Peace Corps Macedonia Archive

Every single morning for breakfast, I have been eating this stuff:

It is my favorite of the local-type foods. They call it Burek (definition). Here is a recipe for it (Yugoslavian Burek). I'm not sure about the recipe and I'll probably never make it until I can't buy it from Burek shops. There are little burek shops on every corner. A quarter of a pie, how much someone ate from the Burek in the picture costs 30 denars, or about 65 cents. I used to eat an eigth-pie sized piece (15 denars, about 30 cents) but ever since moving up to the larger piece, I can't go back. It is sort of like subway, where the 6-inch sub is too small and the 12-inch is too big; the result is I stuff myself every day with the big piece. I never eat them with meat, as the recipe above calls for. I always eat it with spinach and cirenje, a feta-like cheese.

A better recipe. Maybe not better, but it sounds more like what I eat every day for breakfast. You're crazy to cut it into squares though, as the recipe says. Go for a giant quarter-pie sized piece. It isn't necessarily only a breakfast food, either.

So that's that. If you want to open a burek restaurant in the US (i bet it would be popular as a post night-out food) then let me know and I'll see if you're recipe is up to snuff.

Thought I would put two pictures up. One in honor of horses on the street and one in honor of snow. this is not abnormal. at all. snowy. blurry.

Poor us...here in a small little Peace Corps country and I am watching cable television! Yesterday a man or two came from the cable company came over and ran a cable into our apartment and now we have sixty channels. This is spectacular. About half of the channels are in English and we have BBC World, CNN International, ten or eleven Macedonian channels, a handful of discovery channels (Discovery Travel, Science, Civilization, etc.), Cartoon network, Turner's classic movies, and more! So yeah, poor poor us. And only $7 a month.

Something that is a little confusing and somehow related to the cable here is how the whole channel system works. There is this button on the remote that switches between two modes, ?C? and ?S? and if we hit that and then put in a couple numbers that we reference from the brochure they gave us it will go to the appropriate channel. Somehow we can't channel surf though, when we hit up and down on the remote it jumps about between the channels and some don't even work. This is really boring, yes, but I post it in case someone knows what I'm talking about and can tell me what to do. But anyhow, most everything works. The remote for our tv didn't work and I spent a long time poking around a very slow internet looking for an online version of the manual for our universal remote. I never even considered looking in the drawer under the TV. Guess where i found the manual? Not on the Internet!

What else has been going on? Danielle was a little under the weather so I took a day off work (me to work: ?Danielle is sick? work: ?Oh my! Don't work today! See you tomorrow, maybe, if she's okay!) and the Peace Corps medical folks did some tests and gave her some pills. And at work on Friday, it was insisted that I call and check up on Danielle, and leave early, of course, not that I'm complaining!

Missing good ol' kraft mac and cheese, Danielle and I attempted to construct our own version for dinner tonight. Ingredients: flour, milk, cheese, butter, noddles. Unfortunately, only two kinds of cheese is really available anywhere in Macedonia, one is Sirenje, this crazy salty ultra-flavorful cheese, and the other is Kashkaval, a mild cheese that at first tastes like mozzarella but has an after-taste resembling sour milk. We chose the Kashkaval for our experiment and managed to make a totally decent macroniish-noodles-and-cheese. Nothing at all like Kraft, so if you feel like sending us something, we love blue and orange.

As it turns out, I'm more of an American than I thought. This hits me pretty hard since I spend so much time making fun of my country when I am living there. Here are some reasons that have led to my discovery that I am, in fact, an American (or at least that I'm not a Macedonian):

1. Soccer is stupid
2. Handball is stupid
3. Not having Mexican food is stupid
4. Paying for local calls is stupid
5. I support changing clothes at least twice during the week.
6. I don't like drinking coffee with strange repairmen in our apartment.
7. Food with a lot of oil is gross.
8. I expect television programming to be modeled after something other than 70s B-Movies

And, uh, yeah. There's tons of good stuff about this place too, but I'd rather complain. I'm so culturally sensitive.

No, I swear it is. The Orthodox Christmas is on Friday (January 7th) so all of the traditions associated with that are in full-swing. It starts like this: last night around 11pm, Danielle and I decided we needed some Coke and candy so we headed outside in search of this. We expected stores would be closed, but we ventured out anyways. We're on the 10th floor and the elevators have been broken, so we were obviously quite committed to the journey since we knew we would have to climb ten floors upon our return.

When we went outside in front of our building, there was a bon-fire and residents of the building were standing around eating and drinking and being merry. Despite the festivities we headed to the store and then on the way back inside we hoped someone would say something to us so that we would be able to stand around and chat and pretend to be Macedonian.

I said hello to the barber and this triggered a sequence of hospitable events, and we were offered food, sweets, and drink. I ate a couple tiny fish (good) a gelatin cube (search our site for ?gelatin cube? for more info?) and some sort of fig and Danielle and I each had a small glass of the cheap wine they were drinking. We met all kinds of neighbors and people in the building, most who have lived in the building for their whole lives. We stood out by the bonfire talking to fellow building members (everyone in the building knows each other) for maybe an hour and a half, until about one a.m.

We were informed that this morning we would probably be awoken by singing children wanting candy, etc. On the day before christmas (today) they do what is kind of like halloween and there are these kids who knock persistently on the door and sing at the top of their lungs. We prepared gifts of one piece of fruit, one piece of candy, and five denars (ten cents) to give to each loud singing kid. Two kids came by and it pretty much made our morning.

We also learned how to get cable. It's something like six bucks a month for sixty channels, about half of which are in English. I'd call and make an appointment, but the whole world is closed for the holidays so maybe next week.

And, in case you're wondering, here is our grocery list for today:

• Pillow Cases (quick story: last night when we asked our neighbors where to get pillow cases we told them we had been using t-shirts for pillow cases thinking they would get a nice chuckle but rather they gasped: T-Shirts! Oh, my, you need help! My daughter will go with you to the market at 9 a.m. tomorrow morning!)
• Mugs (Note: when I offer people coffee (of the stronger turkish variety), they expect a small glass but all i have are these 12-oz glasses so then our guests end up with an uncomfortable amount of coffee they may or may not feel obligated to drink)
• Hooks
• Containers that seal for leftovers
• Toilet Paper
• Three liters Milk
• Granola
• Noodles
• Two kilos apples
• Crushed red pepper (allegedly available fresh from the market, but i haven't seen it yet)
• Cheap wine
• Coffee
• Chicken (maybe, if not too expensive)
• Baking Powder
• Bread. This doesn't really make the list though, since we buy a loaf every day by default

So that's it for this morning. I'm watching this horribly dubbed cartoon. As is the case with all American or European cartoons shown in this country, the voices are overdubbed in Macedonian. The method by which this is done is roughly equivalent to what you might imagine Mark and Javan doing in 7th grade if they decided to re-record the dialogue for the movie ?Can't buy me love? replacing every third word with Quadco. Come to think of it, pretty much all Macedonian entertainment is akin to a bad B-movie, but without the irony of it being so bad it's good.