Yes, it's been a while, but we were CS-less for 2 weeks! During this time, we traveled a bit ourselves (not too far, just to our house in the mountains and for a weekend visiting old friends and colleagues in Thessaloniki). While in Thessaloniki, I managed to catch up with Linn and Daan, a Dutch couchsurfing couple spending a student exchange year in Thessaloniki. When they stayed with us in Skopje during the winter, they came on the absolutely most disgusting day of all winter - there was muddy slush all over the city and they were wearing very summery shoes. The sight still gives me shivers dispite them saying that they're used to that kind of weather.

It's always nice to see couchsurfers for a second time around, especially if it is in a completely different setting. This time, it wasn't all about Skopsko in family-size plastic bottles and rain and snow and mud...no, this time, it was more like Carlsbergs in a sunny, hot and humid weather by the sea...Linn and Daan's time in Thessaloniki is coming to an end and they'll soon leave the city to travel a bit around the islands before going back to Amsterdam (where we can hopefully visit them one fine day and soon). We have high hopes to do BE and NE (perhaps leaving LUX aside, at least time time around) in the early fall, visiting  some of our couchsurfing friends and making new ones as we go along. Fingers crossed.

Back on this side of the border, and just as the world is glaring towards Israel, we've welcomed Tal from Tel Aviv. She is a freelance translator and that setup makes it easy for her to travel for whole summers at a time (she'll be travelling all the way to September now). In addition to that, she's also a photographer and has some of the most amazingly colorful photos in her portfolio, like this cool red collage...

In Skopje since last Thursday, we meet Tal at the main square on a Tuesday afternoon. Through messages exchanged previously, we've realized that she, like us, would like to see some of the Offest Festival concerts, so we had decided to go to the Baklava + Aynur concert together. Just before that though, there was just enough time for a quick drink beforehand and some of our standard introductions to the region and its complexities. It probably sounds a bit bad, but it's a little refreshing to have guests coming from a region as turbulent and complex as our own, and even Tal (after our lengthy monologues touching on political, historical and cultural regionalities) tells us that the Balkans indeed sound a lot like the Middle East.

So we head to the Macedonian Opera and Ballet Hall just as it starts to anemically rain again. Between exchanging small talk with various friends and acquaintances in front of the entrance, Tal makes a remark that Skopje must be a small city since we know so many people:) (Either that or we're wildly famous, right?) Yeah, I think that even though Skopje has just a little under 2 times the population of Tel Aviv, we do have a small-city mentality after all...We sit through Baklava's concert, Ivica and I (albeit admiring the singer's talent) wishing for some more rhytm, Tal taking pictures. During the interlude, Tal tells us that she  now understands what we meant when we told her about the Balkan saying "the more you travel to the South, the sadder the songs get".

We are (well I am) ravenous by the time the concert ends so we stop by Specijal - a place we've introduced many couchsurfers to and it never fails to amuze them, especially the fact that this local pastry shop works 24/7 but after midnight it only serves pastries through a small window which you walk up to and order from (sometimes with a lot of pointing to specific pastries some 5 meters away from where you are standing). We get some late night leftover pastries and head home to gobble them up. We haven't learned tons about Tel Aviv yet but have high hopes for tomorrow...