It's just a fancy swimmin' hole.

This is a popular swimming pool in the village of Dihovo, just a few kilometers from the city of Bitola. The water comes entirely from the mountains - they basically just divert a cool, clean river into a giant concrete tank, and then divert the runoff from the other end back into the river. The water is absolutely freezing, and it's my understanding that most people come just to sit at the cafe and stay cool near the water during the hot summer months.

Pretty neat, eh?

Food, etc. . . .Continued

There's another aspect to Macedonian agriculture that I find really interesting. As you might be able to tell from all the pictures I've put up, this tiny country has an incredibly varied landscape. Every small region has its own micro-climate, and is therefore usually suited to a particular crop. In each of these regions, there are towns almost entirely dependent on one crop.

Resen, between Ohrid and Bitola, produces most of Macedonia's apples. Rosoman, outside of Bitola, produces the best peaches (it's where I purchased mine - everybody gets excited when I explain the peaches are directly od Rosoman). Prilep is a tobacco town. Sveti Nikole is known for the producing the best meat, while Bitola is famed for dairy and cheese. Kocani is surrounded by rice patties. Every raisin I've eaten in Macedonia has come from Strumica, while the grapes in Negotino and Kavadarci are made into the region's best wines. The few olives grown in Macedonia come from Gevgelija. And so on.

Knowing that most apples come from Resen, or peaches from Rosoman, is one thing. Actually visiting these towns in season is a completely different experience. Prilep is completely covered with tobacco. We drove through the city on the way to Pelister, and tobacco is hung to dry in every possible place - schoolyards, public parks, laundry lines, garages, churchyards, across alleyways, and next to cafes. Rosoman, a village of no more than a few thousand, had dozens of semi-trucks loaded with peaches to ship off to the rest of Macedonia, while dozens of stalls sold smaller quantities to individuals. The streets of Kavadarci and Negotina usually run with wine all year long anyway - I can't imagine what the grape harvest will look like.

I have yet to determine if the watermelons are specific to a region - I'm thinking maybe Tetovo - but I'll be sure to find out.

Food, etc.

There's a giant crate of peaches sitting on my dining room table. I'm guessing that there's a little over three dozen left from who-knows-how-many. I've been eating peaches nonstop, giving them away to friends, to my landlord, to anyone I can before those delicious little fuzzballs start to rot. The problem is that no one really wants to take them, because just about everyone else has a giant crate of peaches on their dining room table as well. It's peach season, after all, and Macedonia - like much of southern Europe - is a seasonal country.

For the most part, I think seasons have disappeared in America. We have our strawberries, tomatoes, and iceberg lettuce available all year long, quality aside. Sure, the sweetcorn from the roadside stand only comes around in the late summer, and local groceries may only have watermelons for a few months of the year (although I imagine Kroger's has them year-round). But most Americans buy the the bulk of their food from supermarkets, and the American supermarket knows not the time of year.

This is not so in Macedonia. When I first arrived in October, fresh salads were already disappearing from restaurant menus, and were being replaced with turshija, pickled vegetables. The tomatoes available over the winter - grown in hothouses in the south of the country, and in Greece - were unnatural, plastic, tasteless, and expensive. Most people avoided them -winter is turshija time.

Then comes summer. The first watermelons, good tomatoes, chives, and cucumbers emerge early, from the halfway-opened hothouses. Things are green and fresh again. Prices drop to reasonable levels. I go to the market, I cook, and I am happy. That's not the end of it, though. The produce stalls start bursting with crops. There are actually dozens of semi-trucks full of watermelons parked all around the city, selling them for $.25 a kilo. Crates of peaches sell for $3, and the city is full of old men walking around with peach juice dribbling from their chin. People are practically giving away green peppers and onions. A month ago, during cherry season, my entire refridgerator and freezer were completely full.

The problem is that Macedonia is an agricultural state surrounded by other agricultural states, and mostly lacks large-scale canning facilities or refridgeration units. There's simply an overabundance of crops as they become ripe, and the price drops to the floor. And, since that crop is only available cheap and fresh for a limited period of time, Macedonians simply stuff themselves with whatever is in season. It sounds like a real treat, and in many ways, it is - I've never had produce that tasted so good.

But seriously - what am I going to do with three dozen peaches in the next two days?

Hiking in Pelister

I was just on Pelister mountain, just outside Bitola, for a hiking trip. We made it up to a really spectacular mountain lake above the treeline.

(The view with the lake behind us - those streams are from a spring fed by the lake.)

(Mountain flowers near the lake)

(A view from a rest stop)

(Crystal clear and ice cold mountain lake)

(The Villa Dihovo, a renovated village house that is now an eco-tourism type B&B)

I may not be updating all that often. . .

. . . but Justin is. He writes about the famous Galicnik Wedding and our trip out into Kratovo here.

There's even a picture of me in my 'traveling hat'.

Hiking in Eastern Macedonia, #2

(Old stone bridge over the river in Kratovo)

(Turkish prison, now a museum, in Kratovo)

(Cocev Kamen)

(Kriva River)

Hiking in Eastern Macedonia

(A view from the 6th century fortress at Konjuk)

(The Kriva River, as seen from the Konjuk fortress)

(A first for me: Pigs wallowing in a roadside mudpit near the Kriva River)

(Wheat fields near Konjuk)

(Kokino, an ancient observatory in an extinct volcano in Eastern Macedonia)

Summer Storms. . .

. . . have knocked out my internet. It's been gone for a week now, and fixing it has been slow going. But, summer in Skopje is rather slow going. It hasn't been quite as hot as I've been told just yet, but it's getting there. Schools are out, and everyone is rushing off to Ohrid (or Greece, if they're lucky) for a few weeks of vacation.

I'll actually be heading to Ohrid in August for the Seminar on the Macedonian Language, three weeks of classes and lectures with other international students of Macedonian. I've been studying, practicing, and improving. . . so we'll see how it goes.

In other news, I've learned how to play Bridge, and I'm a fiend at it.