titel's place

My first week in Macedonia

As soon as I arrived here I've been introduced to all the people and the representative paces around. Right after beeing picked up at the Skopje bus station by Patricia (current MC VP PD) and Ravin (MC VP X elect) I've been taken to the place where I was going to live for the next three months. This place was the MC apartment / office which was very close to the bus station so it took us less than 10 minutes to get there. The apartment consists of one big living room, witch is used as an office for the MC, three rooms and dependencies. At that moment in the apartment were living Patricia who is from Canada, Ravin from India, Goran a trainee from Croatia plus me, so together we were forming an truly international flat as Patricia likes to call it.

Right afterwards Ravin offered showing me the surroundings. Cause it was already a while then since I had everything else to eat than sandwiches we went to a place that turned out to be one of the most important in the town and that was a small shop on a street near by where for 120 denars, witch is about 2 euro, so around 7 ron you would get one big plate of french fries with a roasted burger and two eggs, a pancake prepared in a Macedonian way and a bottle of Coke, Fanta and Sprite. That pace is very nice because for the money you pay it gives you literally difficulties in eating everything that you get so it is very handy when you are hungry.

The next place we went to was the AIESEC Skopje office. For that we went to the University, the pace were are most of the faculties in Skopje witch is about 10 - 15 minutes far from the apartment. What I liked about this office is that it is situated right at the entrance of the economics faculty, in front of the main stairs so there is no way to enter and miss it. In the office I had the opportunity to met some of the LC members, EB members and even a part of the MC members.

Because we had no Internet in the apartment and it took a while singe we got it I could not really do much so I, together with Ravin had time to visit some new places in the city. In one of the days we went to Cale, a very nice old fortress witch is right in the city. Another place we saw was the Turkish Bazar, an area in the old side of the city. This side is both very old and very different of the rest of Skopje. Here we had some of the Macedonian dishes, most of witch have their roots in the Turkish kitchen and Macedonian (yet Turkish) coffee.

If it is to speak about cultural shock as I now that some of the people who are reading this are either present or organizing a seminar on this theme, I can't say I had it. The country and the people are not very different from Romania and I had been helped by the people around me not to integrate well to. The only thing I can really say that I am "shocked" of would be the language where the differences begin from the alphabet, Cyrillic.

Till next time,
titel

posted by titel @ 10:05 PM