On to the next leg of our journey! My dad has arrived and now we are continuing on to Macedonia, and then working our way up to Italy in three short weeks. Macedonia, feels almost exactly the same as Greece, the general energy that you feel, building materials, and center squares all are alike. Although you shouldn’t talk about that in public, because there are strained relations between the two countries.

Macedonia has it’s own currency, because it’s not in the EU yet. Macedonia is a candidate but it’s being blocked by Greece. The reason is that Greece has a region called Macedonia and they think the country of Macedonia will want to take it from them, and they want the country to change its name. Macedonia also has its own language, it affects us because not many people speak English and the language is quite difficult to learn. It makes it more difficult to do business at places, although we still get by easily.

I’ve heard that the reason some people don’t travel is because they’re apprehensive about the language gap. It isn’t actually that hard to find other ways to communicate. Sometimes when we are at restaurants, we have to point to what we want on a menu that is all in Macedonian. My mum also has food allergies and it is hard to explain to the servers what they are because they don’t really speak English. So sometimes what she orders, she can’t eat.

When we were leaving, we were getting a lot of comments about going into countries that have terrorism, refugees, and recent conflicts. When you look at the news, I think it is totally overblown from what we have seen. Some people we met, took buses through Yugoslavia when a war was going on and they didn’t experience anything like what the news was saying. Where we are, there are not many refugees and the countries that have had wars are now doing serious reforming and look great. From Macedonia we will continue to move northwest towards Italy, by going through Albania, Montenegro and Croatia.