Al Gore Spring: Sunny Days in January

I am here a T-club, a too-hip outdoor café on Macedonia Boulevard, the see and be seen walking street in Skopje, and they should change the café’s name to T-shirt for it’s that warm today.

Do not tell me this is January, or that I should be shivering in wool and leather. Global warming is here and the Europeans, with their quick wit, are already calling warm winter days an “Al Gore Spring” after his movie.

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Macedonia: A Russian Waltz Down Memory Lane

Stepping off the plane in Skopje, Macedonia, I get a feeling o déjà vu. A feeling I’ve been here before, though I know I haven’t. My parents came through here in the time of Tito, but that was years before my birth.

Still, I could not shake the feeling of déjà vu. It was so strong, I felt I was having an out-of-body experience, until I realized what was happening. I was time-warping and place-shifting myself back to Russia, circa 1999.

The signs in Cyrillic that I could read like they were in English. The language, which spoken slowly sounds way close to Russian. The people, they even look and act Russian. And of course they do, they are Slavs, just like the Russians.

But this is not Russia. This is Macedonia.

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