Day 157: Bitola - Skopje (Скопје)

Sept 7 - Rough night of tummy trouble for Janet and Odette. Don’t know how I escaped it, since we all ate something from each other’s plates at dinner. Order up a taxi and, armed with plain salted crackers for breakfast and lunch, we head to the bus station. Would have liked to spend a bit more time in Bitola, but I was up against a few scheduling deadlines down the road and had to make a few cuts.

Sit next to a man of mixed Macedonian/Serbian family who has lived most of his life in Sweden. We talk about the current state of affairs in Macedonia. Much lamenting the extreme level of corruption in government, echoing conversations I’ve had with people in Albania and Bosnia, and could be repeated almost verbatim in many countries throughout the world. He doesn’t have a very high opinion of the Ottoman occupation of the Balkans, with some of the same historical points I read in the history museum at Trebinje (Day 127).

We talk about Macedonia joining the EU, which may happen soon. For an example of what would happen, he muses, we can look to Croatia, which lost a significant fraction of its younger people to greener economic fields in other European countries the moment it became an EU member. I heard this also in Albania. As for the EU application process, the war in Ukraine has accelerated the process for allowing countries to join, just as it has altered the equation for joining NATO (i.e. Sweden and Finland).

I paraphrase his core analysis of the situation: “Twenty years ago the economic situation here was bad, but I always thought that in the future it would get better, because Macedonia had just become independent and the country could finally find its own way forward. But here it is twenty years later, and I see nothing better. I think improvement will take many, many years more.”

Anyway, the three hour bus ride goes fast when there is interesting conversation. We pass through the towns of Prilep (where there is a huge marble mine) and Veles. The terrain is mostly hilly, with a few low mountains ranges that we pass through.

Off in the huge, noisy center of Skopje, a huge change after Ohrid and Bitola. Taxi to the apartment, it isn’t easy to find, being in the south residential section of town that climbs up the side of a mountain. I see right away that we are going to get some exercise, as the local bus routes are not convenient. The apartment is new and quite luxurious, a good compensation for the location.