Beautiful Macedonia :) - my stay there was very brief but lots of fun and likely to be repeated. last weekend in rila, rozi mentioned that the only neighbouring country she's never visited is macedonia and thus gave me the idea to go. unfortunately, rozi ran out of money and couldn't come as well, but amélie and i still got our things together and took the bus last friday to go to from sofia to skopje and then on to ohrid in the south-west corner of the country very close to albania. it is a beautiful - though very touristic - town right besides a huge lake. this very same weekend there happened to be the 2nd CS Balkan Meeting going on, which, of course, we joined. more than 100 travellers from the balkans and some more distant regions of the world got together to have fun - attending the meeting as long as one could any time between friday morning and sunday afternoon. as the bus ride from sofia to skopje takes somewhat like 6 hours (including one hour waiting time at the border) and from there another 3 and a half hours to ohrid, amélie and i only arrived in the early evening. in the bus from skopje we stumbled over another three couchsurfers and all five of us arrived well in ohrid where we quickly found the rest of the couchsurfers in their various houses serving as quarters for the whole crowd. somebody must have invested a huge amount of organizational skills to get all of us together. so many people arriving at different times from different places. but in the end, i'm pretty sure, all of us had a wonderful time. there were couchsurfers from all over. all types of people between the age of 19 and something around 50 years. the biggest group came from greece (thessaloniki is after all only about four hours away), but then there were bulgarians, macedonians, serbians, austrians, italians, germans, french, americans, brits, turks, a canadian, a senegalese, lithuanians, a swiss and....probably some more that i can't think of right now. in any case, you can imagine that i liked it a lot and i hope that the next balkan meeting which shall take place in sarajevo will be still within the time of my stay in this amazing region.
from ohrid itself i have actually not seen too much. at least not during the day time. on friday we arrived too late, on saturday we spent most of the day in st. naum (a village with a bunch of churches about one kilometer away from albania) and on sunday it rained all day. still, i have enjoyed it a lot and i have seen what's most important: the lake.our trip back to sofia turned out to be somewhat more adventurous than we had planned. until skopje amélie and i could ride together with a greek-serbian couple in the car of a macedonian. there, we still had a long time to wait before our night bus/train would leave, so we decided to have something to eat in the center. and, of course (!), we had only been walking for 5 minutes, when we saw 5 other couchsurfers in a restaurant doing the same (well, one of them was actually from skopje, so she didn't wait for any transportation, but the rest of us did). at 11 pm, amélie and i wanted to take the bus. we had bought an open-return round-trip ticket and this was the last bus leaving that day. at the bus station we even met yet another two couchsurfers who'd be on the same bus, so we prepared ourselves for a night on the road, when.....we found out that we didn't have the right tickets. for some reason this last bus of the day was of another branch from the same bus company and our tickets weren't valid. besides that, the bus was full and....shit!!! but, uff, we were a little bit lucky at least and still managed to get into the bus. don't ask me how, but the macedonian from the information office at the bus station organized us even two adjoined seats in the bus and we arrived back in sofia at 6 am on monday morning (local time -- there is one hour time difference between macedonia and bulgaria). we had an awful night in an uncomfortable bus full of people (one hour waiting at the border in the middle of it), but at least we arrived back home safely. and i even had another two hours that i could sleep before getting up again and ready to go to my "job".
oh, yeah, that's actually, something else i still haven't written about. i managed to get an internship at CMS Reich-Rohrwig Hainz, the austrian branch of a big international law firm, which has a small office in sofia. i had an interview last wednesday and could start right away. "whenever i have time" i am there, i have my own key card, my own space in the office with computer and everything else i could need and within the next days i should even have my own email address :-P i am even supposed to get paid, but i haven't found out how much that will actually be. anyway, i am happy to have the place, cause it is something else to do besides visiting the few classes i have here. the people there all speak good german except for two or three who "only" speak english. they're all bulgarian lawyers but half of them have studied in either austria or germany. and they are really nice! i really enjoy going there so much that i don't even mind to have a quite stressful week: 9'30-13 h at CMS and 14-20 h class (this week i have an intensive course in commercial law). instead, i plan on going there the whole thursday when i don't have classes because of some kind of educational holiday.yep, as you can see, i keep myself busy - but only in a positive way ! and i really love being here :D
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