I was thinking a while ago that it is time for a longer trip. Since I moved to DC, I haven’t really traveled that much outside of work and there are so many amazing places to see around the world! But there are so many other things on my agenda this year and I wasn’t sure when to find time for a longer trip. Fortunately, my job solved it for me. On Monday, I am off for five weeks on work in Montenegro, Kyrgyzstan, and Kazakhstan. I am really excited about going! I haven’t been to Central Asia for several years, and it will be my first time in Kazakhstan. In addition, my work there will involve a lot of traveling around in the countries to meet agricultural producers, which is really my favorite part of my job! But first two concerts tomorrow with the Swedish Song Group. Might post a video depending on how I look on stage in a folk costume…

So as you probably noted, my travel plans for last week changed and I never went to Paris as I originally had planned. My ticket was cancelled, so I ended up with another airline and so Paris didn’t work out this time. Which was OK because V was out of town anyway. Instead, I went directly to England and stayed with N, another Moldovan friend who lives in Oxford. It was actually my first trip to England in ten years, and I was quite excited about it. For about 2 seconds, I even played with the idea of checking out London as an option for relocation. Well-located in Europe, multi-cultural, with good universities, and lots of NGOs having HQs there, I thought it could be a possibility at least for a few years. Until I was met by the British weather. N claimed that it had been 20 degrees there just a few days earlier, and in fairness, also Skopje was hit by cold winds towards the end of our stay there. But the grey weather and especially the dampness reminded me of how heavy I find the winters in Northern Europe, and I immediately crossed London off the list. It was great seeing N though and to stay in Oxford for a few days (I had never been there before). Hopefully, it won’t be ten years before i go to England again! Here are a few pics:

Store where Alice Liddell, who inspired Lewis Carroll to write Alice in Wonderland, used to buy candy.

The inside of the Christ Church is apparently the inspiration for parts of Hogwarts. 

Does it get more British than the pub?

It seems like it has been a while since I last posted something. As always, it is due to a really hectic schedule, with both work and school, and now travelling. It is like I don’t have peace within me to write when I have deadlines in sight. Not because it takes that much time to write a blog post, but because my creativity seems to only be able to focus on one thing at the time. I can multi-task but not multi-create!

I am now in Skopje, Macedonia, since about a week. I have been coming in here twice per year for the past 3.5 years, but this is the first time I am here for more than a week. Spring has arrived, which means temperatures up in the 20s (70s F) and I have to admit that I have tried to spend every lunch break at an outdoor café. This weekend, I met up with a colleague of mine and went for a walk with her and her little baby around the town, and it seemed like every resident of Skopje was doing the same. I hope the weather will hold for the rest of my stay, even though I, of course, tend to spend most of my time in administrative buildings!

The city has changed quite a bit since I first started coming here in 2008, with new statues and buildings popping up all over the city centre, and lots of new shops (my favorite being a local chocolate store). And yes, knowing that I would be here for 2.5 weeks, I just couldn’t resist getting a Macedonian phrasebook!

Since we already had a one-night stopover in Vienna due to the flight connections, my colleague and I decided to stay an extra night to be able to explore the city better. And we did make the most of it. Sunday morning, we started the day with a lovely breakfast at a Viennese café that the menu referred to as “Viennese breakfast”, with coffee, soft-boiled eggs, rolls, jams, and croissants. After the breakfast, we took the metro out to the former imperial summer palace Schönbrunn where we first took a tour through the inside of the palace and then had a beautiful stroll through the park, before we sat down for lunch at the garden café in park. Despite an immense number of tourists, the place was very peaceful. The visit also triggered my interest in Empress Elisabeth, or Sisi, who with her independent and republican views seemed to have made quite an impression around Europe in the mid 19^th century, and I ended up buying a biography about her to learn more.

Our next stop was the Albertina Museum where we, in addition to admiring the interior of the building, looked at a collection of Monet, Picasso, and Chagall mixed with other international and Austrian artists. I have to admit that I am not very familiar with Chagall’s work, but when I saw one of his paintings of a farm, The Kite, I immediately recognized the typical houses, fences, and carriages of the countryside of my former “home country” Moldova and the countries around. It turned out that Chagall was from Belarus and the painting pictured his childhood.

The most memorable part of the day for me was however watching my first opera at the Vienna Staatsoper. Ever since I was in high school, I wanted to some day see a performance at the opera house in Vienna. It wasn’t exactly a dream but it was something that I wanted to have done in my life. I know a lot of people that appreciate opera much more than I do. I rarely remember arias and often don’t really understand the story, and I rarely like all singers’ voices. But for some reason, I really like to go and see an opera a few times per year. The performance of the evening was Alcina by Händel. The music was fantastic and the singers amazing, and I am really glad I went! I also realized that one of the few solo recordings that I have done (Händel’s Verdi Prati) is an area from this opera, though I have to admit that the mezzo soprano singing it in Vienna took the high notes with a lot more ease than I do!

Breakfast cafe

At the opera entrance

I promised my colleague (who didn’t come with me to the opera) to have someone take a picture of me as a memory

I am now in Macedonia since Sunday. There are rapid and quite visible changes taking place here and it seems like a lot has happened since I first started coming here just a few years ago. The first change that met me when I arrived on Macedonian territory was the new airport which has been under construction for quite some time, but which now apparently has opened. Or rather, it is an extension of the old airport. It is very modern and it seemed to have opened very recently as it took the airport crew about five minutes to match the newly installed airbridge to the door on the aircraft! Other new additions to the city are a number of rather large monuments decorating the main square in Skopje, but I also have the impression that things have changed in the institutions that we work with. And new cafes and restaurants seem to have popped up every time I come here.

It has been a very hectic week here during which I have been working on four different tasks. But it has also been also interesting and exciting. Monday was rather quiet and we only had two meetings as we also needed time to organize the rest of the week, but Tuesday, I had my first meeting at 7:00 am, following by meetings at 9:00 and 11:00, a fourth at12:30 – 15:00, and the last meeting of the day at 15:00 – 17:00. Wednesday, we started at 7:00 am again, going off to a meeting in Macedonia’s second largest city, Bitola (which seemed to be quite an interesting town – I wouldn’t mind getting to know it a little better some day), followed by another two meetings when we finally got back to Skopje in the afternoon. Similarly, Thursday, we had farmers consultations about two hours north-east of Skopje, followed by meetings in the capital in the late afternoon. And today, we ended our week here with three rather intensive but productive meetings. Needless to say, I am quite tired and after a walk around town in the late afternoon, I am now resting in my room. A great thing with this hotel is that is all the rooms are equipped with a kettle so that the guests can make a cup of tea in the evening. So now I am relaxing with a nice cup of tea!

The above pictures are from the old part of Skopje

Evening walk along the Vardar River that runs through Skopje

Bitola: Macedonia’s inhabitants are traditionally from several religions, hence the minaret at the end of the pedestrian street in Bitola. 

The joy of having a kettle in one’s room… A less great thing about this hotel (Best Western) is that the internet basically doesn’t work here. I have been staying here one before and both times, the staff told me it was temporary and that they would fix it… It can be a little stressful when the evenings are the only time available to catch up with the rest of my work. Anyway, tomorrow I am off to Vienna and I hope to forget about work until I get back to DC!

First stop was in Montenegro where I enjoyed a week of lots and lots of work, but also a little leisure. Most of our meetings were in Podgorica but on day, we drove a couple of miles out of the city and visited a dairy farmer and looked at how he was expanding his business, and learned from him what obstacles he was facing. Another day, we had a couple of meetings located in Bar and Kotor, which gave us the opportunity to have a late lunch in the UNESCO World Heritage listed town of Kotor. As I have written before on this blog, the bay of Kotor is probably one of the most beautiful places in Europe and the Old Town of Kotor, which once upon a time was part of the State of Venice, is a little pearl on the Adriatic coast. In short, it was a good week, and not the least because of our amazing counterparts on the project that I support!

View over part of Podgorica from my hotel 

The Island Sveti Stefan

In Kotor

Milos, the fantastic Project Manager that I work with (and a faithful reader of my blog it turned out!)