Skopje, Macedonia, Europe

Today got off to a poor start, but ended up being pretty nice. I didn’t get a great night sleep at the hostel and woke up around 6:30am. I downloaded UFC 172 that was on last night and got to watch Jon Jones defend his light heavyweight title again. I wanted to check out of the hostel so I could leave my bags and go walk around the city a little bit, but by 9:30am there were no hostel workers at the reception area for the hostel. So I was forced to stay in the hostel because I couldn’t check out and hand in the keys anywhere.

I kept checking back up reception and no one showed up until 1pm. I was pretty annoyed at this point because most of the day was gone already. I asked the hostel worker if he could call the bus station to verify that my bus to Skopje was actually leaving at 5:30pm like it shows online. He said he wouldn’t call. He didn’t really have a good reason, he just kept saying no. I haven’t met a hostel worker who was less helpful than this guy. So that pissed me off.

At this point I didn’t even want to leave my bags there so I just grabbed my bags and walked up to the bus station. I’m glad I didn’t rely on what I found online because the bus didn’t leave at 5:30pm, it left at 4pm. I got up to the station by about 2pm so I had to wait around for a couple hours, but that wasn’t the end of the world. At this point I was just happy to get out of Bulgaria. Yesterday was a nice day because I spent it with Jacquelien and Dineke, but it didn’t really haven’t anything to do with the city of Sofia. I wasn’t overly impressed with anything I saw in Bulgaria.

The bus ride to Skopje was a pretty nice ride. The bus was nothing special. It wasn’t as nice as my bus to Sofia, but the scenery was nicer. As we were leaving Bulgaria it was apparent just how poor this country is. The houses were almost all decrepit. The cars didn’t look any different. I expected Macedonia to look the same but I was surprised to see that it looks much nicer than Bulgaria. The houses look nicer, they drive nicer cars, and the people look like they take care of themselves much better as well.

I got to Skopje at about 9pm and got a taxi to my hotel, Pansion Bianco. It is one of the nicer hotels I have stayed in on this trip, and I’m looking forward to spending a couple of nights here. Skopje looks like a much nicer and much more inviting city than Sofia. I’ll check it out tomorrow and find out for sure, but I have high hopes. That put me in a better mood than I was in this morning, so that’s good!