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Tennis went ok. Thanks to everybody who kept their fingers crossed!
The weather was so splendid it defied description, although quite nippy in the early morning (5°), so playing outside was a pleasure merely for being out and in the sunshine. The male-female ratio was so skewed that playing mixed doubles wasn't possible, and there were only 5 women, so we couldn't even play women's doubles, i.e. women just played singles, and I came third out of five, which isn't so bad. Mostly I had enormous fun drinking coffee and chatting to people during the pauses between matches. Boss came and watched for about half an hour. It was over around 2 p.m., and after bit of grocery shopping I went home and spent the afternoon on the couch with ze boyz, watching Dead Like Me.
Oh, and Mr H didn't turn up, of course. Without informing the organizers, of course, and I think I'm really beginning to go off him because of his unbelievable lack of manners -- nobody could look sufficiently gorgeous to make up for such rudeness.
At 7p.m. Vlatko, the faithful driver, came to pick Irene and me up and take us to Negotino. It's a small town about 100 south of Skopje, and Slavica and Vesna's brother-in-law, i.e. the husband of the eldest sister Violeta, has a small winery there.
It was a fantastic, heartwarming experience, and I hope I'll be able to do it justice.
I'd somehow expected something old and carefully renovated, but Zarko (that's Violeta's husband), in the manner of those down-to-earth people who actually have to live and work in the place, had built something new -- big, two-storey building the front part of which is the live-in part, and the larger part in the back is the place where the tanks, storage etc. are. It's obvious that the owners don't live there all the time, but the warmth and friendliness of those people more than compensates for that not-quite-lived-in feeling.
When we arrived at about 8.30, the women were loading the table with everything Macedonian cuisine has to offer. I was quite tired and hadn't slept in the afternoon, so I didn't expect to last very long, but we were up till 2 a.m., talking, eating, laughing and getting to know each other. I'm still overwhelmed by the unquestioning warmth with which Violeta and Zarko welcomed us in their midst like family members. I know of course how much Vesna and Slavica like me, but that doesn't automatically translate into their sister and brother-in-law offering more than a friendly, respectful welcome.
So Saturday evening was, in a way, a dream come true: sharing the company of local friends with no agenda other than being together, and talking to them in their own language.
Yesterday at 8 a.m. we got up rather bleary-eyed, but since everybody was more or less in the same state, that didn't really matter. Vesna made Turkish coffee, and we five women -- Zarko was still sound asleep, and Ile, Slavica's husband, was already out somewhere -- sat around the table in our pyjamas, having coffee, smoking and exchanging the occasional hangover moan. After the third cup and at least 1 litre of water, we got dressed, and Irene, Vesna, Violeta and I went for a walk aound the village.
We hadn't seen anything the night before, because it had been pitch dark. The weather was as perfectly cloudless as on Saturday, and the sunshine already nice and warm; I was bundled up well in t-shirt, jumper and fleece jacket, with a warm scarf wrapped around my neck.
There are maybe 50 houses in the village, all of them old, square stone buildings with whitewashed walls along which red peppers are hanging out to dry like edible garlands; some buildings are well groomed, others show obvious signs of poverty. The main (and only) road might have been asphalted a long time ago; now there are only patches of asphalt left, and the rest is sand. The people there live off the land, cultivating grapes, red peppers and a bit of tobacco, keeping sheep, cows and fowl. Most of them still have horse carts and, if they have tractors, they're the type I remember from my earliest childhood. Everybody is sunburned the way people toiling outdoors every day are, their hands are hard and calloused, and when they say hello, they look at you with interest but don't behave as if you were a creature from outer space.
There are dung heaps with roosters on top, and friendly dogs, and cats sunning themselves in nooks in whitewashed walls, and grandmothers sitting coss-legged in courtyards in front of a mountain of red peppers, teaching the grandchildren how to put them on long threads. There are wooden sheds held up by improbable statics, pointing rickety metal pipes at you and exhaling a strong smell of grapes and of the rakia that is being produced inside. There are plastic bottles and other garbage littering the free space one might call the village green if one had a lot of good will and imagination.
The village elementary school currently has 6 pupils, who have joint lessons covering the whole curriculum. It is an old stone building situated at the highest point of the village -- two large rooms, one of which is currently unused. The rooms have large windows with wooden frames dividing the glass into multiple squares, many of which are broken. Plastic covers the holes where glass has broken and not been replaced. In front of the school building is the outhouse, nothing but a three-sided cubicle built of rough stones and divided in two by some planks; the doors, too, are made of wooden planks, and the whole construction has a "roof" made of planks with spaces in between. Each half has a concrete floor with a hole in it. Between the school building and the outhouse, a column of polished steel, maybe 1,7m high, with a niche containing a screen and keyboard. The screen is black and dead, there is no On switch, the purpose of the device unfathomable.
A doctor comes to the village twice a week, the orthodox priest only at Christmas, Easter and for the village fair, which is in May. The care of their bodies and souls is left to the inhabitants, who don't have much time to fret over spiritual and physical health. They've had running water only since 2003, and electricity not for much longer.
The village, whose name translates into "Fried Corner", is one of the hottest places in Macedonia. In spring the surrounding hills are probably lush and green; now, at the beginning of October, the grass is pale and sunburned, a languid background for the still-vivid green of the vineyards.
It's difficult to describe what I felt during the walk: there is beauty enough in the landscape and old buildings to make the heart swell, but a closer look reveals the poverty of those people -- while wandering through the 19th century and seeing the real face of Macedonia, it is difficult not to think of the amounts of money that are being squandered on project Skopje 2014 with its statues, faux-classicism buildings and phoney nationalism, and not to feel terribly angry because a very small part of that money would suffice to renovate the school, have a permanent doctor and asphalt the road.
When we returned from our walk, Slavica was busy making Mekici for breakfast. To make mekici, you mix a basic yeast dough with a pinch of sugar, one of salt and a splash of rakia. It has to be slightly on the runny side, so you can scoop it out, flatten it a bit in the middle and fry in hot oil. Mekici are eaten with feta, cream cheese and/or jam, and you don't drink coffee but yoghurt. We had coffee, too, though, and to my surprise I was actually hungry.
Around noon we finally started working. Ile and Zarko had already grilled the whole red peppers on flat, round wood stoves, and from 12 to 5 I didn't do anything but peel peppers, chatting with the others and occasionally standing up to stretch my back, have a cigarette and eat a few grapes that were so sweet I had to drink a lot of water.
While we were peeling, sitting on upturned crates in the sun, a neighbour came with a cartload of grapes to put into Zarko's press, and a little later a cousin of Vesna, Slavica and Violeta arrived with his wife and 18-months-old daughter. He'd brought a bottle of whisky, and the men had a drink and a chat, while Violeta went upstairs to start preparing lunch.
At 5, when we'd finished all the peppers and the sun was already low, the ajvar bubbling on the wooden stove and the hands finally washed and slathered in cream, Irene, Slavica and I went for another short walk, this time in the opposite direction. We strolled up the hill next to the house and sat on the top, in the dry grass, enjoying the now-weaker sun and, most of all, the complete and utter quiet. Not a bird singing, not a cricket chirping, just total, mellow stillness and peace.
Lunch started at 6 and was a lively affair. The visiting cousin turned out to be th CEO of Macedonian Radio and Television, a clever, sympathetic guy looking good in the way pirates do (the beard and dark skin might have given me that impression), and we had an interesting discussion over barbecued meat and sausages, oven-baked potatoes, salad and the ajvar we had just made, the whole accompanied by Zarko's 2008 Vranec (red wine, somewhere between Cabernet Sauvignon and Shiraz).
Vlatko the driver came to pick us up at 8, and of course he was offered wine, meat, bread and ajvar, and at 8.30 we finally said farewell and returned to Skopje.
I don't think I've ever been so tired in my life; my back and arms and legs hurt, not to mention my head, but it was doubtlessly one of the best weekends I've had here so far.
God, I love this country. (Yes, I think that much was obvious)
Now I'm back in the big city -- Skopje *does* seem like a big city now, at least for a while -- and at work, and I hope I'll be returning soon to that place and that family.
A good start into the week to you all!
The weather was so splendid it defied description, although quite nippy in the early morning (5°), so playing outside was a pleasure merely for being out and in the sunshine. The male-female ratio was so skewed that playing mixed doubles wasn't possible, and there were only 5 women, so we couldn't even play women's doubles, i.e. women just played singles, and I came third out of five, which isn't so bad. Mostly I had enormous fun drinking coffee and chatting to people during the pauses between matches. Boss came and watched for about half an hour. It was over around 2 p.m., and after bit of grocery shopping I went home and spent the afternoon on the couch with ze boyz, watching Dead Like Me.
Oh, and Mr H didn't turn up, of course. Without informing the organizers, of course, and I think I'm really beginning to go off him because of his unbelievable lack of manners -- nobody could look sufficiently gorgeous to make up for such rudeness.
At 7p.m. Vlatko, the faithful driver, came to pick Irene and me up and take us to Negotino. It's a small town about 100 south of Skopje, and Slavica and Vesna's brother-in-law, i.e. the husband of the eldest sister Violeta, has a small winery there.
It was a fantastic, heartwarming experience, and I hope I'll be able to do it justice.
I'd somehow expected something old and carefully renovated, but Zarko (that's Violeta's husband), in the manner of those down-to-earth people who actually have to live and work in the place, had built something new -- big, two-storey building the front part of which is the live-in part, and the larger part in the back is the place where the tanks, storage etc. are. It's obvious that the owners don't live there all the time, but the warmth and friendliness of those people more than compensates for that not-quite-lived-in feeling.
When we arrived at about 8.30, the women were loading the table with everything Macedonian cuisine has to offer. I was quite tired and hadn't slept in the afternoon, so I didn't expect to last very long, but we were up till 2 a.m., talking, eating, laughing and getting to know each other. I'm still overwhelmed by the unquestioning warmth with which Violeta and Zarko welcomed us in their midst like family members. I know of course how much Vesna and Slavica like me, but that doesn't automatically translate into their sister and brother-in-law offering more than a friendly, respectful welcome.
So Saturday evening was, in a way, a dream come true: sharing the company of local friends with no agenda other than being together, and talking to them in their own language.
Yesterday at 8 a.m. we got up rather bleary-eyed, but since everybody was more or less in the same state, that didn't really matter. Vesna made Turkish coffee, and we five women -- Zarko was still sound asleep, and Ile, Slavica's husband, was already out somewhere -- sat around the table in our pyjamas, having coffee, smoking and exchanging the occasional hangover moan. After the third cup and at least 1 litre of water, we got dressed, and Irene, Vesna, Violeta and I went for a walk aound the village.
We hadn't seen anything the night before, because it had been pitch dark. The weather was as perfectly cloudless as on Saturday, and the sunshine already nice and warm; I was bundled up well in t-shirt, jumper and fleece jacket, with a warm scarf wrapped around my neck.
There are maybe 50 houses in the village, all of them old, square stone buildings with whitewashed walls along which red peppers are hanging out to dry like edible garlands; some buildings are well groomed, others show obvious signs of poverty. The main (and only) road might have been asphalted a long time ago; now there are only patches of asphalt left, and the rest is sand. The people there live off the land, cultivating grapes, red peppers and a bit of tobacco, keeping sheep, cows and fowl. Most of them still have horse carts and, if they have tractors, they're the type I remember from my earliest childhood. Everybody is sunburned the way people toiling outdoors every day are, their hands are hard and calloused, and when they say hello, they look at you with interest but don't behave as if you were a creature from outer space.
There are dung heaps with roosters on top, and friendly dogs, and cats sunning themselves in nooks in whitewashed walls, and grandmothers sitting coss-legged in courtyards in front of a mountain of red peppers, teaching the grandchildren how to put them on long threads. There are wooden sheds held up by improbable statics, pointing rickety metal pipes at you and exhaling a strong smell of grapes and of the rakia that is being produced inside. There are plastic bottles and other garbage littering the free space one might call the village green if one had a lot of good will and imagination.
The village elementary school currently has 6 pupils, who have joint lessons covering the whole curriculum. It is an old stone building situated at the highest point of the village -- two large rooms, one of which is currently unused. The rooms have large windows with wooden frames dividing the glass into multiple squares, many of which are broken. Plastic covers the holes where glass has broken and not been replaced. In front of the school building is the outhouse, nothing but a three-sided cubicle built of rough stones and divided in two by some planks; the doors, too, are made of wooden planks, and the whole construction has a "roof" made of planks with spaces in between. Each half has a concrete floor with a hole in it. Between the school building and the outhouse, a column of polished steel, maybe 1,7m high, with a niche containing a screen and keyboard. The screen is black and dead, there is no On switch, the purpose of the device unfathomable.
A doctor comes to the village twice a week, the orthodox priest only at Christmas, Easter and for the village fair, which is in May. The care of their bodies and souls is left to the inhabitants, who don't have much time to fret over spiritual and physical health. They've had running water only since 2003, and electricity not for much longer.
The village, whose name translates into "Fried Corner", is one of the hottest places in Macedonia. In spring the surrounding hills are probably lush and green; now, at the beginning of October, the grass is pale and sunburned, a languid background for the still-vivid green of the vineyards.
It's difficult to describe what I felt during the walk: there is beauty enough in the landscape and old buildings to make the heart swell, but a closer look reveals the poverty of those people -- while wandering through the 19th century and seeing the real face of Macedonia, it is difficult not to think of the amounts of money that are being squandered on project Skopje 2014 with its statues, faux-classicism buildings and phoney nationalism, and not to feel terribly angry because a very small part of that money would suffice to renovate the school, have a permanent doctor and asphalt the road.
When we returned from our walk, Slavica was busy making Mekici for breakfast. To make mekici, you mix a basic yeast dough with a pinch of sugar, one of salt and a splash of rakia. It has to be slightly on the runny side, so you can scoop it out, flatten it a bit in the middle and fry in hot oil. Mekici are eaten with feta, cream cheese and/or jam, and you don't drink coffee but yoghurt. We had coffee, too, though, and to my surprise I was actually hungry.
Around noon we finally started working. Ile and Zarko had already grilled the whole red peppers on flat, round wood stoves, and from 12 to 5 I didn't do anything but peel peppers, chatting with the others and occasionally standing up to stretch my back, have a cigarette and eat a few grapes that were so sweet I had to drink a lot of water.
While we were peeling, sitting on upturned crates in the sun, a neighbour came with a cartload of grapes to put into Zarko's press, and a little later a cousin of Vesna, Slavica and Violeta arrived with his wife and 18-months-old daughter. He'd brought a bottle of whisky, and the men had a drink and a chat, while Violeta went upstairs to start preparing lunch.
At 5, when we'd finished all the peppers and the sun was already low, the ajvar bubbling on the wooden stove and the hands finally washed and slathered in cream, Irene, Slavica and I went for another short walk, this time in the opposite direction. We strolled up the hill next to the house and sat on the top, in the dry grass, enjoying the now-weaker sun and, most of all, the complete and utter quiet. Not a bird singing, not a cricket chirping, just total, mellow stillness and peace.
Lunch started at 6 and was a lively affair. The visiting cousin turned out to be th CEO of Macedonian Radio and Television, a clever, sympathetic guy looking good in the way pirates do (the beard and dark skin might have given me that impression), and we had an interesting discussion over barbecued meat and sausages, oven-baked potatoes, salad and the ajvar we had just made, the whole accompanied by Zarko's 2008 Vranec (red wine, somewhere between Cabernet Sauvignon and Shiraz).
Vlatko the driver came to pick us up at 8, and of course he was offered wine, meat, bread and ajvar, and at 8.30 we finally said farewell and returned to Skopje.
I don't think I've ever been so tired in my life; my back and arms and legs hurt, not to mention my head, but it was doubtlessly one of the best weekends I've had here so far.
God, I love this country. (Yes, I think that much was obvious)
Now I'm back in the big city -- Skopje *does* seem like a big city now, at least for a while -- and at work, and I hope I'll be returning soon to that place and that family.
A good start into the week to you all!
