Lorrie in Europe

 Where the heck did those 10 days go?!  Yikes!  I am so far behind I must be almost first again.  LOL….hows that for a positive spin on procrastination? After we left Pristine we headed into North Macedonia.  Skopje, the capital city, would be our first stop.  Hard to know exactly what to say about skopje, North Macedonia. It’s simultaneously unbelievably overwhelmingly gorgeous and kind of sketchy shabby if you look just barely past the surface. We’ve kind of come to the conclusion that the city (or maybe even the country as this is the capital city) might be kind of broke as it appears that no maintenance has been done for a long time (like maybe years). So many broken bits (benches, stairs, planters, paving stones, signage, parks, gardens, etc) are in dire need of attention and everything looks like it’s been completely neglected but at the same time you have to love it here. The grandeur of the squares, the statues, the pillars and columns, and the buil...

 Well, Pristine, Kosovo (pronounced Prishtina) has been a bit of a roller coaster.  LOL. Our arrival with the two young men coming to the rescue of our taxi driver in finding our accommodation was just the beginning. On the upside, we have an elevator (thank god as we are on the sixth floor) so that is a treat but I neglected to notice that there is no air con in this unit when I booked it.  Aggggghhhhh….that is usually one of the first things I look for.  On the upside, it cools down pretty well at night so we haven’t really had too much time here when we would have put it on anyway.  Although I would have used it yesterday when we got back in from walking for about a hundred miles in a hundred degrees! (I may be exaggerating just a bit but honestly it was smoking hot and we really did walk for hours). In truth, we walked so far and it was so hot that when we stopped at a caffe where we’d normally have a coffee…..this time it was a coke as cold as they could ge...

 Holy!  Where did that week go?!  The last time I wrote anything in here we were still in Montenegro and I totally missed our entire time in Shkodër, Albania and Prizren, Kosovo.  We are currently booked into our two bedroom apartment in Pristina, Kosovo for the next three nights.  So, I guess I’m going to have to do some backtracking! First of all, it has surprised us that few haven’t gotten stamps in our passports the past couple of borders we’ve crossed.  Neither Albania nor Kosovo have been putting stamps in.  Might have something to do with the ongoing dispute with Serbia about Kosovo being recognized as an independent country???  Not sure….. We LOVED Shkodër where we also had a two bedroom apartment that was massive (for $25 CAD each/night).  It might have seemed so massive in part because at some of our previous places there was actually no room to even walk between our beds let alone turn around in the room.  LOL. But we loved Sh...