architecture is now distinctive to me. Apparently the Cyrillic alphabet was invented in Ohrid too?
From Ohrid I went north towards Skopje, making a stop in Tetovo. This was the coldest part of the trip so far, thankfully it wasn’t actively snowing but it was below freezing for a while. The layers worked thankfully.
Slave was super helpful with local advice while I was in Macedonia. Our plan to meet on Christmas was coming together, and I rode from Tetovo to Skopje Christmas morning. I didn’t realize that Orthodox Christians celebrate Christmas in January, so the 25th didn’t feel like a bad day to ride onto Skopje.
I checked into a hotel in the Old Bazaar part of Skopje. It was a market neighborhood leftover from the Ottoman era and I loved it. There were a ton of dense shops and streets and for some reason jewelry stores?
Slave met me about an hour after I arrived. He had just landed from vacation in the Dominican Republic, but somehow still had enough energy to take me out for an amazing Christmas dinner.
We started out by going to a Turkish Coffee bar that was tiny and full of ornate plates and cups. We had some Turkish Coffee that was cooked in SAND(!) which I’d never seen before. Then we had some Turkish chai tea.
After that we drove about a mile away to what seemed like the hipster neighborhood. Slave found a traditional Macedonian restaurant for us to eat in and we had ourselves a little feast. His longtime friend Aleksander came as well so I got to ask him questions about Slave growing up and stuff.
I loved that we got to hang out. We had been to parties together in SF and we used to work together, but never really spent much time 1:1. I’d always found Slave to be mysterious. Like a super-smart-next-level kind of mysterious. Now that I’ve visited where he’s from and spent some more time with him, I feel like I understand him (just slightly) more.
