Sept 12 - Today is Janet’s birthday! As luck would have it, sometime during the night I start getting sick, like a bad cold. I wake up with no energy and feel like I really can’t get anything done today. Go ahead and mask up just in case. This is our only day to really see Vranje, and although it has very little to offer in terms of ‘tourist attractions’, I wanted to see a normal town.
I summon up enough energy to get out and buy bus tickets for tomorrow, and change some money into Serbian dinar (about 117 dinar to 1 US$). Also manage to get rid of my Macedonian money. It is a windy, cold day, so different than what we’ve been experiencing almost non-stop since mid-June. The hills around Vranje are densely forested. Somewhere nearby, over the hills to the west, is the border of Kosovo. It seems like everywhere I see the colors of the Serbian flag, on the sides of buildings and on fences.