January is famously hard for exchange students, and that’s hit me in the past week or so. It was tied to the stress of having actual finals, rather than “show up and don’t do anything because the tests are in a different language” finals, because I go to a rigorous English-speaking school modeled after the American system. BUT I’ve finished my first semester of senior year, and have finally mustered up the strength to blog!
For New Years, the three YES Abroad students decided to spend our time in the freezing cold at and around a concert thrown by the Municipality of Centar, which is the center part of the city. It was way too cold to be there the whole time, so we popped into a restaurant and bought overpriced cheese sticks and soda (Team Газоза forever) until just a few minutes before New Years, when we ran back to the celebration and had a rather anticlimactic New Year. My biggest impression of New Year’s Eve was honestly just COLD.
I also got to go skiing (well, I didn’t really ski, more like watch others expertly navigate their way down a slope and ride over the mountains on a ski lift) with my host family in Mavrovo, a ski and snowboard center that was FULL of people excited about the first snow. Unfortunately, I didn’t take any pictures, but this should give you a pretty good idea of what it all looks like!
Oooh, a big one – Orthodox Christmas, which is January 7th. I’m a bit iffy on the timeline, because what I wrote in my journal contradicts the calendar and the calendar contradicts what I can find online, but as far as I can remember, this is what went down: At around 4 or 5 AM the day before Christmas, kids come to people’s doors, sing a song, and receive money/candy/fruit (this is known as kolede). I was asleep for this, so no first-hand experience here. Then, in the evening of the 6th, I went with my host family to my host aunt’s house, which is in what I would call a “suburb” of Skopje – not one of the adjacent villages, but a part of the city that is almost entirely residential with stand-alone houses along streets. There, each street had a bonfire, where the neighbors stand and talk and eat food that’s been laid out on a table nearby. I practiced my Macedonian with extended family members, and did a little bit of dancing, and took pictures of the fire:
Another cool thing was that at one point, my host mom and I went to see the next block’s bonfire, and upon introducing me as American, the host quickly called out to someone to “bring over the American” – there was a young woman from South Carolina there, visiting Macedonia on her first time outside of the US to visit her boyfriend’s family! That was a really fun surprise.
On the 7th, we had a vegetarian-only lunch/dinner with traditional foods, and we split a piece of bread with a coin in it – whoever got the coin got luck for the next year. My host dad got it, for I believe the second year in a row!
After the holidays were over, but I was still on break, I dyed my hair half-blonde half-brown and then turned into a monster that sits in her room with books and emerges only to eat, shower, and freak out about exams. That, finally, is over, thank goodness, and I’m taking this weekend to figure out how to become active as an exchange student and combat the January blues.
That’s all for now! I’m hoping the next post will come a bit faster.
Skopje-ing Out The Territory 