So last summer Adam and I rescued a dog. Well actually another volunteer rescued a dog which she found starving on the street and then we ended up taking him from her. At first she had just planned on keeping the dog outside but he started following her home and sitting in front of her [...]

My first look at the city of Bucharest came as I emerged from the underground metro station at Unirii Square. The overcast sky and light gray stone buildings quickly explained the Romanian culture’s love for hot coffee. The environment evokes a need rather than just a desire to visit one of the abundant warm cafes [...]

Today Adam and I went to a small village called Terarce for Bean Day. The village has a mixed population of Albanians, Macedonians, Turks, and Romas. As part of an effort to improve inter-ethnic relations in the village a small NGO called the Center for Education and Development, which has existed since around 2006, organizes [...]

It was 7:10 a.m. in a town called Veles, about an hour outside of the capital Skopje, when I looked to the ticket window and made eye contact with the expressionless woman seated behind two panes glass and a waist-high counter. She quickly looked away, it was then I realized Cara and I weren’t going [...]

Well here are a couple of photos of the local castle that once was here in Tetovo. It seems that every ‘larger” city in Macedonia seems to have one. Ours was originally built in the 1800′s during the Ottoman empire by the local magistrate as a summer home for he and his family. It is [...]

The Municipality of Tetovo includes the city of Tetovo and about twelve other small villages which are on the outskirts of the city and also high in the mountains behind the city. Recently, the municipality, together with USAID, finished a renovation project in one of these small villages. USAID funded the complete renovation of the [...]

The city of Tetovo is located next to the Sar Mountain range. This range contains some of the largest mountains in the entire country and is home to its own ski resort, Popova Shopka, its own breed of Mastiff-wolf-dog, Sharplaninec, bred specifically for the high country, and of course, its own people, mostly Albanians. The [...]

The Vevcani Carnival has been taking place for over 1,400 years. It is one of the oldest and most authentic pagan holidays still celebrated in the world. Unlike many other holidays that have continued to adapt themselves to constantly changing belief systems the people of Vevcani have worked to maintain the original concept of the [...]

Often times during Pre-Service Training (PST) the incoming volunteers, after raking our brains over the rudimentary principles of a foreign language, get to attend meetings. Most of these meeting are informative, long, cold, and of course tedious. However, we knew what we signed up for and, after all, “This is Macedonia” (TIM). During the early [...]

September 19, 2010 It was my third week of “practicum” meetings on Mondays and Tuesday s and I was traveling for the fifth time alone by bus to Kumanovo.  I walked farther down the lane than normal to a bus stop that was (to my knowledge at the time) visited by two alternative bus routes, [...]

Just a collection of photos from the last week. We went to a wine festival in downtown Skopje, and since it was our first time in the big city, we took in some of the big changes the city has been building. We took the train in from our site, which takes about 45 minutes, [...]

 These photos were taken last Saterday at the Skopje Fortress in Old Town Skopje. Adam, me, and several other volunteers went to Skopje just for the day and to check out a wine festeval taking place in the center. We have more pictures of the wine festeval that we will post later but I thought [...]

September 15, 2010 It has been a week since Cara and I began our Peace Corps service in Macedonia, a small anonymous land-locked country in the heart of the Balkans.  It is a country, the size of Haiti, which characterizes not only its own personal identity but holds vestiges of Balkan history in its ancient [...]

Just a glimpse of the “shtëpi” or home we are staying in. The home we now live in was built some years ago by one of three brothers who inherited a few acres of land passed down from their father, who like most people at the time, had a variety of crops he produced, livestock he [...]

This is Purshka Park near the town of Cherkeze where we are living for the next few months. The park is one of the few in the area, which is still maintained to a usable degree. There is  a meandering promenade that cuts straight through the narrow stretches of grass adjacent to an overgrown canal. It appears next to [...]

The honey-moon-view of Kumanovo. The town where we spent five days at the Hotel Satellite doing orientation and cultural training.

This is the hotel room where Cara and I stayed. Due to our age and the enormity of the room when compared to other volunteer’s rooms, combined with the fact that the room had a cool view, it was quickly labeled the honeymoon suite.

Welcome to WordPress.com. This is your first post. Edit or delete it and start blogging!