Probistip

I finished my first full week in Probistip with my host family.  Things are going great over here.  I have no serious concerns and my wants/needs appear to be tended to.  I settled into a routine where I have my language class in the morning, from 8am to noon.  Some days we have additional classes, others we don’t.  But after that, I go home, get my homework done and on the weekends, my host brother, Zlatko,  invites me out with him and his friends.  At this point, that pretty much is my life.  The language is difficult.   In class, we learn valuable stuff, but then we go out into the real world and people are speaking a mile a minute, or don’t speak clearly and even the words/phrases we do know we have a hard time picking up in the real world.  But, I never really intended for this blog to be about learning or feel good stories.  Instead, I would like to tell you about the more interesting things that happen:

First, the flushing mechanism of the toilets here is different than in America.  In America, we press down on a lever.  Here, there is a rope that protrudes from the top of the toilet and you pull that string to flush.  As I learned at my host family’s home, there is a rhythm to pulling the string.  You want to pull it once, forcefully.  Ok, that’s the back story.  So I was at a bar with Zlatko and I had to go to the bathroom.  And, at this point, I had a bunch, so I go to use the restroom and I finish and to flush, I yank the rope.  Maybe I don’t know my ‘drunk strength’ (def: the additional strength you gain once you become drunk – or more realistically, the fact that when you are drunk, it is difficult to judge how much force to apply to a given physical task), but when I yank the rope, I ripped the fucking thing right off the toilet!  I just stood there, dumbfounded for a couple seconds.  What could I do?  I determined the only proper thing to do would be to drop it and walk away.  I mean, what else could I do?  I was drunk.  The situation was entirely unavoidable.  

Second, a traditional Macedonian specialty is Ayvar, which is a paste made from red peppers, which are plentiful here.  Making ayvar is a huge process and from start to finish takes approx. 12 hours to make.  The end result is a thick, jam-like paste that is spread on bread.  It is often pared with a special type of white cheese, but since I don’t eat cheese, I don’t enjoy it that way.  Anyway, every mother makes ayvar here and for the first 4-5 days I lived with my host family, I ate it every day, either for breakfast, lunch, or dinner.  Being from red peppers, it is red.  And I ate so much of it, I literally starting shitting red.  The first time I saw that, I panicked for a couple seconds.  Was there blood in my stool?  That’s never a good problem to have, let alone when you are in a different country and can’t speak the language.  But, after about 3 seconds, I connected the dots.  Ayvar = red.  No problem.

Finally, we were at a bar and I wanted to buy a beer.  A bottle of Skopsko is 60 denari, or roughly $1.75 maybe.  But, I look in my wallet and all I had was a 500 denari note and a bunch of birds (10 denari notes).  Rather than take the birds out of the flock and start counting them, I just give Zlatko the 500 note.  Using a 500 note to pay for a 60 denari bill is kind of frowned upon (it’s like going to a bar in Philly and whipping out a $50 to pay for a $5 bottle of beer).  So, instead, I just told Zlatko to go up to the bar and buy a lot of beer so I wouldn’t have any change.  For whatever reason, that made more sense to me at the time than to see if I could change the 500 or if I did have enough birds.  Zlatko comes back with like 6 bottles of beer and we are handing them out to anybody we know.  Craziness.  

So those are some of the misadventures I was telling you about.  I still have not uploaded the photos onto my computer.  But, I think I’ll do that Monday.  Chao.