Bob wanted to visit his Macedonian family in Pestani. he had been invited to the home of a porter he met in 1965, and ended up being friends since. He’s filmed his friend’s wedding and that of his family, has his own room in their home, and even had kids named after him. I was happy to go along, and I was looking forward to seeing Ohrid again, and to returning to Skopje via Debar.
The trip down was blessedly uneventful. Once we hit Gostivar, we could see more mosques (dzami), we catalogued towns as 1-, 2-, or more dzami towns. Big views as we approached the pass at Straze, but barbed wire blocked my attempts to see more at the rest stop there.
Pestani is halfway down the east side of Lake Ohrid. It used to be a fairly quiet fishing village, but has turned into the 2nd largest town around the lake, wall to wall with small hotels, bars, and signs advertising sobi (rooms to let). I had passed through it on my first visit in 1974 on my way to Sveti Naum for the Saint’s day there.
I met Bob’s family and spent most of the rest of the day and evening just hanging out while they caught up. His friend has two sons. One runs the bar and the other was pirating music onto CDs (this told to me matter-of-factly) until the Internet came along and ruined his business. The older son and I talked about music, and he played some old Leb i Sol albums, as well as their latest from their reunion tour a couple of years ago.
Bob and I walked around the town, visited relatives, and I took a few pictures of the sun setting over the Albanian mountains. It’s still a beautiful lake. Dinner and drinks while listening to Jimi Hendrix, the Doors, Sly, etc. (still popular here, apparently). It’s still hard for me to adjust to the juxtapositions I encounter.
Looking at this town, and thinking back on Bulgaria, things certainly have changed. One doesn’t have the experience of going into a restaurant where you a given a full menu, trying to order things only to be told they don’t have them today, and realizing there’s only one item in the kitchen. You can order anything. You can buy anything. The stores are stocked (all this was particularly noticeable in Bulgaria). Of course, there are other characteristics of post-Communist society. Graffiti is much more common; I would say it’s a problem in Plovdiv, where it covers walls, trains, even ancient monuments. There are casinos, particularly in Bulgaria, which are likely run by the local mafiosi. There are the decaying monolithic buildings of the Soviet era, bigger in Sofia than in Skopje. There are more and more English words in the vocabulary, just as in Greece (it doesn’t matter that they are written in Cyrillic, it still feels like a virus). People haven’t talked much with me about politics, and I haven’t ventured to ask unless I have a context, but ost of the Macedonians I’ve listened to feel life was better under the Communists; I wonder if the northern ex-Jugoslav republics feel the same way. I’ll ask Slavko when I see him next week. Gas is still about 3 times what it costs in the states (probably more realistic), and although people drive like maniacs, there are fewer cars on the road than in the states, so maybe your survival chances are about the same. these are all pretty simple observations, but I had time to think about them during our stay here.
