My Macedonian Adventure

A few of my sweet Albanian friends have left Ks on vacation and I am missing them greatly! We got back from camp and about 5 of our close high school friends left almost immediately for vacation with their families and won't be back for over a month...after we leave... :( So I was thinking today about when we watched the EuroCup 2008 and Germany lost to Spain. I had made a bet with one of the competitive kids that the losing team would have to do something crazy (at the other team's disposal... scary, I know). Well, Germany lost and so me and the other faithful supporters of Germany had to down some nasty, rotten bananas. Kaylee was gracious enough to top them with whipped cream....

but I still gagged... I can't think of many things that I hate worse than mushy bananas. They have to be GREEN for me to eat them and these were almost black. SICK!!! :) Oh good times with my favorite Albanians!


So last Thursday (for LAURA'S BIRTHDAY!), we went on a little day trip to Macedonia! They picked me up from Senada's house and we were on our way South! What we didn't realize is that we were in for quite the trip. We had the opportunity to converse with the officials not once, but twice before we even reached our destination. haha it was a hilarious day:

We had to drive through a town that Joanna used to live in, but as we were driving down this one street in particular, we didn't notice people's odd stares and gaping mouths until all of a sudden we see a police car coming from the opposite direction turning on its lights and waving us down. Well, it turns out that it had gone from a two-way street to a one-way... hind sight is 20-20, right? Not only was the police officer a butt about it, they blocked traffic for us to turn around and he made us follow him to the police station. The only word we understood was "TICKET!" and he motioned for us to follow. Notice in the picture below that the police car is in FRONT of us...So we followed him there and Joanna went inside to talk to the po po and the Big Guy was looking out for us because we didn't get a ticket after all. WHEW!

Ok, that was #1... #2 didn't happen until we were IN Macedonia where apparently she was speeding, but I'm not convinced. I think they pulled us over because we had Ks tags on the car and they don't like Ks plates. But we didn't get a ticket then either. They said "20 Euros... Bank..." and let us go. We didn't know what the heck that meant, but we were outta there! I sneaked a picture of Jo and the Macedonian officers... hee hee :)
The rest of the day consisted of: McDonalds, buying tortilla chips at the grocery store, visiting a castle, driving around the city for 30 minutes looking for a Turkish Bazaar that apparently doesn't exist anymore, walking around aimlessly in an outdoor/indoor mall only to realize that the dinar-dollar exchange rate is ridiculously expensive, eating ice cream, and saying, "Well... guys.... what do you want to do now??.............we could go home??........" So we left and drove back to Ks to eat some Mexican for dinner with our newly purchased tortilla chips!

I uploaded PICTURES from our Macedonian adventure onto facebook. Click on the link and check them out! Make sure to read the captions below the pictures :)

Random note: I just downloaded the "Viva la Vida" song by Coldplay that I used to always see on the iPod commercials in the States. The orchestra in the background is phenomenal and it makes me want to play my cello more :)

Ok, naten e mire.