Journey to Pristina

I woke up kind of rough for the bus ride. It was difficult to eat, so I only downed half a bread with eggs... The nausea didn't go away when I got on the bus. I wasn't surprised because I had almost no food! It kept getting worse and worse.... until I did something I've never done before in my memory. I threw up on the bus.

Luckily, I'd urgently asked for a plastic bag from Ben to puke into. It was not the most glorious moment I've experienced, plus it didn't even eliminate my nausea for long. I was fairly uncomfortable for a lot of the bus ride...

I arrived at the bus station in the dark, but it wasn't super late. We had a connection in Skopje for about 20 minutes, so we got to see some of the city twice from the bus arriving and leaving :) It was dark by the time we entered Kosovo, so I didn't really get to see much of the country upon arrival. I texted my next host, and he was actually able to come and pick me up! I had to hastily say goodbye to Ben at the station to run for the car though.

I was tired from the lack of food and day of traveling, so we went to his house and ate some food. I felt a lot better once I was able to stomach something. I felt good enough to a comic-themed bar to have a couple beers with a couple friends of his. It was in the centre of the city, so I got to see some of the city too :) They had a newspaper in English for all the foreigners working in Pristina, so that was cool.

Eventually we went to the house where I was given a mattress on the floor which was actually really comfortable! I fell asleep pretty quick :)

Sveti Naum

I caught the bus after thinking that I had missed it. Problem is, Macedonian is in Cyrillic alphabet, not Latin, so even if I knew the name of the monastery I didn't know what it looked like in the language... so I didn't know which bus it was. I caght it though, and it went through a National Park. At one of the stops in the middle of nowhere, there were four people standing there... I recognized one of them from the hostel! He was hiking with the other three; They all had met the day before walking around. They were also on their way to the monastery, so now there was a group of us!

We arrived after the bus went by the Albanian border, which freaked us out at first cause we were sure it was on the Macedonian side of the lake and I had no passport on me or anything. It was though so it was all good.

The monastery was pretty - there were peacocks EVERYWHERE.



















We walked around, took the photos, and had some wine together at a little restaurant. The guy from the hostel's an Aussie, there was another Aussie (girl), Brazilian, and an older Canadian woman from Edmonton that was also a Massage Therapist! Small world eh!! Couple of her kids were in Vancouver so we had a nice Canadian chat hehehe.

We all came back together and got a coffee right on the water as the sun went down:





I went back to the hostel afterward for a while before going to meet up with the people from the forest for dinner!



I convinced Ben (from Atlanta) to come with me for this dinner event, with a walk onto the lake via a pier first. The rest of the crew was late but we just ordered our food and theirs arrived a little late. There was live traditional music on that night, which is why we were there, and it was nice. The place had atmosphere, so I had a good time :)