Day 1 and 2

by John Fisher

My first two days in Macedonia have been busy ones - filled with meetings and meals.

After arriving Thursday, Paul, Goran and I went to Hotel Super 8 in Skopje where I had made my reservations for accommodations.  The hotel is both modern and inexpensive, owned by an American who returned to his native Macedonia to go into business.

Before going to a 5 o'clock meeting with our student leaders we ate at an outside restaurant adjacent to the hotel.  The weather is beautiful in Skopje. Eating outside is the thing to do.  We ate fresh Macedonian salads (like Greek without the olives) and had steak as our main course. The steak was beautifully cooked, very tender and served with a delicious mushroom sauce.  We talked Balkan politics and ate for over two hours.

At 5 we had our meeting.  (I'm still suffering from jet lag and so nod off in most of our meetings.)  Then after the meeting, a new friend took me to dinner in the Albanian section of Skopje.  He is an air force officer working for the Ministry of Defense.  He is working on a PhD, lived for a year in the United States, and has written a book of Albanian-English words.  The meal again started with a fresh salad and the main course was beef sausage links.  Very delicious.

We talked about history, politics, and religion.  He neither drinks nor smokes.  I told him about the Word of Wisdom and how God has shown his love to his children in all ages by giving them health laws through his prophets, like those given in the Old Testament and more recently to the prophets Mohammed and Joseph Smith.

I was exhausted by 11 p.m. and so went to bed only to wake up at 3:30 a.m. (which is 9:30 p.m. in the Midwest United States).  At 4:30 a.m. I heard the call to prayers and at about 5 a.m. I used the Yahoo program on my computer to call my wife and daughter in America.

Today we met with the Macedonian Red Cross and the military nurses and medical team.  Both groups will provide vital instruction and key exercises for our humanitarian training in Krivolak in southern Macedonia next week.  If it was 29 degrees Centigrade in Skopje today, it might have been 39 degrees in Krivolak.  

After our meetings I went with our operations director, his assistant, and Paul to a restaurant where I think I truly had traditional food from the region.  Again it started with fresh salad. Every salad is slightly different.  This one had a tasty herb, possibly parsley. The salad of mainly tomatoes and cucumbers is covered in white cheese.  I asked for extra olives.  So the group accused me of making a southern Macedonia salad.  Southern Macedonia is the part of the country below the Greek border.  

Then we had Macedonian goulash with mashed potatoes covered in the most delicious sauce.  The meal tab for the four of us came to about 20 USD.  This included two soft drinks and two beers for our Macedonian friends.