Happy (belated) Thanksgiving, readers! Richard and I have been socializing and traveling, which partially explains the long blog silence. We finally found a reliable dog-sitter, so last weekend we took our first over-night trip. Destination: Skopje, Macedonia. What a treat to get out town for a night. We started with a leisurely bus ride through some lovely country - hilly and wooded. Skopje is an old city with an Ottoman history. We crossed its medieval bridge and explored the ruined fortress wall. Then we chanced upon the oldest mosque in the Balkans. As soon as we walked into the grounds, the imam of the mosque came to greet us. After taking off our shoes (all the better to freeze) he showed us into the mosque and gave us a long tour of the space. With the help of a multi-lingual, hand-written cheat sheet, we received a surprisingly understandable history lesson.

We also whiled away some time at the contemporary art museum, which provided an interesting counterpoint to the historical sites of the old city. The museum itself is an Polish-designed white square box. Inside this cavernous space we found an exhibit by Macedonian artist Reshat Ameti. The art itself was a feast, but equally important was the experience itself. We had the museum almost to ourselves. The (noisy) exception was the construction workers doing renovations right above our heads. Totally oblivious to the presence of museum goers, the racket eventually drove us out the main exhibit space. No worries, we thought, since we were anxious to see the Picasso that our guide book promised us. We couldn’t find it, so we asked the lonely attendant. After some confusion which we solved via hand signals and a hodge-podge of Russian and English, we were informed that the Picasso was locked up downstairs and unavailable for viewing. Something about the way he said this made us both laugh. We imagined the curator of the museum carrying around a key chain composed of car, apartment, and Picasso keys.