I never thought I'd be able to use my US visa anywhere outside the States. But it actually got me into North Macedonia (Russians no longer get visa-free entry, but you can get in with a US visa, or via Schengen or national visas).

And get this — they still have Ramstores here! Talk about a blast from the past. I thought they all went extinct ages ago. Turns out it's a subsidiary of the Turkish Migros, and it's doing just fine in North Macedonia. According to Wikipedia, they should have them in Kazakhstan too.

So if you're looking to save money on travel, come check this place out. In the small but charming city of Ohrid, you'll find a piece of Italy's Lake Como. And the stone city in Kuklica? Think of it as the Balkans' answer to Stonehenge (:

Once again, I've been reminded that our ideas about a country can have absolutely nothing to do with what's actually happening on the ground. I was convinced that North Macedonia was completely Orthodox and inhabited only by Macedonians.

But it turned out that roughly a quarter of the country's population are Muslim Albanians (there are also Catholic Albanians here, but they're vanishingly rare—though at least one of them is known worldwide: Mother Teresa). And the sheer number of mosques in the western part of the country is mind-blowing. It feels like you've stepped into Bosnia or even Turkey. The Painted Mosque in Tetovo is practically one of a kind. It looks absolutely stunning.

In bunch of settlements, you suddenly see Albanian flags hanging around. Even though I definitely didn't cross any border. It's just like the Serbian and Croatian flags in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Albanians believe they're being oppressed, and this has sparked armed clashes over the years. The biggest one was in 2001, and the most recent was in 2015 (there was also an attack on parliament in 2017, but that was Macedonians and they weren't armed, so we won't count it). I honestly barely remember hearing any news about conflicts from here. Guess the Serbia-Kosovo situation just overshadows everything else.

Right on the border with Albania, the Macedonians set up their national park, Mavrovo. You can easily spend 2-3 days here. The park is huge with tons of trails, hills and mountains for every skill level – and it's absolutely beautiful.

The staff at the info center were super helpful. They gave me detailed advice on which trails to take and which to avoid. They mentioned that over 200 bears live in the park, while all of Slovenia only has about 600. So you need to be careful on the more remote trails. That said, there haven't been any documented bear attacks on people.

A night rain messed up our plans, so we ended up taking a different route than we'd originally planned. Looks like we'll have to come back! :)

Overall the park is wonderful, but along the roads it gets pretty messy in spots. People literally throw bottles and chip bags out of their cars. The trails themselves are clean, but walking along the highway you just feel 😢

And get this – when I drove through the toll booth, I watched the cashier toss a piece of paper out of their window onto the street. Like it was totally normal. Why would you do that? :(

Quick linguistics lesson. They speak Macedonian in Macedonia. It's actually way less similar to Serbian than Montenegrin or Bosnian are. There's seems to be more Russian-Bulgarian influence, I guess. I'm no expert, of course, but the differences are pretty striking.

Менувачница instead of мењачницы.
Театар instead of позориште.
Сметка instead of рачуна (bill).
Кафе за носење instead of за понети.
And there are tons of these substitutions.

To completely break the system, they use ќ instead of ћ. For example, their word for house is куќа, not кућа. Or ноќ instead of ноћ. And they basically dropped the letter х from the beginning of some words entirely. I had to buy леб and алву.

Still, even with my modest Serbian knowledge, we could understand each other just fine. At one point I tried switching to English when I was checking into my accommodation (it was really hard to express myself in Serbian). But they replied with "let's just stick to Serbian."

There are some fun brain teaser exercises. I didn't immediately figure out how to translate "Враќаш толку колку што си зел," but then it clicked (:

PS. Wikipedia has a whole section about whether Macedonian should be considered its own language. They write that throughout history it was considered a Bulgarian dialect, then a Serbian dialect. And only in the middle of the last century did it start being considered a separate language. But Bulgarians still think it's "the Macedonian norm of Bulgarian"!

I just arrived in Skopje, and it's a really strange city.

It feels like four different architects are working here all at once: a Greek, a Turk, a Soviet engineer, and someone from the 90s. Everywhere you look, there's this wild mix of styles. Even in the city center, there's no unified aesthetic—everything's all jumbled together. Plus, some buildings are half-finished, while others are built but left incomplete on the inside.

In some neighborhoods, it's like you've stepped into a provincial Russian town from thirty years ago. It's pretty grimy in places. The public transport and bus stops are all worn out. There's tons of tacky advertising everywhere, and it's all in Cyrillic too. Total immersion.