Pictures from Thanksgiving and Swearing-In

Here are the pictures from Thanksgiving and Swearing-In

The dishes I prepared for Thanksgiving, Macaroni and Cheese and Lumpia

All of the food that we made! 

So much to eat!

Turkeys!

Proof that I had my fair share of Thanksgiving feast in Macedonia

Thanksgiving oro

Swearing-In!  Brit and I are nervous to give our speeches

The US Ambassador with the Albanian dance crew

Our love for Toshe has no bounds

The Lozers and the 'Bassador

Thanksgiving and Swearing-In

Peace Corps mentions that the lifetime of the average volunteer has highs and lows throughout service. These past two days have been incredibly amazing for me, and I can say that I am finally a Peace Corps Volunteer (and not a trainee).

Yesterday, the families of Lozovo joined the trainees in celebrating the great American holiday of Thanksgiving!  For once I felt like a master in the kitchen as I slaved over a hot stove while my host mother watched and laughed at my concoctions. 

For Thanksgiving the USA ships two American turkeys for each training community to enjoy (sorry, American tax-payers, but however much you paid for those turkeys definitely had their worth and were appreciated here!).  Once the turkeys were thawed, we sent them to the motel to be cooked by the staff there.  All trainees and families were tasked to make side dishes to accompany the turkeys, which in my mind resembles even more the spirit of the first Thanksgiving.  Therefore, the table was filled with a smorgasbord of American and Macedonian cuisine.

What did I decide to make?  1. Macaroni and cheese with bacon, squash, and leeks and my favorite food to eat 2. Lumpia!  The morning was spent making the dough for the lumpia (aka spring roll wrappers).  This involved smearing the dough on the hot pan, and then lifting the wrappers from the pan with my fingers.  Not only was I holding dough for an hour straight, but I am pretty sure that I burned my fingerprints off from my left index finger and thumb.  I concurrently made my macaroni and cheese, which was stuffed with the best ingredients possible (squash, leeks, and bacon).  I would not have been able to cook both dishes without the help of Emily and my host mother.

Afterwards, all of the trainees and families headed to the motel to feast.  We all sat for a while until the turkeys were ready.  They were cooked almost to perfection, as both were butterflied to speed up the cooking process.  After we were all stuffed from dinner, some families thought it would be a great idea to dance the oro around the table.  This is where the cultural lesson of Thanksgiving was lost on the people of Macedonia.  Never have I moved so much after a Thanksgiving dinner, but it was definitely a blast!

Today, we all left our communities and left for Kumanovo to swear in as official Peace Corps volunteers.  Some of us had some jitters, but maybe Brit and I had the most since the other trainees selected us to represent the group by giving the speech in Macedonian and Albanian.  We were honored to give the speech on their behalf, and we worked for the past week writing the speech, translating it, and practicing it.  While I had translated the speech on my own, my Macedonian instructors also had a translated copy ready, which was much better.  Therefore, all of my thanks are devoted to them!

The ceremony was attended by our current and future host families, our counterparts, the Peace Corps staff, the US ambassador, and representatives of the Macedonian government.  Throughout the ceremony, we sang both the American and Macedonian anthems, heard speeches from the new Peace Corps Director for Macedonia, and recited the oath to become volunteers.  Interestingly, the oath we recited was the same as that recited by ambassadors and the president of the United States!  We hope to serve our country with the highest honor possible.

Following the ceremony, a Macedonian news network wanted to interview me.  I had no idea what the context was, so I basically said that I was happy in Macedonia and that I loved learning the language.  You can watch me stumble through the embedded video provided in the link below.

http://www.kanal5.com.mk/vesti_detail.asp?ID=24160

Tonight I enjoy my last day in Lozovo, and I leave for a bus to Prilep early tomorrow morning.  I know that I am going to miss Lozovo, my host family here, the other (recently sworn-in) volunteers, and all that this part of Macedonia has to offer.  Luckily, I plan to return soon for Macedonian Christmas (Божиќ).

I have plenty of pictures to share, but I think I will add them to another post since I have so many.

Running Out of Thyme in Lozovo

In many ways, for me today felt like the final day of training in Lozovo.  Tomorrow we will celebrate Thanksgiving with our families at the motel, and I will probably spend most of my free time tomorrow cooking and packing for my new home.  Thus, today marked the last “normal” day in Lozovo, yet it was anything but.

First of all, I woke up pleasantly surprised to find that the snow had stuck on the ground.  Lozovo was covered in winter wonderland, and I was thrilled to see my training community with a new cover. 

Morning of the first snowfall in Lozovo

Today also marked our last day of class for Macedonian language, and today the students were responsible for teaching the class. Since we had finished the assigned textbook about a week ago, we steered away from a formal lesson and decided to translate a song.  The song?  “I Want It that Way” by the Backstreet Boys.  Yup. 

It would not have been Lozovo if we stopped there.  After translating the song, we decided to sing and film the performance.  Props to Ted for finding the perfect song to translate, and props to Ksenija for filming our debut hit in Macedonia!  (To see the performance, follow the link below!)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zMMVst_fUfI&feature=youtu.be

After class, Ted and I decided to search for herbs, to be used tomorrow for our Thanksgiving dishes, in the nearby fields and forests surrounding Lozovo.  We took a long walk with Emily and Dan, trudging through mud, in order to find thyme in the forest (for my mac and cheese!) and sage near the creek (for Ted's stuffing).

Looking for those herbs

Here I am now, watching Turkish films with my host mother while simultaneously practicing my speech that I will present during Swearing-In on Friday.  I look forward to my new site, but I will be sad to miss all that I have come to love here in Lozovo.

The Longest Time Away

Today marks the longest time I have lived outside of the US, and more importantly, outside of Chicago.  Never before have I lived for so long away from my home city.  Yet, in some ways living here still seems natural, and in other ways, it is a bit underwhelming.

Starting this Thursday, Americans enter what I consider my favorite time of the year- Holiday Season.  Nothing reminds me of home more than Thanksgiving, holiday decorations, Michigan Avenue lights, and Christmas songs on the radio.  I thought that I would be craving for a return home, and maybe I will once the Holidays start passing on the calendar.  However, everything has been very busy during PST, and with the addition of this current flu, my time and energy is pretty drained. 

Also, with PST coming to an end, I thought that all of the groups would be celebrating, either among the volunteers or with our families, for our final days and especially for the final weekend at our training sites.  However, we have all taken this past weekend pretty easy as we will soon prepare and pack for our future, permanent sites in cities across the country.

It has been a while since I last posted with updates on Macedonia, so I hope to post a longer update today.  Bear with me!

Excursion to Skopje

On the weekend of November 9-10, I had traveled to Skopje to see my host-brother’s new apartment.  He recently purchased his own flat in a new building that is  surrounded by other recently constructed apartment complexes.  He lives relatively close to the river, and his neighborhood is called Novo Lisice, as it just borders Lisice, a town just to the East of this neighborhood.  This old town (Lisice) is currently engulfed into the Skopje metro region, and I am interested in seeing what it will look like in twenty years from now. 

A map of Skopje, for your convenience.

Overall, Skopje is an expanding, dynamic city, and it is no surprise that all of the young people want to live and work in the capital.  The downtown center has a new facelift, as I mentioned in a previous post, but other neighborhoods are booming and expanding in Skopje as well.  Given the expansion and the number of jobs that are growing in the capital, I assume that most investment into the country is being directed to the capital.  Thus, it is pretty difficult for other parts of the country to expand and attract investment, or more importantly, to retain its young talent.

While Skopje is one city, it is divided into different municipalities based on the population, so each municipality, or neighborhood, has its own mayor.  Novo Lisice lies just east of Aerodrom, which arguably is the most modern and most-demanded neighborhood in Skopje.  The mayor of Aerodrom is very popular, as he is focusing on renovating this part of Skopje with new parks, arenas for sports, and basically all types of common spaces for the young families who are moving into his neighborhood.  Many of the pictures taken below were shot during our stroll through the neighborhood.  We ended our stroll at the fort on top of the hill near the center.  From there, most of downtown Skopje was visible, and it was surprising that crowds had not filled the fort to enjoy the sunset.

Toshe Park in Aerodrom

Along the river front, lots of young people running and working out

From the fort

The next day, Alexander had his apartment blessed by a priest.  We all followed rituals involving holy water and candles as the priest recited and sang some hymns.  Afterwards, we all enjoyed the potluck of food and talked for hours on end.  Alexander and Kate were told that they could inherit his father’ saint (St. Ovan), or they could visit a church and randomly pick a saint from one of the books.

Language Proficiency Interview

The Language Proficiency Interview, or LPI, is each trainee’s final test for the Macedonian or Albanian language.  The test was conducted this past Thursday or Friday within all of the communities (although the final LPI will be proctored to the dual-language group three months into service in a language of their choice).  The test is not a prerequisite for our service.  If we fail, we are not sent home, but instead, given additional help and monitoring.  However, we all felt pressure to do well since we wanted to make our teachers proud, and for some, to show off our language skills with a rating based on performance.

The LPI is interview-based since most of our interactions throughout our service will be verbal.  Throughout the interview, we are basically asked to talk about ourselves, our work, our families, and whatever else we want to discuss.  Some of us fell into traps- a few other trainees mentioned that they had watched movies the previous day, and thus they were asked to describe “Batman” or “The A-Team” in Macedonian.  Having made this mistake once in Japan (and being forced to describe the plot of Casablanca in Japanese), I found these stories both humorous as well as unfortunate.

However, the LPI is best approached with a bit of humor.  In the end, it tests our current fluency and ease with the language, and is quite lax on accuracy. Furthermore, our learning does not stop with this test, and it is up to us to continue practicing and speaking Macedonian with our future site mates and host families.  Some volunteers will rely on their knowledge of Macedonian to have a successful home stay and work experience.  Others will be able to get by on English.  Hopefully, I will be able to continue learning the language and improving my own knowledge and fluency.

So here I am now, with a mildly upset stomach, pondering the next moments in Macedonia.  The end of training is looming over the horizon.  Yet, I am not sure why I am not so fazed.  Maybe it is because I am taking this experience one day at a time.  Or maybe it is because I am ready to move to my new site.  I am not sure, but pretty soon, the habits I have developed in Lozovo, and everything that I have become used to, will go away.  No longer will I see the same group of trainees, no longer will I be taught Macedonian each day from an amazing professor, no longer will I enjoy the hospitality of the wonderful family here, and no longer will I enjoy the serenity of the Macedonian countryside.  Yet I know that for the longest time I have been away from Chicago, this experience has been fulfilling so far.  There are things I can look forward to in my new city, and there are things that I will miss from Lozovo.  But first thing is first- this flu needs to go away!!!

Велес

Over the past two weeks, I have embarked on a few day trips to bigger cities in Macedonia.  Below I describe our night out in Veles (Велес).

On the first of November, a few of the Lozers visited Lozovo’s biggest sister-city, Veles, for pastramajlia.  According to the last census, Veles is the 6^th largest city in Macedonia, with the population of just over 40,000 people.  The city is located just west of Lozovo and is a 25-minute ride away by bus.  Veles is basically in the center of Macedonia and is split by the river Vardar.  There is a saying in Macedonia- all roads lead to Veles, which is pretty much true.  Most buses make a stop at the bus station in Veles, which is quite fortunate for those who live in Lozovo.  The Macedonian language was also standardized to the Veles dialect, since Veles is centrally located within the republic and is located on the river Vardar. (See here fore more brief info about Veles).

In my opinion, Veles is the most beautiful city in Macedonia (or at least, of the cities that I have visited so far).  Driving west toward the city, the buses wind along hills and through ravines until the city of Veles, with its buildings climbing along the hillsides, comes into sight.    The city is bifurcated by the river, with the pazar and bus stop on the east bank and the majority of the city on the west bank.  Several bridges traverse the river, allowing pedestrians to cross the roaring waters below as they enjoy the panorama of houses situated on the surrounding steeps.  Unfortunately, the Peace Corps did not market the city well to the rest of the volunteers.  During a medical session on “Environmental Concerns,” Veles ranked high for water and soil pollution despite the recent closure of its smelting and lead manufacturing plant. 

The Lozers have visited Veles often for practicum work throughout PST.  However, Veles hosted its own version of pastramajlia, rivaling the much larger version of the festival in Shtip (city located to the East of Lozovo).  Pastramajlia is a pizza-like dish, with buttery dough (in my opinion, lighter than pizza dough) topped with meat and eggs.  Pastramajlia from Veles traditionally contains sheep meat (hence “pastrма,” or пастрма, which is meat of sheep preserved in salt or oil).  However, during the festival in Veles, the meat is typically pork as the dish is mass-produced. 

When we visited Veles for the festival, the main street was closed to traffic and filled with tents offering pastermajlia and regional wine.  We met with two Veles locals and talked over a few drinks before strolling through the city and past the tents.  The park near the coffee bars is relatively new and gorgeous!  We were decided to wind through the old part of town, which is very residential and situated on the hill closest to the center.  At the top, we were able to enjoy a beautiful view over the entirety of the city.  At the festival, we were lucky to enjoy a set at the main stage, and the local Veles band, which also covered Red Hot Chili Peppers songs, were really entertaining.  We ended our night at a new bar, Tarantino, which we were able to get into early since one of our friends from Veles knew the bouncer.  Overall, it was nice to escape our small town and enjoy the night on our own in a bigger city.

Strolling the the old part of Veles

Pastramajlia

On the terrace of Tarantino