During her afternoon in Shutka, Abi wandered into a local sweets shop and saw a big pitcher of icy cold chocolate-colored liquid, that she initially thought was Ice Coffee. When she asked the person that worked there if it is indeed coffee, he said "No, no, no! Not coffee!". So she left the shop in somewhat of a shock and went on wandering around Shutka. Few hours later, she comes back home and in her stories about what she saw, she mentions this mysterious looking "Not Coffee!!" liquid. I laugh and in between laughing a funny thought goes through my mind: it's been almost a year of hosting couchsurfers and not one of them has ran into this before? How strange.
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Right in the middle of last week, a very refreshing multicultural wind blew through our house, temporarily alleviating the heat horror that was Skopje. While we were melting at temperatures dangerously approaching 40C and tried limiting our need to step out of the house to a minimum, 2 extremely ambitious souls were making their way around the Balkans with trains and buses (I shudder at the thought of being in a bus in that weather). The heat was so unbearable that for the first time in our CS hosting history we couldn't muster up the strength to go and wait for our guests at the bus station. As I wrote an sms to them explaining which bus to take, into which direction and how to ask the driver for help with getting off at the right stop, I kept thinking "oh, this is a bad idea". If you know me you know that I have issues with control and the public bus system in Skopje completely throws me off.
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On their second day in Skopje, Elena and Maja successfully navigated the complicated public transport system towards Matka alone (which makes me go into another nail-biting frenzy when I think about the possibility that they get lost somewhere along the way) and we then meet downtown after work. My day is hectic; I have tons to do at work, I still haven't shaken off my sinus thing from last week AND my brother and dad are leaving for the World Cup in South Africa (which is a terribly exciting thing that leaves me quite envious too). But Skopje is hectic in June as well, and when we meet downtown and after a quick bite in the Old Bazaar (ќебапи at Destan) we visit Kale (the Skopje fortress) where the girls take note of the gazillion Macedonian flags waving in the city (no, we're not celebrating anything, we just seem to have a thing for flags).
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The day after we saw Nellie off, we welcomed Fine (pronounced "Feenai") in the middle of an unusual Skopje spring heat, and amidst the ever-present taxi drivers swarming the bus station. Fine, as I mentioned earlier, is German by origin but has been living outside of Germany for the last 8 years. She has moved quite a lot and actually she did try to briefly outline the countries she's stayed in, which made us a bit dizzy. Fine is married to a Brazilian guy and together they are (sort of) currently based in a place called Angra Dos Reis, near Rio de Janeiro (and very close to the Ilha Grande island - which we think looks gorgeous and  a photo of which is shown below). They spend quite a bit of time on boats and did the Canto Mediterraneo project last year, sailing from Venice to Istanbul and documenting the music of the Mediterranean lands they visited on the way.
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Our guests from Estonia had to change their plans to fly out of Thessaloniki via Prague to Tallinn because of the air traffic chaos due to the Icelandic volcanic ash. Both of them work at a public university in Tallinn and have to be back at work in the middle of this week but this may be unlikely to happen as they decided to travel with buses and trains to reach Estonia. Even though the Estonians are hardworking folks, they do have a saying which goes something along the lines of "work is not a rabbit to run away from you"...as in, relax, it will always be there. Sounds more Balkan than Baltic:)

So once their tickets to Belgrade (first on the list of many cities they'll travel through to reach Tallinn by ground) were bought on Sunday morning, Hanna and Mirjam did some Skopje exploring on their own, visiting the Mother Theresa Memorial House and the Old Train Station (the most dramatic witness to the Skopje 1963 earthquake). We then met them for beers at a terrace in the old part of Skopje, next to the Kale fortress. During their week-long stay in Macedonia the girls sampled all of our local beers, trying to select their favorite (for us, Skopsko wins every time...)
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(left to right) Elena, Hanna and Mirjam and their beers...
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