Macedonia - The day before

6/3-11

So it has already been more than one week and this is the first thing I write, I guess it is first things first and I have been pretty busy just enjoying and getting used to the Macedonian kind of life. Of which you will learn more about in this blog, well my Macedonian kind of life.

Oh yeah, so this is a blog dedicated to my one year visit in Macedonia working as a volunteer with the EVS organization, more specifically at the SFERA young volunteer firefighters. Hopefully it will not be a problem to keep up the chronologic order, so far I at least have made small notes everyday – and now I am going to try and recap it all for you all!

So here we go:

The day before the trip starts:

Since my plane was leaving from Arlanda (Stockholm, Sweden) pretty early – and I was living kind of far away from the town - I went one day early and crashed on my great friend Sara’s couch. For starting it was a bit boring, seeing how she went out for training at the very time I arrived. But one can always choice if one wants to be bored or not, so I headed out to see what the capital city of Sweden had to offer a Sunday evening. Her apartment was pretty close to one of Sweden’s biggest and probably most ugly buildings, which is called Globen. I mean imagine this huge ball, I don’t mean huge like some ball you might be playing some games with, I mean freaking gigantic (it plays as host for big sports events and concerts), all in white, just big and ugly sums it up pretty good. I have never been in the location so I went to check it out from the inside, which with all stores and bars was a better view. Pretty soon I found this really nice sign outside a small bar saying something like: We have a great selection of beers at a human price, come on in! I was hooked at that and so I went in. Started zippin’ on a Staropramen and was feeling that this was really my kind place, old style with nice background music, right now I can only recall some random Bob Marley song, but that is always good. Anyway the girl sitting next to me was also heading out for a journey the next day – and has also never been at this amazing little bar before our encounter. She was going to Thailand for 3 months, sadly she was leaving even earlier in the morning than me, otherwise we could have hooked up for the airport! The last person I spoke to before I left was one of the regulars, think he had been there for 20 years or more. The bar had this really cool thing for the regulars, they had their own beer mugs with name tags – the guy I spoke with was called Tillberg if I remember correctly. He told me that the director of the famous movie Jack used to be a regular at the place, sadly he passed away the other year and was nowhere but on a photo to be seen. I don’t remember his name right now but he sort of looked like Gandalf in the Lord of the Rings. 

The Gandalf guy, real name: Jan Halldoff

After this I grabbed something to eat and went back to Sara’s place, where we just relaxed and had pretty nice nostalgic evening.