I haven't got anything planned to write about, but I find myself sitting here in my living room again with another game show on the TV that I don't feel like watching, so I figured I'd do some writing. Since I've got nothing planned, this post is probably gonna be all over the place. Just warning you now so that you don't think you have ADHD and kept spacing off while I was busy connecting the paragraphs together in some artistic fashion. So know now that the paragraphs are not going to be connected at all.
I'm not sure how to start this off, so I'll just jump right into it. There's a cat jamboree being held outside my room every night and every morning. It's not the funnest thing to fall asleep and wake up to. Actually, it's probably the first time I've really wanted to kill an animal. Don't worry though I won't. I'll just "accidentally" throw them down the stairs or kick them across the room. OK, that first one never happened but I swear, kicking that cat across the room was an accident (notice there are no quotation marks). It was dark and I couldn't see it.
It seems like I've been learning a lot of children's games recently. We've already been over the Macedonian version of eenie, meenie, miney, mo, which I've actually managed to almost memorize. I also learned the Macedonian version of rock, paper, scissors (or as Microsoft Word wants to say "rock, paper, and scissors"). I'm not exactly sure how this is carried out, but I think it goes down like this. You hold your hand back and at some time together with everyone else (I'm not sure what it is that's done to make sure everyone does this together) you flip your hand either palm up or palm down and that determines the outcome. From what I understand, it's something that's done to choose teams. People with their palm up are on one team and people with their palm down are on the other team. I don't know. Maybe I'm completely wrong and just making stuff up. I'm sure if I am, one of the Macedonians will correct me tomorrow and I'll know the truth, but you will all be stuck with this fabrication. For all you know, I could be making up this whole game.
It's an unseasonably cold day here in the Krat, and it's been eating away at my mind all day. For this reason, I want to talk to all of you about this very important subject. The cold. Cold in Macedonia is not experienced the same way that cold in America is experienced. It's an entirely different concept here and therefore it must be handled differently because it just has to be. You're gonna have to take my word. And it's not just the way you handle it, it's the way it affects your ability to handle it. And this type of cold is handled differently everywhere you go. The Aussies say it's a three dog night. Well, here in Macedonia we say it's a 5 blanket and sleeping bag kinda night with the heater running on 5 because you just don't care anymore. Granted it doesn't roll off the tongue as smoothly as three dog night, but it gets the point across. Here are a few things that never would have occurred in the US because I was cold. You know you're Macedonian cold when:
-You don't take a shower because you feel like you might freeze if you took off all of your clothes in a room without any heating. Plus it's a b-i-t-c-h (just in case you're reading this out loud to young children. you can thank me later) to get dressed when taking a shower gets the whole bathroom soaking wet. Who forgot about Macedonia when they were introducing shower curtains to the world?
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| I've been practicing my duck face |
-If that's not enough, you also lay your pillow and a nice thick pair of socks on your heater before you go to bed so that they are nice and warm.
-When there's time you even lay your clothes on the heater in the morning before you put them on. This isn't practiced as often as you'd like though because you haven't been able to kick your addiction of hitting the snooze on your alarm.
-You take a break from using your computer or other electronic device because you are losing motor function in your fingers
You know, I feel like I could have done a much better job with this list, but I was too lazy to push myself to come up with more stuff. My bad. I dropped the ball there.
I don't think the word of the post will be a surprise to anyone. The very fitting word of the post is:
снег (sneg) - snow
Remember, you don't have ADHD. Have you ever been sitting there breathing like a normal living person and for some reason someone is playing a kazoo to the pattern of your breaths? It's kind of cool at first until you realize that it's not a kazoo, it's you. No, I haven't been breathing like that my whole life and just now realized it. I just have a bit of a cold. The popular diagnosis has been that it's because I was in Skopje and the air's not clean there. Skopje does provide some of the worst air in the world during the winter months. The bad air combined with the drastically swaying weather is a recipe for stuffy noses. At least that's what they tell me, and I guess I believe them. It sure is hard to say you don't. Even when you say you don't.
Most of last week I played hooky from school and went to Skopje (shh, don't tell anyone) to party, search for wild animals that I didn't know existed here, and practice some of my new pickup lines on grandmas. Oh, and I had in service training, but that was just something I decided to do to pass the time while I was there.
There were a couple of birthdays throughout the week that we celebrated Peace Corps style. Needless to say they were pretty ballin'. After finishing an intense competition on Saturday night, I went on a walk around the grassy knolls of Kale, and to my surprise I saw a rabbit running along the edge of the brush. But this wasn't just any rabbit. I mean what kind of rabbit runs when they have one of the coolest methods of transportation--hopping. It turned out that this rabbit was a hedgehog (that made more sense in my head). WHAT!?! A hedgehog just prancing around in the brisk Skopje night air? Yep. I did some reading and most likely it's a northern white-breasted hedgehog (not that any of you were wondering. I'll try to keep those types of comments to myself from now on).
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| I actually got this spiky little critter to pose for a pic. Actually it was more like 20 but I decided to only post 1 |
While I was waiting for my 4 o'clock bus to show up on Sunday, I met this lovely wise-cracking old woman. She was feeding the pigeons her bread crumbs and I looked over to watch them eat. When she saw me looking at the pigeons, she started talking to me. I understood about the first 10 minutes of the conversation. The 4 o'clock ended up being a no show, so I waited around and talked to this lovely lady for about an hour and a half. She fed me and told me jokes and talked about her family. And in return I acted like I understood everything that she was telling me.
That wasn't even the highlight of my day. The best part was when I got home and made myself a peanut butter sandwich. Man, it had been a long time. And that thing was good. Plus, on top of that I found the spring for part of my camera flap that I thought had been lost forever. And this time I was actually able to put it back on my camera without losing it for three weeks.
If the air quality, wild hedgehogs, and me being here isn't enough to make you want to visit Macedonia, maybe this will push the tides in my favor. Kratovo (for those of you that can't tell from the title of this blog, that is where I live) is even mentioned in this. Please ignore the first 8 countries. And if you are thinking about going to them, well I don't want to ruin your plans, but I've heard that they've been having outbreaks of some pretty deadly diseases as well as some pretty hardcore civil wars that don't look like they'll be ending any time within the next 20 months or so. I guess Macedonia should just be bumped up to number 1:
http://www.lonelyplanet.com/travel-tips-and-articles/lonely-planets-best-in-travel-2014-top-10-countries
I'm gonna end this with some words of wisdom that I told myself today. Feel free to pass them on to others. If you recently saw a cactus, be sure to take a 360 degree look around yourself before getting the okay to stretch. I don't know if you ever did this, Danimal, but I was sitting in the chair next to the cactus the other day minding my own business (and by that I mean ignoring everybody else in the room that was talking in Macedonian. yes, that includes the TV) when I felt a stretch coming on. So what do I do? I reach for a little sky and as I move my arms down to get a little side action in there, before I know what's going on, BAM! I slammed my hand into the cactus. You better believe I got my hand away from that cactus as fast as I could. But the damage had already been done. Surprisingly it didn't hurt too bad, but those cactus needles weren't fun to pull out of my hand. The sad thing is that this wasn't the first time I tried giving the cactus a high-5. I'm hoping it'll be the last though.
Stay classy world.
